Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

physical reactions, which stand in sharp contrast to the merely speculative properties of
Terror and serious Sexual Content with regard to reader response.
160
By literalizing the symbiosis between sex and violence through the dialogism of
Pornography and Horror, American Psycho not only illustrates the properties of
transgression and taboo but also reveals the novel’s potential as a text of social criticism.
Yet it could be argued that if Ellis’ point was to illustrate metaphorically the misogynistic
violence of the male gaze in particular and patriarchal society in general on the one hand,
and the perverted collective violence–direct or indirect—of consumer capitalism on the
other, he would have come across the first time, and the repetition of such scenes remains
unjustified. This argument is flawed, however, for it again fails to take into account the
overall premise of American Psycho’s being a satire, a work of social criticism 21 . This
“excess” is by no means gratuitous, for as mentioned above, the objects of the novel’s
attacks are mass consumerism and the tenets of Western Society, and thus this excess in
violence illustrates the excesses that form an integral part of liberal capitalism. This
prompts David Price to observe that “in Patrick Bateman’s world, there is no
contradiction between being a Wall Street hotshot and a serial killer because the ideology
of the culture obscures such a contradiction (327).” This parallel between the individual
violence of the main protagonist and the collective violence of capitalistic culture is
displayed when asked by someone at a party what his line of work is, Bateman answers,
“murders and executions” his answer is assumed to be “mergers and acquisitions” (Ellis
206).
21
A point that was equally emphasized by the likes of Carla Freccero, Julian Murphet, David Price,
Elizabeth Young, and Ben Walker.