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“civilized” man is indeed no stranger to carrying out acts of horror, a fact that Ellis
explicitly demonstrates.
171
In American Psycho, Ellis draws a metaphor for the passive, almost vegetative
state that characterizes white-collar life in the twentieth century and its lack of
‘physicality,’ where the need to fulfill one’s instinctual drives has been replaced by a
gregarious appetite for a variety of consumer products: clothes, cars, home electronics,
music, and movies. A superficial lifestyle plagued with ennui prompts one to yearn for
excitement, to indulge in the ‘thrill’ that the modern entertainment industry offers its
viewers by constantly pushing the envelope with regard to representations of gore and
violence. A paradigm that Ellis meticulously portrays in American Psycho, where the
main protagonist’s only relief from an existence defined by "surface, surface, surface …
all that anyone found meaning in” (375), is found by indulging in violence—whether
fictional or not.
* * *
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, it would seem surprising that a
work of written fiction would get so much attention in this day and age—especially when
one considers that the public at large is constantly bombarded with explicitly violent and
suggestively obscene images from the national news media and the entertainment
industry. Nevertheless, certain self-righteous groups and individuals were so distraught
by what they had read or heard that they campaigned for a national boycott of the book,
going so far as to issue death threats to the author. In a review for The New York Times,
Roger Rosenblatt called for the public to “Snuff this book!”, while Tammy Bruce of the
Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) urged the public to