by BJW Nashe
American Psycho as a stage musical? Twenty years ago, if you had tried to turn Bret Easton Ellis’s satirical slasher novel into a glitzy musical production, people would have thought you were mad — nearly as psycho as the maniac in the book. In fact, you simply would have been thinking too far ahead. Sometimes it takes a while for the scandals du jour to morph into tomorrow’s entertainment. Now it seems the time is ripe for Ellis’s serial killer to sing. One of the most hated characters ever created — homicidal stockbroker Patrick Bateman — is the star of a slick new musical in London, playing to sell-out crowds at the Almeida Theatre.
Whether this is a good thing or not depends on one’s point of view. When Hollywood took a stab at American Psycho in 2000, with a carefully crafted big screen adaptation directed by Mary Harron, the film raised interesting questions about literature, entertainment, commerce, and crime. These same questions are even more relevant for the musical version. No matter what the medium — text, film, stage drama — it’s easy to get seduced by the sensationalized plot synopsis: a Wall Street investment banker leads a double life as a sexually deranged serial killer. American Psycho is not primarily concerned with either banking or murder, though. The story’s main focus is the dehumanizing nature of mass consumer culture. Whether this can be adequately conveyed in a popular entertainment form such as a musical is debatable.
First, some information about this deadly extravaganza in London. The production has a fair amount of creative heft behind it. It is directed by Rupert Goold, who has garnered acclaim for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, English National Opera and Chichester Festival. The largely electronic musical score — performed on synthesizers and drum machines — is the work of Duncan Sheik, who has had previous success with the show Spring Awakening. The script was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, whose stage and screen credits include Glee, the recent remake of Carrie, and the Broadway spectacular Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark. Matt Smith, from the BBC’s global hit Dr. Who, stars in the leading role as Patrick Bateman.
On the whole, Londoners have to admit that, by Jove, American Psycho is a bloody hit. The show is sold out for the duration of its run at the Almeida, which lasts through February. Reviews have been mixed, however. The Guardian’s four-star review states that the show “works superbly,” and goes on to praise Rupert Goold’s “stylish production, Duncan Sheik’s music and lyrics and Matt Smith’s beautifully defined performance as the deluded hero.” Variety disagrees, claiming that, “Beneath the highly polished surface there’s little drama or, crucially, danger.” The Telegraph is flat-out merciless, calling the production “glib, heartless and pretentious.” Critic Charles Spencer writes: “You could sense the audience lapping up this empty mixture of ironic style and sudden moments of violence.”
The dissenting voices, however, are nothing compared to the cries of protest that greeted the novel’s appearance in 1991. American Psycho started causing trouble even before it was published. When word leaked out in early 1991 that Simon and Schuster had dropped the book at the last minute due to “aesthetic differences,” rumors spread that Ellis had created a monster. When the “monster” was 
subsequently released by Vintage Books, the press smelled blood in the water. Serious discussion of the novel’s literary merits were largely drowned out by denunciations of the book and its author for allegedly glorifying violence and misogyny. All of this attention proved to be a double-edged sword for Ellis. No doubt the controversy provided a ton of free publicity, which gave sales a definite boost. Yet he found himself attacked and demonized in the press for months on end, and even received several death threats.
Those who condemned the novel on moral grounds were missing a crucial point. Convicted murderer Paul Bernardo may have claimed during his trial that American Psycho was his “bible,” but the book is anything but a celebration of violence and murder. Patrick Bateman’s acts of rape, torture, and mutilation are never presented as “entertainment.” We are never meant to view him in a positive light. We are never meant to empathize with him as we do with the fully rounded characters who inhabit most realistic fiction. Nor are we led to approach Bateman’s transgressions in terms of psychology or criminology. It is a mistake to approach American Psycho the same way we view a thriller such as The Silence of the Lambs, for instance. Ellis is treating this material in a more detached, conceptual manner in order to engage in sharp social satire.
The satirical thrust of American Psycho is directed toward the hollowness of consumerism. The main subject of the novel is not murder. The murders simply serve to illustrate the seriousness of the book’s main theme, which is commodification. In fact, the number of pages in the book devoted to physical violence are relatively few — twenty or thirty pages in all. In contrast, we have over three hundred pages of relentless, pitch-black comedy that serves to ridicule and eviscerate crass materialism. This is skillfully achieved through Patrick Bateman’s stream-of-consumer-consciousness narration, which dwells obsessively on the products and commodities that dominate his existence.
In page after page of the book, Bateman describes his affluent daily life, all the while detailing the name brands and prices associated with clothing, accessories, home decor, cars, health products, food, restaurants and nightclubs, drugs, etc. Everything is a product that comes with a price and serves as a status symbol. This includes people, who are viewed as objects of repulsion or desire, as pieces of meat that may or may not have value based entirely on appearances. People are appraised based on their “net worth.” Bateman and his peers evaluate each other based on their business cards and their expensive suits. Women are sized up for sexual desirability. Homeless people out on the street are treated like worthless pieces of garbage. Bateman’s own health and fitness regimen — the workouts, the manicures, the facials — are evidence of narcissistic self-commodification.
In this context, Bateman’s horrific killing spree — not to mention the psychic violence of his racist, sexist, and pornographic ranting — is not simply an aberration. It is treated as a logical culmination of living in a consumer culture gone haywire. Ellis is showing us, in graphic detail, that the end result of all this branding and marketing and buying and selling is total dehumanization.
One can argue that Ellis has overstated the case. Even the greediest and most materialistic consumers are rarely turned into sadistic murderers. Yet the question of their dehumanization remains. Has the never-ending parade of pure products led us all to become fundamentally dead inside? Are we incapable of treating others with dignity and respect? Are we habituated to violence and exploitation? Ellis’s novel is exaggerated and over-the-top for a reason. By forcing the issue and pushing his character to such extremes, he hopes we as readers will be inspired to question our own relationship to the worst aspects of rampant consumerism. His novel is best seen as a form of shock therapy. American Psycho, oddly enough, is in this sense a very morally-driven book.
The moral concern arose out of a deeply personal crisis, rather than a class in sociology. After distancing himself from his most incendiary work for the past two decades, Ellis has recently been speaking more openly about his experience writing American Psycho. As a successful, wealthy young author in the 1980s, whose first book Less Than Zero had catapulted him to instant fame, Ellis started losing his bearings. In a July 2010 interview with The California Chronicle, Ellis explained:
“[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself. That is where the tension of American Psycho came from. It wasn’t that I was going to make up this serial killer on Wall Street. High concept. Fantastic. It came from a much more personal place, and that’s something that I’ve only been admitting in the last year or so. I was so on the defensive because of the reaction to that book that I wasn’t able to talk about it on that level.”
No doubt there is irony involved in delivering an anti-consumerist message in the form of a novel. Novels are commodities, after all. But novels are perhaps better suited to a counter-cultural stance than are blockbuster films and glitzy musicals. The latter are typically marketed as pure entertainment, and tend to operate right at ground zero deep inside our 
mainstream consumer culture. Thus, when I think of a well-dressed, well-fed crowd forking over serious English pounds to see a fit and well-toned Matt Smith take the stage as Patrick Bateman, wearing nothing but tight white underpants as he croons along to Eighties style synth-pop — well, I have to wonder whether somebody has lost the plot here. Is this really an effective way to capture Ellis’s sense of “slipping into a consumerist kind of void?” Maybe so. Maybe the Glee approach is the best way to get at the heart of soullessness. But I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m confused. When I read that American Psycho is 
“non-stop materialism set to song,” I can’t help but cringe. Same goes for descriptions of Bateman performing “a sexual threesome with a large pink teddy bear,” or singing an “ode to business cards,” or performing aerobics dance routines offset by the high-tech sheen of stunning set designs. Meanwhile the brutality of treating people as things, and the bloody spectacle of the murders, are downplayed so as not to get in the way of the “fun.”
But the show is a sell-out, and it’s making cash money, so no one is likely to get hung up over something as academic as “commodification.” If Brad Pit and Angelina Jolie decided to perform semi-nude interpretive readings of Karl Marx at a fancy supper club, and charged five hundred bucks per ticket, that might sell out too. And everyone would be happy.