Patrick Bateman
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Patrick "Pat" Bateman is a fictional character, the protagonist and narrator of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
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[edit] Biography and profile
Patrick Bateman works at the fictional Wall Street firm of Pierce & Pierce (also Sherman McCoy's firm in The Bonfire of the Vanities) and lives on the Upper West Side in the American Gardens Building (where he is a neighbour of actor Tom Cruise). At first appearance, Bateman is a handsome, well-groomed, and intelligent young man, but he is eventually revealed to be a serial killer who murders a variety of people, from colleagues to several prostitutes. His actions, including torture, murder and cannibalism, are described in graphic detail in the novel.
Bateman comes from a wealthy family. His parents have a home in Long Island, and he mentions a summer home in Newport. His mother now resides at a sanatorium. His father grew up on an estate in Connecticut, and now owns an apartment in a New York hotel. His younger brother Sean attends Camden College. Bateman graduated from Harvard University in 1984, and Harvard Business School two years later and moved to New York City.
[edit] Interests
It is heavily implied that Bateman spends little time in his office and does very little work while he is there. While in the office, he appears to spend most of his time on trivial amusements such as crossword puzzles, watching television (in the film, an episode of Jeopardy!), and listening to music. He often arrives late, meets friends for drinks before taking long lunches, and does work late into the evening. When asked why he holds a job he says he hates, despite the fact that he is independently wealthy and does not need to work, he always gives the same stony reply: "Because I want to fit in."
When not in the office, Bateman spends his free time nightclubbing, eating at trendy restaurants, working out, or visiting various salons. At home, he enjoys watching videotapes, particularly pornography and slasher films, and is an avid fan of a fictional talk show called The Patty Winters Show. Bateman often uses the phrase "returning videotapes" as an excuse to account for the time he has spent torturing and killing his victims. Bateman also reads biographies of other serial killers, such as Ed Gein and Ted Bundy.
Bateman is an avid music fan, particularly of pop and pop-rock. His favorite musical group is Talking Heads, but Bateman discusses at length Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis & the News. He also listens to jazz (Dizzy Gillespie and Bix Beiderbecke) but loathes rap, which he derides as "niggerish."
[edit] Bateman's personality
As written by Ellis, Bateman is the ultimate stereotype of yuppie greed: rich, shallow, and addicted to sex, recreational drugs and conspicuous consumption. All of his friends look alike to him (to the point that he often confuses one for another, and they often confuse him for other people), but he obsessively details every single feature of his clothes, stereo, workout routine, and business card. He is engaged to an equally rich, shallow woman named Evelyn. She appears to be in love with him, but he cannot stand her, but stays with her for the sake of his social life. He has a mistress on the side (the fiancée of a colleague he hates) and has regular liaisons with prostitutes and women he encounters at clubs, many of whom end up being his victims. The one woman (and possibly the one person) in his life he has anything approaching feelings for is his secretary, Jean, whom he just cannot bring himself to seduce, rape or kill, perhaps because she is the only person in his life who is not completely shallow.
While on the surface, Bateman seems to be the embodiment of the suave, attractive and successful businessman, he appears to loathe himself as much as he does everyone else; he kills many of his victims because they make him feel inadequate, usually by having better taste than he does. His friends mock him as the "boy next door," his own lawyer refers to him as a "bloody ass-kisser...a brown-nose goody-goody," and he is often dismissed as "yuppie trash" by people outside of his social circle.
Bateman often expresses doubts regarding his own sanity, and he has periodic attacks of psychosis, during which he hallucinates. He often experiences feelings of depersonalization. In his own words, "...though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there." Although Bateman often claims that he is emotionless, he also describes experiencing moments or periods of extreme rage, panic or grief, often over trivial inconveniences such as not being able to get a good table at a restaurant. In the middle of killing and dismembering a victim, he breaks down, sobbing that he "just wants to be loved."
Bateman compensates for these inabilities and insecurities through obsessive vanity and personal grooming. He dresses in the most fashionable, expensive clothing possible as a means of affecting some "control" over his otherwise chaotic life. Likewise, he categorizes people by what they wear and how they look because they are more easily "understood" in terms of labels and stereotypes. People as three-dimensional beings are unpredictable and impossible to understand, but people in terms of attire and appearance are much more easy for Bateman to grasp.
Publicly, Bateman presents a façade of being sensitive and caring. He expresses concern for issues such as AIDS, environmentalism, education, racism, sexism, pollution, abortion, immigration, and the economy. However, Bateman is actually virulently racist, classist, and misogynist, abusing his girlfriends and the homeless even when not actually torturing or killing them. He also deliberately invests in companies with racist policies while contributing to the legal defense of Robert Chambers.
Bateman does not fit the "typical" profile of a serial killer, as he kills more or less indiscriminately, with no preferred type of victim and no consistent or preferred method of killing. Throughout the novel, he kills men, women, and one child. He kills women mostly for sadistic sexual pleasure, often during or just after sex, and is also a prolific rapist. He kills men because they anger or annoy him, and the child just to see if he would enjoy it (which he does not).
Periodically, he matter-of-factly confesses his crimes to his friends, co-workers, and even complete strangers ("I like to dissect girls — do you know I'm utterly insane?") just to see if they are actually listening to him. They either are not, or think he is joking. Bateman is never arrested for the enormous number of murders he committed.
[edit] The question of Bateman's reality
Whether or not Bateman actually committed the atrocities depicted in American Psycho is subject to debate. Throughout the novel, and especially during its final chapters, Bateman describes various incidents and events that are either outrageously unbelievable or patently delusional. This is best exemplified in the chapter entitled "Chase, Manhattan," where Bateman engages in such wanton and public displays of violence — driving a stolen cab into a karaoke restaurant; engaging the police in a full scale shoot-out; killing the night watchman at the office building next to his own — that even he could not escape punishment. Finally, in one of the novel's most famous scenes, Bateman returns to the apartment of one of his victims, where he had stored numerous butchered corpses, only to discover the place cleaned, painted and for sale. The realtor, present upon his arrival, questions him as to whether he "saw the ad in the Times," which Bateman claims he did, only to have the realtor reply that "there was no ad in the Times." She then requests that he leave and not return, which he does. Yet the novel does contain incidents which objectively may have occurred. In the novel's initial chapters, Bateman's friends reference a murder which took place at a yacht party attended by Bateman. Similarly, after Bateman kills his colleague Paul Owen (Paul Allen in the film), Owen's family hires a private detective to investigate his "disappearance." That a character later claims to have met Owen in London for dinner is immaterial, since characters frequently mistake one another's identities throughout the novel. Paul Owen was actually decomposing in a bathtub in Hell's Kitchen. Bateman is also identified by a cab driver near the end of the novel as being the man who killed his friend, but instead of turning him into the police, he merely robs Bateman of his cash, Rolex and sunglasses.
The three most straight-forward explanations are that Bateman did indeed commit all the murders, that Bateman imagined all of the murders, or committed some of the violent acts and only imagined (hallucinated) committing others.
That Bateman hallucinated some or all of the murders is certainly a possibility. Bateman is clearly mentally unbalanced; either committing the murders he claims to have perpetrated or fantasizing about murder to such an extent that he is no longer able to differentiate between fantasy and reality is clear evidence that he is mentally unbalanced. Additionally, certain incidents he experiences (such as the ATM telling him to feed it cats) are clearly delusions.
While there are strong arguments for and against the "reality" of Bateman's crimes, it seems plausible that the truth lies somewhere in between. Bateman may have committed some of the acts he alleges, and may simply have fantasized about others. Perhaps the realtor had the apartment "fixed," and reports of her findings there buried, so as to make selling the place as easy as possible; perhaps she realized that Bateman was the man responsible, and let him escape simply to avoid a scandal and more work on her part or afraid that he might kill her as a witness. It is also possible that, with Paul Owen/Allen having disappeared and his apartment turned into a slaughter house, his family concluded that Paul was the murderer, and have deliberately covered up evidence of the murders rather than let scandal destroy their family's reputation. Bateman's "confessions" may operate in the same manner: perhaps he simply thinks he speaks when in reality he is not (as he imagines that he says he is in the field of "murders and executions" when he actually says "mergers and acquisitions"), and perhaps in other circumstances he actually does say something only to be ignored by his vapid, inattentive friends.
It is also quite plausible that the reality of Bateman's sociopathic behavior is intentionally left ambiguous. This may be to suggest that the context in which the character is situated is so obsessed with surface and image that (all) deeply disturbing behavior goes unnoticed, including murder, rape, and torture (not to mention hyper-competitiveness, sexism, classism, drug addiction, and depression). Many incidents are probably meant to have a double meaning--suggesting Bateman may be hallucinating these murders, while also suggesting that greed and shallowness so pervade the culture he is a part of that he could get away with his crimes. Examples include the apartment, which might indicate that the apartment was never a murder house and he hallucinated the whole thing; or that, in the shallow culture Bateman lives in, the profit to be made selling an apartment is valued above reporting evidence of murder. Similarly, in a scene in the film, Bateman is caught by a friend with a bag containing a murdered body; rather than question Bateman's odd behavior (loading a bag into a car in the middle of the night,) the friend asks where he got such a great bag, mocking the fact that Bateman's surroundings are so superficial that the friend doesn't even realize anything is wrong. (See Yazmin Ghonaim's Cinephile's Film Analysis at http://www.cinephiles.net/American_Psycho/Cinephiles-Gate.html)
[edit] Bateman outside of American Psycho
Bateman made his first appearance in Ellis' episodic 1987 novel The Rules of Attraction (in which Sean, his brother, is the main character); no indication is given that he is a serial killer. Bateman also appears in Ellis' 1998 novel Glamorama, with "strange stains" on the lapel of his Armani suit.
Bateman also appeared in the American Psycho 2000 e-mails, which were written as an attempt to hype up the movie. Although they are often mistakenly credited to Ellis, they were actually written by one or more unnamed author(s) and approved by Ellis before being sent out. American Psycho 2000 served as a sort of "e-quel" to the original novel. The e-mails take place in 2000, a little over a decade since the novel. Bateman is in therapy with a Dr. M. He is also married to Jean, his former secretary. They have a son, Patrick Bateman Jr. (P.B.), who is 5 years old. In the story, Bateman talks about therapy, trying to get a divorce from Jean, his renewed feelings about murder, and idolizing his son.
Most recently, Bateman appeared in Ellis' 2005 novel Lunar Park, in which a fictionalized Ellis confesses that writing American Psycho felt like channeling the words of a violent spirit rather than writing anything himself. This ghost — Bateman — haunts fictional Ellis' McMansion. A character also comes to Ellis' Halloween party dressed as Bateman. Towards the novel's end, Ellis writes the 'last' Bateman story was a way of confronting and controlling the character, as well as the issues Ellis created Bateman as a means of countering. Bateman, for all intents and purposes, dies in a fire on a boat dock.
Bateman is also the subject of the Manic Street Preachers song, "Patrick Bateman".
In the episode "Return to Sender" of the TV Show Dexter, Dexter reveals that he uses the alias "Dr. Patrick Bateman" for buying certain powerful sedatives used in his killing.
[edit] Bateman in film
The best-known portrayal of Patrick Bateman is Christian Bale's in Mary Harron's 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play the infamous character, but dropped out of the film. Bateman was also portrayed by Dechen Thurman (brother of Uma) in the 2000 documentary This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. Michael Kremko played Bateman in the opening scene of American Psycho 2: All American Girl, the 2002 direct-to-video sequel to American Psycho. In AP2, Bateman was killed by the young girl who saw him kill her babysitter, who took her along to his apartment in an attempt to apprehend him. Many fans don't consider the sequel to be canon.
Scenes with the character were shot for the 2002 film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction. Ellis revealed in an interview that director Roger Avary asked Bale to reprise the role, but Bale turned down the offer, and Avary asked Ellis himself to portray Bateman. Ellis refused, stating that he "thought it was such a terrible and gimmicky idea," and Avary eventually shot the scenes with Casper Van Dien. The scenes, however, were ultimately cut from the final version of the film.
[edit] Similarities with his brother
Despite generally hating each other, Patrick Bateman and his sibling Sean Bateman have various things in common, despite being on very different ends of the social scale. For one, they both take copious amounts of drugs, yet are not addicts.
Also, both characters bring doubt in whether they are reliable narrators or not. Many question how much of Patrick Bateman's story in American Psycho is true; and Sean Bateman's narration in The Rules Of Attraction sometimes clashes with other character's versions of a given story.
[edit] Chronology of Bateman's Life
- ca. October 1 - October 23, 1962: Patrick Bateman is born (deduced from a passage in American Psycho where he tells detective Donald Kimball that he and Paul Allen were both seven in 1969 and later when he briefly muses on what it means to be a Libra as well as wondering what he'll get for his birthday in October).
- 1980: Bateman graduates from Exeter Preparatory school.
- 1984: Bateman graduates from Harvard University.
- 1986: Bateman graduated from Harvard Business School.
- From the time of his graduation, through the end of American Psycho, Bateman works at Pierce & Pierce.
- ca. 1996: Bateman shows up at Victor's club in Glamorama.
- 2000: Bateman enters therapy with a Dr. M. This appears in the American Psycho 2000 e-mails. In these emails, he is divorcing Jean, to whom he has been married for at least five years, and has a son. He has apparently started his own brokerage firm and seems to be even richer than he was in the original novel. His tastes are even more rarified. His homicidal tendencies (or thoughts) seem to have cooled a little with the birth of his son, but have not disappeared completely.
- 2003: Bret Easton Ellis kills Patrick Bateman by writing an unordinary account of the serial killer being trapped in a pier fire. See Lunar Park.
[edit] Trivia
- Does not have a car. When Evelyn asks Patrick what he wants for Christmas, he replies that he wants, among other things, a car stereo. Evelyn interrupts, "But you don't have a car, honey." He insists, "I want one anyway." (p. 183, American Psycho, 1991) However, in the 2000 e-mails, Patrick mentions driving an Aston Martin, and owning a Mercedes and Bentley.
