Patrick Bateman, What's On Your Walkman?

Or maybe just the first Muse album?

But I think the point about Bateman is that his moral nihilism is really highlighted by the fact that he takes these massively popular and yet spiritually vacant groups seriously. So perhaps today's Bateman would write long dissertations about Destiny's Child and 'NSync. ;-)

But the point about Patrick B. is that he is a man of his time - a distillation of the most detested aspects of a particular culture, pushed to their apparently logical extremes. So what would the equivalent be now?

Is today's Patrick Bateman in fact Nathan Barley? In which case, wouldn't Patrick Bateman be listening to....Momus? ;)

NB. I am not suggesting he is a serial killer.

He wouldn't like Dave Matthews albums. He'd like their singles. He would absolutely detest Destiny's Child. He would like Mariah, but only her old stuff, before she "went black". He would possibly like Ray of Light as his hip choice, but nothing else by Ms. Ciccone. Definitely would like Sugar Ray and Train, and would probably talk for hours about how they AREN'T just rereleasing the same song over and over. He would definitely be into Celine Dion. I can't see any of the country-crossover artists being his thing: he'd definitely make a point about them being little hardbodies, but it'd be a "shame about their music" type thing. Absolutely no rap. Not even a smidge.

And wherever he came from, he'd turn the volume on the radio up to *almost* "anti-social" levels during the chorus of Train's "Drops of Jupiter".

They'd satisfy his every musical need ...

On the other side there's me saying I found Laurie Anderson's 'O Superman' spooky after hearing it had been a serial killer's favourite song, or Chris saying he read Eno's diaries after 'American Psycho' and thought of Eno as a serial killer. This I'd call 'pathologising the normal'. It appeals to people of a nervous and paranoid disposition, who'd rather like to change everything.

Personally, I look at Hitler patting his alsations and wonder if everyone with large aggressive dogs isn't, deep down, a fascist. It doesn't make Hitler more sympathetic, it makes dog owners -- all dog owners -- less sympathetic. Bateman's music criticism was a devastating indictment of a certain kind of puffed-up populist pabulum which was (like the Carpenters) so un-pathological it became, paradoxically, pathological.

Pathologising the normal is, for example, pointing out that it's cars, not Gary Glitter, which pose the biggest threat to children. It's a moral position.

It seems clear to me that Ellis is a moralist. If Hello! magazine interviewed Patrick Bateman they'd 'normalise the pathological', focusing on his decor and his family ties so we could see him as 'just like us'. But Ellis uses him to satirise the moral vacuum which was the yuppie 80s. Ellis is 'pathologising the normal'. He would not approve of Tom's sympathy. He wanted everything Bateman touched -- the suits, the records, the furniture -- to be dragged screaming into the tar pits of guilt-by-association. He would be as annoyed by Tom's attitude as Brecht was when, no matter what crimes he made McHeath commit in his attempt to highlight bourgeois corruption, the audiences flocking each night to 'The Threepenny Opera' sang along unironically to 'The Canon Song': 'If we meet a different type of feller, whose skin is black or yeller, we quick as blinking chop him into beefsteak tartar'.

What more can a satirist do? At that point you just have to throw up your hands and walk away. People love the stink of corruption. Give them porn, it's all they deserve. (Ellis did that too, of course.)

I think this division is probably a political one (conservatives v. radicals) too, and probably lines up the people who champion weird leftfield artists against the ones who like what the major labels concoct. But I would say, Tom, that Ellis is on 'our side' here, not yours. He did *not* put the music crit in to make people like Bateman. Admit you're being perverse!

Why is this an either/or proposition? Couldn't the dog owners become less sympathetic at the same time that Hitler becomes more sympathetic? Each entity being tainted by the moral worth of the other?

This might be true if it weren't for the fact that Hitler and Bateman are so much stronger in their 'moral magnetic pull' than 'a dog owner' or 'a late Genesis fan'. Of course dog owners and Genesis fans outnumber murderous monsters, but their colourless inoffensiveness gives them no weight, and allows their harmless hobbies to be easily tarred with guilt-by-association.

Sociologists of crime talk about how a formerly complex individual, as soon as he gets stuck with a label like 'serial killer' or 'pedophile', has a 'master role'. Herr Hitler (with his master race) and Master Bateman (with his Mastercard) have 'master roles' so powerful that, like moral black holes, they threaten to suck all neutral surrounding matter into them.

But if the dog owners contain some measure of moral worth (because it takes empathy/love/compassion to love another living creature) then that positive value must carry *some* weight, however small. An object may be sucked into a black hole, but the laws of physics dictate it will exert gravitational force on that black hole along the way.

True, not much force -- but nobody's saying that fighting his lonely fight for his sad music *excused* Bateman, or even mitigated his crimes -- simply that it exerts some small measure of sympathy.

Perhaps Ellis was aware of the mutual moral-magnetic pull at work here, and wanted both effects to occur: a degree of sympathy for Bateman and a moral tainting of pop music *at the same time*.

I think this thread went off-topic somewhere, but I'm not sure how.

For the moral chastisement to work, we have to recognise ourselves somewhat in Bateman. But that doesn't mean we have to like what we see (or hear) of ourselves in him. Phil Collins wasn't wrong to withold the film permission to use his songs. Ellis hardly intended an endorsement.

Before I kiss this thread a probable goodbye, I'd like to add that Hootie and the Blowfish (cited above I think) is the clear recent equivalent to Huey Lewis and the News -- silly name, vague-but- amiable pop-rock homogenity, difficult to hate but apparently impossible to love, watered-down black influences, "whatever-happened- to" pop-culture memory.

And Bateman circa 1995 would love Hootie.

I think Bateman and Hitler are more than just 'somebody you don't like'. They're both pathological uber-monsters with a negative charisma strong enough to taint anything they touch. They have the Midas touch in reverse. The whole point of inventing Bateman, for Ellis, was to make Armani suits and Huey Lewis records seem pathological, no?

Maybe I'm just being peevish because I have a pet dog, a small inoffensive Puerto Rican mutt with decidedly Socialist tendencies. And oddly enough I've always wanted to murder Ellis.

This put me in sort of a spot, as I couldn't A) lay claim to getting off on reading bland prose on yuppie lifestyle accessories or B) lay claim to getting off on reading about mutilated women. So I had to keep pushing the satire angle.

The same people who buy millions of Nick Cave records and fashion magazines, presumably: men, women, and people who wear clothes.

By the way, this is one of my favorite threads ever on ILM.

What difference this makes to Momus' critique of my post I don't know.

You were talking about pathologizing the normal and normalizing the pathological. Isn't it possible to avoid either system? I could say that fascism and fondness for dogs are not inspired by the same tendencies; thus, Hitler's owning dogs doesn't change my opinion of him or dog owners one whit, although it makes me wonder how the two were connected in Hitler's mind.

But then, one can be sentimental without being a hater. It might be hard to do it the other way around, though.

surely we can admit in 2002 that "the yuppie eighties" was a liberal/hollywoodian myth? admittedly i was six in 1989.

Actually when I read the book, "Bizarre Love Triangle" was running around in my head the whole time. I think he also mentions it. The connection gets even better with the movie as Bateman's apartment has those Robert Longo portraits - and Longo directed the "BLT" video with falling suited folks!

Maybe even a little house music as Underworld in the early '90s (Born slippy, Dark and Dark Long Train)

I'm sorry, but this is one of the funniest posts of all time. I don't even know what's more amazing - ther implication that the author made reservations but didn't actually go to the restaurants, the idea that you need to practice such things, or the punchline contrast between "hottest eateries" and "i'm dying."

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/mind/30_-_Studio_LaRoux_In_House_Announcer_-_The_More_You_Sell.mp3

(I was going to just drop this gem without comment but I deeply urge you to take a trip into this heart of darkness.)