White

by Bret Easton Ellis

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  Charlie Sheen had severe drug and alcohol problems, and perhaps even struggled with mental illness, but so did a lot of people in Hollywood who simply were better at hiding it. There was no denying that Sheen was exploiting a problematic situation that he’d helped create, but you couldn’t ignore the fact that the negativity certain people felt about him never outweighed the public’s fascination with the hedonism he clearly enjoyed and that remained the secret envy of many other men. Sheen’s supposed propensity for violence against women hadn’t hurt his popularity with female fans either, and if anyone wants to know what that means, then that’s a story for maybe fifty other books. It now appeared that the manners and civility and courtesy that Empire had demanded and enforced had ceased to exist. And that what the new guard wanted above all was reality, no matter how crazy the celeb who’d brought it on actually was. This was what enflamed corporations like CBS and the legacy media and the entertainment press but also gave them boners even as they were wringing their hands and clutching their pearls.

  Charlie Sheen apparently didn’t care what they thought about him anymore, and he ridiculed public relations taboos and the cult of likability. Hey suits, hey corporations, I don’t give a shit—you all suck was what so many of the disenfranchised were responding to in the winter of 2011. Sheen was blowing open the myth that men would outgrow the adolescent pursuit of pleasure, because flickers of that dream would never go out. Even if you were married and had terrific kids, the dream of living without fake rules and responsibilities, of rejecting the notion of becoming an ideal, a clean and spotless comrade enthralled by groupthink, the dream of being an individual and not just part of some tribe would always survive. Charlie Sheen was the new reality, and anyone who was a hater now had to hang out with the rest of the collective in Empire’s graveyard. Nobody had known it in the summer of 1986, but Charlie Sheen had actually been Ferris Bueller’s dark little brother all along.

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  In the decades after it was published, readers of American Psycho often asked me where Patrick Bateman would be now, as if he were an acquaintance of mine, someone real I used to know. This often came up during the tech boom of the mid-’90s, and after the movie version was released in 2000, and again post-9/11 and during the Bush presidency, and it came up urgently in the months after the 2008 housing crash, and the question became even more prevalent on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication in 2016, which happened to coincide with a Broadway musical based on the book that was opening that spring, and it was never posed more desperately than it was after Donald Trump was elected. This question was asked because of how specific the setting of American Psycho is, and it was asked by fans at readings and signings or on social media, and by colleagues at pitch meetings or on conference calls, sometimes as an icebreaker, and it was asked whenever guys posted pictures of Halloween costumes—in which they were wearing the sheer blood-splattered slicker that Christian Bale’s Bateman sported in the film version when he killed his Pierce & Pierce rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) with an ax to the face. In particular, they wondered where the Wall Street yuppie and supposed serial killer who’d haunted the late-’80s streets and nightclubs and restaurants of Manhattan would be if he were re-created and resituated, if he were actually alive, tactile, wandering through our world in flesh and blood.

  If you’d read the book carefully and had a sense of Manhattan geography, you knew that Bateman’s sleek and minimalist Upper West Side apartment had an imaginary address, and this always suggested to me that Bateman wasn’t necessarily a reliable narrator, and that he might in fact be a ghost, an idea, a summing up of that particular decade’s values as filtered through my own literary sensibility: moneyed, beautifully attired, impossibly groomed and handsome, morally bankrupt, totally isolated and filled with rage, a young and directionless mannequin hoping that someone, anyone, will save him from himself.

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  During the mid- to late ’90s—at the height of the dotcom bubble, when Manhattan seemed even more absurdly decadent than it did in 1987—it was a possibility that Bateman, if the book had been moved a decade closer, might have been the founder of several dotcoms, and that he would’ve partied in Tribeca and the Hamptons, indistinguishable from the young and handsome boy wonders who were commanding the scene with their millions of nonexistent dollars, dancing unknowingly on the edge of an implosion that would mercilessly wipe out the playing field and correct all sorts of bogus scores. While twirling through that decade myself as a youngish man, I often thought this was a time in which Bateman really could’ve thrived, especially with the advent of new technologies that would have aided his ghoulish obsession with torture and murder and offered him new methods of recording them. And sometimes I thought that if I’d set the book in the 2000s Bateman could’ve been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn, palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder. He could also just as easily have been a hedge funder in New York: Patrick Bateman begets Bill Ackman and Daniel Loeb.

  In 2002, two years after the original movie had opened theatrically, there was a shoddy, barely released sequel called American Psycho II: All American Girl that had little to do with Patrick Bateman, who’s killed off in the first five minutes. The film was adapted from a script titled The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, which was originally conceived as a thriller with no connection whatsoever to my book, and it wasn’t until production began that the script was altered by Lionsgate to incorporate a Bateman subplot, because of the success the studio had with producing American Psycho. There was also talk at Lionsgate about a TV series that would either continue the Bateman saga or update it to the present day. Patrick Bateman action figures were being sold online, and then came American Psycho: The Musical, which after a sold-out London run in 2013 was transferred to Broadway in March 2016. All of this encouraged me to wonder not only about where Bateman might have been then in these various moments in time, but also about how this character was created in the first place.

  How strange it was to see the embodiment of my youthful pain and angst morph into a metaphor for the disruptive greed of an entire decade, as well as a continuing metaphor for people who work on Wall Street—an abiding symbol of corruption—or for anyone whose perfect façade masks a wilder, dirtier side, as in: “My boyfriend’s such a Patrick Bateman.” As the book’s author I still have no idea why—and I can’t take any responsibility for this—it had such resonance, though it might be that the moment we were living in then was, if anything, even riper for the metaphor of a serial killer, a ripeness that has extended far beyond that into a Donald Trump presidency. Part of why it was hard for me to reimagine Bateman anywhere else or at any other time was because of where I was emotionally and physically during those years I was dreaming him up, so I’ve never had an answer for anyone who asked me.

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  I find it stranger as I get older that this archetypal character—for me more or less a faceless and free-floating representation of yuppie despair—was actually based on my own anger and frustration, in a very specific time and place. Moving to Manhattan after graduating from college with a BA—a phrase seemingly embalmed in some distant era, such an antiquated fantasy at a time when grads can’t afford to even think about moving to Manhattan—I found myself in a world that had swallowed the values of the Reagan ’80s as a kind of hope, an aspiration, something to rise toward. I disagreed with the ideology that was being so widely embraced but I was still trying, as Bateman puts it, to fit in. While I might have been turned off by such gross ambitions—and by what they suggested it meant to be a man, much less a successful one—where else was there to go? (True, I’d already published two novels, but they
had nothing to do with the emptiness I was now feeling.) Doesn’t the whole process of becoming an adult start with learning how to navigate these waters, even compromising one’s youthful ideals and learning how to be all right with wherever you ended up? The rage I felt over what was being extolled as success—what seemed expected of me and other male members of Gen X, including millions of dollars, six-pack abs, and a cold amorality—was poured directly into a fictional figure who was my own worst version of myself, the nightmarish me, someone I loathed but also considered, in his helpless floundering, sympathetic as often as not. And his social criticism sounded to me almost entirely correct.

  American Psycho was about what it meant to be a person in a society you disagreed with and what happened when you attempted to accept and live with its values even if you knew they were wrong. Delusion and anxiety were the focal points. Insanity crept in and was overwhelming. This was the outcome of chasing the American dream: isolation, alienation, corruption, the consumerist void in thrall to technology and corporate culture. All of the novel’s themes still hold sway three decades later when the one-percenters were suddenly richer than any humans had ever been before, an era when a jet was as commonplace as a new car and million-dollar rents were a reality. New York in 2016 and beyond was American Psycho on steroids. And despite the connections provided by the internet and social media, many people felt even more isolated and increasingly aware that the idea of interconnectivity was itself an illusion. This seems particularly painful when you’re sitting alone in a room and staring at a glowing screen that promises you access to the intimacies of countless other lives, a condition that mirrors Bateman’s loneliness and alienation: everything’s available to him, yet that insatiable emptiness remains. These were my own feelings during those years in the apartment I was living in on East Thirteenth Street as the 1980s came to an end.

  In the period when the novel takes place, Patrick Bateman already belongs to the as-yet-unnamed one percent, as he probably still would today. But would he be living somewhere else, and with different interests? Would better forensics—not to mention the Big Brother cameras on virtually every corner—prevent him from getting away with the murders he at least tells the reader he has committed, or would his expression of rage take any other form? Would he haunt social media as a troll using fake avatars? Would he have a Twitter account bragging about his accomplishments? Would he be showcasing his wealth, his abs, his potential victims on Instagram? During Patrick’s ’80s reign, he still had the ability to hide, a possibility that simply doesn’t exist in our fully exhibitionistic society. Because he wasn’t so much a character to me as an emblem, an idea, I’d probably approach him again by addressing his greatest fear: What if no one was paying him any attention? Something that upsets Bateman terribly is that due to corporate-culture conformity, no one can really tell anybody else apart (and the novel asks what difference does it make anyway?). People are so lost in their narcissism that they’re unable to distinguish one individual from another, which is why Patrick gets away with his crimes (even if they’re in a fictional scenario). This also illuminates how few things have really changed in American life since the late ’80s: they’ve just become more exaggerated, and more accepted. Patrick’s obsession with his likes and dislikes and with detailing everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches has reached a new apotheosis. In many respects American Psycho is one man’s ultimate series of selfies.

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  Christian Bale changed the look of Bateman for me, giving him a face, a spectacular body and a deep yet hesitant voice, noting that he took his cues from watching Tom Cruise on The David Letterman Show: what Bale called a very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes. He created an iconic portrayal, which can happen when you make a movie from a well-known text, whether it was Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara or James Mason as Humbert Humbert or Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance; these actors get stuck in our heads, and we can never read the book again without picturing them—and those portraits tend to be frozen in time. But readers first came across Patrick Bateman near the end of my second novel, The Rules of Attraction, published four years before American Psycho, where he appears late one night in a Manhattan hospital in the waning days of 1985, waiting for his father to die. Sean, his brother and one of the novel’s narrators, also comes to visit—begrudgingly, supposedly to pay his last respects, but really because he needs money—and he ends up getting dissed by the older brother he loathes. So Patrick Bateman started becoming real for me years before I started American Psycho, though I didn’t have a clear sense of this at the time—which maybe is why I often find the question of where he might be now rather elusive. Bateman’s so fixed for me in that particular time and place that I simply can’t imagine him anywhere but in that lonely office at Pierce & Pierce, or committing his unfathomable crimes in that imaginary apartment on the Upper West Side, or lost and wasted in various trendy nightclubs.

  Like many characters a writer creates, Patrick Bateman lives on without me, regardless of how close we became during the years I spent writing about him. Characters are often like children leaving home, going out into the uncaring world and being either accepted, ignored, extolled, criticized, no matter what the writer might hope for. I check in with him every now and then, but he’s been on his own for years, and I rarely feel like his guardian or that I have any right to tell him where he should or shouldn’t be living, decades after his birth—as if he’d listen to me anyway, much less care. The novel’s twenty-fifth anniversary did, however, force me to look at how my character’s considered now, compared to how people talked and thought about him in the months before the book was released. Some people who wanted the book banned then regarded Bateman’s crimes (which might have been entirely imaginary thought crimes) as my crimes, a hideous mistake that contributed to the death threats I subsequently received, and to the censorship with which I was threatened. In 1991, this seemed like an unusual and curious response but these days people routinely mistake thoughts and opinions for actual crimes. Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes and aesthetics still count—and the reason I’m a writer is to present an aesthetic, things that are true without always having to be factual or immutable. But opinions can also change, even if, according to social media, they’re supposed to be forever.

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  American Psycho: The Musical officially premiered in April 2016 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway, the fruition of a project that had been in the works for roughly a decade. I first heard about it in Los Angeles in either 2006 or 2007 at the Chateau Marmont when I had drinks with a group of young producers and managers, all male, all white, all straight, who were intent on bringing the book to the stage. I remember very little about that encounter since, in those hazy years, I was drinking heavily and distracted and lost in a midlife crisis so severe that I barely paid any attention to strangers during business meetings. But I do remember it was cocktail hour, the summer light was dimming, we sat at a table on the crowded patio, and everybody seemed so impossibly young and guardedly optimistic as we talked about a musical not based on the movie, but on my novel. The young men offered various vague reasons as to why they were interested: American Psycho had a brand that resonated, it was such a cool idea, it was an alternative to family-friendly Broadway fare, and maybe even straight dudes might buy tickets to a musical. They kept talking, and after another margarita I realized: these guys could have been anyone. But these were genuine fans, and they kept reiterating that this show could be very lucrative. They reminded me somewhat of the young men I’d met on Wall Street while I was uselessly researching this novel almost thirty years previously, except I was the older one now.

  The entertainment business forces you to become a gambler whether you like it or not, and the young men were rolling the dice against odds that were decidedly not in their favor. Even if they did get the show to Broadway—that night at
the Chateau there was no book for it, no music, no songs—the stark fact was that 80 percent of Broadway productions fail to recoup their costs. Yet, sure, it conceivably could be lucrative—and that sounded so nice, so hopeful, after a couple of drinks on the patio where I remember candles were being lit, and the garden was darkening—so why not let them try? At the very least I’d get some up-front option money. I kept nodding pleasantly that evening and asked only a few perfunctory questions whose answers I really didn’t care about because I’d never get involved down the line. I just wanted everyone to be happy, confident that I was committed to their idea. Buzzed, I kept thinking, Hey, this could be lucrative.

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  It took many years for everyone to figure out their respective deals, and these emails and phone calls from agents and lawyers were my only reminders that people were trying to turn American Psycho into a musical. I was often involved in a myriad of other projects, and this idea still felt like such a long shot that it would evaporate from my mind the minute I got off the phone with an agent or a lawyer or a would-be producer. During that preproduction decade I had dinner only once, in 2010, with the writer of the musical’s book, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, and it was strictly social: he already had his own take and didn’t ask me any questions at all about the novel. I also met Duncan Sheik, who was writing the music and lyrics, once during that period, and then again, maybe a year later, at a cocktail party at the producer David Johnson’s house in Brentwood. And I met Rupert Goold, the director of the production, one time at another dinner, and these dinners were civil and booked at expensive restaurants, and I drifted through each of them serenely since the whole idea seemed like a pipe dream. I always felt more than welcomed if also pleasurably useless—they were going forward with or without me, and I didn’t care because I never thought it was going to happen, even if Duncan and Roberto and Rupert all had solid Broadway credentials. Jesse Singer, one of the show’s producers, was my point person during the years of development, and he kept me up-to-date on everything that was and wasn’t happening. But I had so many other distractions. For instance, getting used to being back in Los Angeles after twenty years away had proved harder than I anticipated; compared to Manhattan, it was a lonely town that bordered on the ghostly, and there was the movie version of The Informers, which had started out with so many good intentions but was turning into a creative and financial disaster, and I lost friends over it. I was meanwhile having a hellish time writing a new novel, which almost verged on memoir, detailing the midlife crisis that was burying me during that period. Finally, there was also the actor I’d fallen for, who was very interested in a movie role and committed to getting it—but nothing else, I found out the hard way.