Analyses

I hesitate to call these analyses, but I try. By god, do I try. Some of my favorites from the blog will show up here. :]

Stray Thoughts

aka the closest thing this site will have to a microblog

• i've been meaning to put together a list of the fake restaurants in American Psycho. off the top of my head are Vanities and Chernoble, both of which have so much meaning to them already haha. vanities, for the culture's vainness, and chernoble (chernobyl and noble), for the invisible radiation that seems to be slowly killing the characters and for their status

• Alison Poole 🥺. i've yet to read about her in Story of My Life (what an unfortunate name), but i love her development in BEE. from just another one of Patrick Bateman's victims (not to mention the disrespect and creepiness he treats her with— "You were a real ... manhandler.") to Victor and Damien's secret angel investor and captor sort of and known terror of the city... i support her

• time, or lack thereof, in American Psycho is used so well. days and months mix into each other and sometimes it seems like Patrick doesn't even know when he is either. the timeskips with no obvious indication don't help, either (intriguingly, the chapters leading to Tim Price's disappearance are the only chapters that take place successively. perhaps an indication that it was the most important night of Patrick's life?)

  i've looked up openings of restaurants and album releases and when they weren't made up, they were usually off from the dates he gave. my favorite aspect of these, though, is Patrick's perception of time skewing towards eternity. (“How long has it been this way?” “A millennium,” I whisper.). American Psycho IS hell, and Patrick has been in hell for a long, long time

• patrick and jean's relationship has an associated song, Like a Prayer by Madonna. it also has an associated flower, the lily. why not the rose, usually associated with love and passion? lilies can mean "pure and everlasting love", innocence, purity, and rebirth. pretty fitting for their relationship! source: i made it the fuck up. no jk, like a prayer and lilies tend to show up in chapters with jean

Jean vs. Patrick's Riddles Three

jean passes all of patrick’s tests, even the ones he isn’t fully aware of doing

the most meaningful quality to patrick is that she is Not Evelyn. this is obvious when he asks her if she, like evelyn, owns a briefcase or a designer filofax.

the questions “how many people in this world are like me?” and “why do you like me?” are also used to compare her to evelyn. at the beginning of the story, he asks evelyn, “why don’t you just go for price?”. when patrick lists all the reasons she should (he’s rich, good-looking, has a great body), evelyn counters that everybody is or has those things. she both confirms his worst fear, that he is just like everybody else, and doesn’t give him the answer he’s fishing for: the reason she stays with him.

jean does the opposite (admittedly thanks to patrick asking outright this time). she truly believes that no one else is like patrick. even when he argues the opposite, she insists that he’s wrong. it’s a rare moment from jean, who is usually careful to not aggravate patrick.

the unintentional test is seen way before patrick is even considering dating her. jean is put through a situation similar to one of patrick’s earlier flings, patricia. unable to get reservations to dorsia for either of them, he settles for a less trendier restaurant. the names for the restaurants are near exact as well: barcadia and arcadia.

while patricia is furious that they weren’t able to go to dorsia, jean laughs it off. even though patricia eventually relents, she spends the entire date talking about herself and doesn’t care that patrick is ignoring everything she’s saying. jean, on the other hand, is concerned when she notices patrick’s distance.

i’ll end this with a cute detail :]. while breaking up with evelyn, patrick complains that she doesn’t drink beer. in end of the 1980s, the ultimate patjean chapter, jean… you won’t believe this…. orders a beer.

What's in a name?

timothy price probably has the most money out of all the characters and is implied to be having an affair with evelyn richards (rich), who patrick considers to be incredibly greedy (ignore the irony, i believe he's a fair judge in this situation lmfao)

i'll take this opportunity to say that evelyn may not be from money? at least not to the extent of the other characters. i'm referring to this exchange:

I eventually get the last laugh when he asks if she still has the job at “that art gallery on First Avenue” and Evelyn, clearly stressed, her face falling, answers no, corrects him, and after a few awkward words he moves on. She sniffs, opens her menu, immediately starts on about something else without looking at me.

it's interesting how much this affects her. the failing to specify what position she held is also suspicious, as if it's something she would be ashamed of. but maybe you could construe this as her pulling a patrick— upset about a perhaps mistaken identity

there's also this conversation about colleges. evelyn is quick to start talking about where she went for school

“Where did you go?” Vanden sighs after it finally becomes clear to her that no one is interested in Camden.

“Well, I went to Le Rosay,” Evelyn starts, “and then to business school in Switzerland.”

“I also survived business school in Switzerland,” Courtney says. “But I was in Geneva. Evelyn was in Lausanne.”

(the topic ends here and evelyn and courtney are the only ones to answer)

but it IS her event and she was making a point to be polite to her guests, so, i don't know! i just feel like it would be a great explanation for her greediness, which is so over the top that it is the last thing patrick notices about her before he breaks up with her

Then, very simply, dinner reaches its crisis point, when Evelyn says, “I want a firm commitment.”

The evening has already deteriorated considerably so this comment doesn’t ruin anything or leave me unprepared, but the unreasonableness of our situation is choking me and I push my water glass back toward Evelyn and ask the waiter to remove the half-eaten urinal cake. My endurance for tonight is shot the second the melting dessert is taken away. For the first time I notice that she has been eyeing me for the last two years not with adoration but with something closer to greed. Someone finally brings her a water glass along with a bottle of Evian I didn’t hear her order.

“I think, Evelyn, that …” I start, stall, start again. “… that we’ve lost touch.”

and oh wow, that was just the evelyn tangent

anyways... another fun case of names is mrs. wolfe (wolf), the real estate agent who, from patrick's point of view, cleaned up owen's apartment (not very well, as it's implied she has to cover up the smell with roses) and is already showing it to potential new owners

in a previous chapter, we learn that patrick considers himself to be a predator.... animal, and his victims, prey

I cannot seem to control myself, here in a room that contains a whole host of victims, lately I can’t help noticing them everywhere... all of them having one thing in common: they are prey.

patrick agonizes over his inability to leave a real mark. here, he witnesses evidence of his perceived victim being erased completely, an act that has its own viciousness to it, and one that is actually acknowledgable by people. it causes a visceral reaction in him

“I think you should go,” she says.

“I think … I want to know what happened.” I feel sick, my chest and back covered with sweat, drenched, it seems, instantaneously.

maybe i'm reading into it too much here, but as their exchange is one of predators, they seem to settle it like how real predator animals would: by ignoring each other. the title of the chapter ("The Best City for Business") also conveys a level of respect for her, as they are equals

some last but not leasts:

• the last name bateman was inspired by norman bates from Psycho. norman bates, "nor man", alludes to how norman isn't entirely himself, a man. patrick bateman, is the other extreme: he insists on being too much of a man, whatever that means to him

• this is probably a stretch but the dichotomy of victor ward and jamie fields. i need to think about this more, but already, the induced imagery... they're also characters from The Rules of Attraction who get their names changed (technically) when reintroduced in Glamorama. victor changes his last name from johnson to ward and nobody remembers jamie's name right, she gets called either "janey" or "jaime"

the unofficial ellis trilogy

i feel like i've talked a lot about how the "need to read" BEE novels are an unofficial trilogy that consists of American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park... but here we go again

even though BEE at their core are all about the same thing, the three share a running theme of portraying ellis's relationship to his father, starting subtly in American Psycho and reaching a critical point in Lunar Park. in American Psycho, Patrick's world is shaped by his father: the company his life centers around was his father's. the latter two's conflicts are more obviously pinned on the characters' fathers

(also note that the main characters' relationship with their significant other progresses through the trilogy. in American Psycho, they begin dating, Glamorama is several years into the relationship, and Lunar Park has ellis married with kids)

Glamorama and Lunar Park only exist because of American Psycho. the backlash ellis received from it led to dissociation from his public identity (Glamorama) and a fear that his character, Patrick Bateman, is overshadowing his life (Lunar Park)

before the trilogy were Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction, which focuses mainly on lost college kids, a theme not shared by the adulthood-centric trilogy (you could consider The Rules of Attraction unofficially part of the trilogy as Patrick first appears there, alongside a scene set in the hospital his father stays)

after are Imperial Bedrooms and The Shards, which vastly stray from the trilogy. Imperial Bedrooms focuses back on the main character of Less Than Zero (a twisted return to form) and The Shards introduces a whole new cast of characters and takes place in high school. neither Patrick nor Victor show up as they do in Glamorama and Lunar Park. (unless ellis writes a Glamorama 2...🥺). post-trilogy also seems to share the theme of how being a writer has affected ellis

but... that's just a theory a G