Patrick Bateman
Patrick Bateman is a fictional character, the protagonist and narrator of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and its film adaptation.
Biography and profile
Patrick Bateman works at the real Wall Street investment 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 neighbor of actor Tom Cruise). In his "secret life", however, Bateman is a serial killer who murders a variety of people, from colleagues to several prostitutes. His crimes, including rape, torture, murder, necrophilia and cannibalism, are described in graphic detail in the novel.
Bateman comes from a wealthy family. His parents have a home on Long Island, and he mentions a summer home in Newport. His parents divorced sometime earlier, while his mother became sick and 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 (and is portrayed in the preceding novel and later feature film, "Rules of Attraction"). Bateman attended Phillips Exeter Academy for prep school. He graduated from Harvard University in 1984, and Harvard Business School two years later and moved to New York City.
Interests
According to his fiancée, Evelyn, Bateman's father "practically owns the company". As a result, he 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, doodling, watching television, listening to the latest pop music, and reading violent pornography.
When not in the office, Bateman spends his free time nightclubbing, eating at trendy restaurants, working out, or visiting various health clubs and tanning salons. At home, he enjoys watching videotapes, particularly pornography and slasher films, and 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, as well as a convenient way to excuse himself from the company of others. Bateman also reads biographies of other serial killers, such as Ed Gein and Ted Bundy, frequently slipping in bizarre facts relating to them amid everyday conversations.
Bateman is an avid music fan, particularly of mainstream pop and pop-rock. He specifically enjoys the music of Talking Heads, and he discusses at length Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis & the News (there are whole chapters devoted to each of these three musical icons). He also listens to jazz (Dizzy Gillespie and Bix Beiderbecke).
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. They can't stand each other, but they stay together for the sake of their social lives. 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. He just cannot bring himself to seduce, rape or kill her, perhaps because she is the only person in his life who is not completely shallow. Every time he mentions Jean throughout the novel, he casually acknowledges her as "Jean, my secretary who is in love with me" and introduces her in the narration as someone he "will probably end up married to someday".
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 (Paul Allen's superior reservation skills, business card and handling of the prestigious Fisher account, for example). 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 my flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I am simply not there." Although Bateman often claims that he is devoid of emotion, 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 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, with unwavering attention to detail. He dresses in the most fashionable, expensive clothing possible (e.g. Valentino suits, Oliver Peoples glasses and Jean Paul Gaultier overnight bags) 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. Bateman's apartment also is firmly controlled in terms of look and taste, with the latest music, food, and paintings. 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 the façade of a sensitive and caring liberal. He expresses a stereotypically left-wing concern for issues such as AIDS, environmentalism, racism, homelessness and the economy. However, Bateman is actually a virulent sexist, racist, elitist, conformist, sadist, and homophobe. 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, a child, and animals. 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 didn't).
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. In the climactic scene, he calls his lawyer and leaves a lengthy, detailed message confessing all of his crimes. He later runs into his lawyer, who mistakes him for someone else. Bateman is never arrested for the enormous number of murders he commits.
The question of Bateman's reality
Whether or not Bateman actually commits 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 shootout; killing the night watchman at the office building next to his own — that even he could not escape punishment. At different points, Bateman describes events which are clearly hallucinations, which range from an ATM telling him to feed it stray kittens to a park bench gaining sentience and following him home. Towards the novel's end, Bateman returns to the apartment of one of his victims (his colleague Paul Owen), where he had stored two butchered corpses, only to discover the place cleaned, painted and for sale. In the book's final chapter, following Bateman's attempt to confess his crimes, a character named Harold Carnes claims to have seen Paul Owen alive in London.
However, the novel contains no firm proof that the killings are mere hallucinations, and indeed presents much evidence that suggests that most, if not all of the killings, really did occur. 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 Paul Owen, Owen's girlfriend, Meredith, hires a private detective to investigate his "disappearance." With regards to Owen's apartment being put up for sale, it is possible that the killings have been covered up by the authorities in order to protect the real estate business; for instance when Bateman questions the realtor as to what happened in the apartment she tells him "Don't make any trouble" and asks him to leave. Bateman also notes that bouquets of roses have been placed in the apartment, the scent of which seems to mask a lingering smell of death beneath. While Harold Carnes' claim to have seen Paul Owen in London is interpreted by some as proof that the murders were imagined, it should be noted that throughout the novel and the movie, characters repeatedly mistake one person for another; thus this may be another case of mistaken identity, a theory given credence by the fact that Carnes does not even recognize Bateman himself and addresses him as both 'Davis' and 'Donaldson' during the conversation. Also, a tramp whom Bateman blinded with a knife early in the novel appears again in a later chapter posing as a blind Vietnam veteran, and towards the book's closure, a cab driver identifies Bateman as the killer of his friend, but instead of turning him in to the police he merely robs Bateman of his cash, Rolex and sunglasses [1].
Bateman outside of American Psycho
Bateman made his first appearance in Ellis' 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 makes a short appearance 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 advertisement campaign for 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 8 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.
Bateman appeared in Ellis' 2005 novel Lunar Park, in which Ellis confesses that writing American Psycho felt like channeling the words of a violent spirit rather than writing anything himself. This ghost — Bateman — haunts Ellis' McMansion. A character also comes to Ellis' Halloween party dressed as Patrick Bateman. Towards the novel's end, Ellis writes the 'last' Bateman story as 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.
Most recently, "Patrick Bateman M.D." was used as an alias by Dexter Morgan, the protagonist of Showtime's Dexter, whenever he had to order the strong animal tranquilizer he uses in his murders. According to Dexter, the reason for choosing the name was because it sounded, "So wholesome, so inconspicuous".
Patrick Bateman was credited as a character in the 2006 film Broken directed by Simon Boyes and Adam Mason, however never actually appeared in the movie. During the directors' audio commentary, Boyes and Mason state that they had simply made up many of the ending credits for their own amusement, and the Bateman credit was one of them.
Bateman in film
The best-known portrayal of Patrick Bateman is Christian Bale's in Mary Harron's 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Though Bale had been the first choice for the part by both Ellis and the director, the producers offered the part to Keanu Reeves, Edward Norton, and Brad Pitt. 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.
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.
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 Phillips Exeter Academy.
- 1984: Bateman graduates from Harvard University.
- 1986: Bateman graduates 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 rarefied. His homicidal tendencies (or thoughts) seem to have cooled a little with the birth of his son, but have not disappeared completely. This is interpreted by some fans as non-canon given that the e-mails were not written by Ellis.
- 2003: Ellis kills Patrick Bateman by writing an extraordinary account of the serial killer being trapped in a pier fire. However this is also interpreted by some fans as non-canon. See Lunar Park.