American Psycho is still a great primer on the racket we call the free market

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/american-psycho-racket-free-market

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Fans of Doctor Who may only just have said their farewells to Matt Smith, but the actor has already moved on. Since the start of December, he's been starring in a musical version of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho at London's Almeida theatre. The novel was first published in 1991, when Smith was eight years old. But with every year that passes, American Psycho looks more prescient.

In choosing to play anti-hero Patrick Bateman on stage, Smith sends out a shrewd message that he is an actor to be reckoned with, one who knows a sleek and exciting vehicle when he sees one. Which is funny, really. American Psycho is all about making the perfect choice, and the importance of ensuring that you're in the position to make it.

American Psycho has become what it satirised – a must-have book on a must-have shelf. Because there is no choice really. If you're not a success, you're a failure. That's the contemporary mantra. And who chooses the latter?

The musical's programme includes an interview Easton Ellis gave in 2011, when American Psycho was 20 years old. Asked if Bateman was "an early sign of the zeitgeist", Easton Ellis replies: "Whenever I am asked to talk American Psycho, I have to remember why I was writing it at the time and what it meant to me. A lot of it had to do with my frustration with having to become an adult and what it meant to be an adult male in American society. I didn't want to be one, because it was all about status." Which is funny, too. Easton Ellis's roar of anger against a world that demanded success ensured that he would live the rest of his life as a man who had written a Great American Novel. He chose well.

Not that it looked that way to begin with. There was pre-publication disgust at the prospect of a supposedly serious novel that resorted to visceral horror-movie splatter, and post-publication reviews that condemned the book as a nasty piece of work. But the tide turned – Easton Ellis himself considers a rave review by the British novelist Fay Weldon in the Washington Post to have been the turning point.

My guess is that initially people in the media felt rather too satirised themselves by the book. Bateman worked on Wall Street. But plenty of people in the media had embraced the same sort of life – Manhattan loft decked in the "right" furniture and the "right" contemporary art, happening restaurants, designer clothes of impeccable provenance. American Psycho showed the elite what was on the end of its fork. It took them a while to catch up to the fact that they could feel the fear and do it anyway.

Today, bankers are still portrayed as criminals – Scorsese's new film The Wolf of Wall Street being the most recent example. What has changed is that it's now perfectly acceptable to adopt the still-exotic, now much-replicated kind of lifestyle that was the centre of Bateman's existence, and still consider yourself to be "on the left". That's what Blairism was all about. The expenses scandal – all that yearning for flashier homes and more prestigious furniture – was its rightful apotheosis. (As was, unfortunately for those of us without expense accounts, the credit crunch.)

And the psychopathic violence that so disgusted early critics of American Psycho? It's all too easy to cite the violence that has been used in the cause of spreading liberal democracy around the world – not just the wars, but also the terrorism, the sweatshops, the pitting of rich against poor around the world. Bateman was portrayed as personally craving the enactment of violence. But in an odd way, he was an honest broker, who knew that in order to maintain his own glittering lifestyle, other people had to be its victims. Winners and losers – it's what the supposedly natural order of neo-liberalism is all about. There have certainly been plenty of losers.

In 1991, the idea was that the excesses of the 1980s, "the designer decade", were already passing into history. The 1990s were predicted to be more caring, more environmentally aware, more gentle. Easton Ellis clearly didn't entertain such soothing fantasies. Instead, Bateman's values went global. The 1990s became debt-ridden, as more and more found that they had no choice but to live beyond their means, while others simply chose to. Debt offers the illusion of choice, while actually removing it. Very often, instead, debt promotes fear.

But in American Psycho, the winners – the purveyors of debt – are fearful, too. They suffer under a self-imposed tyranny: the tyranny of choice. In the musical, Bateman's apartment is furnished with black leather and chrome Barcelona chairs, while the apartment of his slightly superior arch-rival, Paul Owen, is furnished with white leather and chrome Barcelona chairs. It looks nicer. Even in his choice of leather dye, Owen wins and Bateman loses.

Freud writes about the narcissism of small differences in his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents. In American Psycho, the discontents of civilization are writ large. Extreme self-loathing is prompted by a slightly inferior business card or an elusive restaurant table. Bateman feels total dehumanization as a result of his minuscule failures. Each tiny imperfection of choice destroys his sense of himself. Or as he puts it: "I simply am not there."

The degree to which American Psycho is perfectly Freudian is breathtaking. Freud argues that there is a basic conflict between humanity's aggressive nature as the planet's top predator, and the opportunity to create calm and safe civilization that this pre-eminent position brings. To enjoy the fruits of dominance, the qualities that delivered it have to be repressed, or at least made metaphorical, like Bateman's metaphorical violence. Capitalism can thus be seen as an eternal reenactment of humanity's triumph over all other animals, which explains why neo-liberals like to describe free markets as mirroring human nature and have little difficulty in treating those who don't win at the game as lesser, more expendable, forms of animal life.

The great irony, of course, is that free markets are all about choice – itself a Batemanesque torture, as there can only ever be one best choice. In making the "right" choice, the individual proclaims his place in civilization, again and again and again, even though the self-expressive demands of individualism and the conformist demands of civilization contradict each other. Thus, consumer culture is both a hideous trap and also the safest enactment of human nature that we've so far found. Even though it's not safe. Even though it evolves so quickly that few can keep up: your shiny new smartphone becomes yesterday's status symbol before you've worked out how to use it. In American Psycho: The Musical, Bateman keeps his absolutely up-to-the-minute Sony Walkman on its own little hallowed shelf. How the audience laughs.

The tragedy – and American Psycho is indeed a tragedy – is that there's probably not a human on the face of the earth who doesn't know in some part of herself that it's all just a racket. Contented people accept their own choices as good enough for them. The really contented – the complacent – can persuade themselves that anyone without that satisfaction has simply made bad choices. At root, however, the fear of adulthood that Easton Ellis described so feverishly in his novel is just the dawning, horrible realisation that, to be a "successful" adult, you must succumb to the tyranny of bewildering, capricious choice, and cross your fingers in the hope you get it right, however unlikely that may seem.

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