American Psycho and Wendigo

American Psycho (2000) illuminates expanded definitions of frontier constructed on similar dichotomies found in Ravenous: colonizer/colonized, masculine/feminine, nature/culture, and Wendigo or wetiko/sustainability. According to Annette Kolodny, a frontier, and the literature and film that embody it, “may be identified by its encoding of some specifiable first moment in the evolving dialogue between different cultures and languages and their engagement with one another and with the physical terrain” (Lay of the Land 13). Kolodny’s definition of frontier expands it beyond traditional views of the American West to include multiple collisions between “a currently indigenous population and at least one group of newcomers or ‘intruders’” (13). Despite their contemporary contexts, American Psycho highlights similar collisions from a gendered perspective.

Scholars examining Mary Harron’ film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho primarily explore how the film plays with and responds to genre expectations, with a nod to Patrick Bateman’s (Christian Bale) identity construction and status as an unreliable narrator. David Eldridge’s “The Generic American Psycho,” for example, asserts that “the power of genre classifications was a constant concern” in both novel and film (19). David Robinson’s “The Unattainable Narrative: Identity, Consumerism and the Slasher Film in Mary Harron’s American Psycho” also highlights the film’s genre responses, asserting that the film “borrows the horror genre’s trademark self-consciousness and takes it to a new level, marrying the genre to a larger body of cultural narratives, including those of television, pop musing, news media, and advertising” (26). These multiple cultural narratives also provide fodder for Bates’ identity construction as both venture capitalist and real or imagined cannibal serial killer.

We assert, however, that in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New York investment banking executive negotiates a post-colonial frontier in which women become landscapes to exploit, annihilate, and cannibalize, just as he and his colleagues consume material culture and collide with those who provide it. Although Bateman hides what could be psychopathology from his co-workers and friends and dives deeper into a deviant world like that described in Wendigo mythology, his aberrant responses to the 1990s Yuppie world of excess merely amplify theirs. According to Jennifer Brown, in American Psycho “the cannibal has become the reviled image of overindulgence, overspending, and overexploitation of resources” (214), more “us” than “them.” As a contemporary Wendigo, Bateman bumps up against the feminine underclass on Wall Street, negotiating a modern frontier without the sanity Forbes prescribes. Only Jean (Chloë Sevigny), Bateman’s secretary, survives the crash.