#36: american psycho / kim
Dear Readers:
Each month you will receive an email containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. They’re all combined together this month. It’s the 36th one.
When I’m tired or in a bad mood, I like to look at photographs of Kim Kardashian. It always makes me feel better. This started a couple years ago, when a friend told me that Kim breastfed, which gave her a feeling like, if Kim can do it, then I can definitely do it. When my friend told me this, I thought, Kim Kardashian, hm. I had never thought of knowing anything about her before. I think I google-image-searched her for the first time soon after that.
I’ve never watched Keeping Up With the Kardashians, I guess because I’m not a very visual person. When I read a description of a room, even/especially if it’s by Henry James, I rush through it without attempting to picture it. I want to move on to the good parts, where someone says something but is thinking something else. Who cares what color the wallpaper is? And I’m even less televisual than I am visual. Not that I don’t watch a huge amount of TV, but I’m usually not really watching it. It’s more like listening to it, or reading the closed captioning, which we often have on. I only look at the action on the screen when two characters are having a very emotionally intense conversation or seem like they’re about to kiss, which, very annoying, Brian always notices. He says, “oh now you’re watching” about five times a night.
Once, when I was at Michigan, everyone went to Buffalo Wild Wings without me, and I was really hurt.
“We didn’t think you’d like it!” the guy who organized the outing said.
“Why??”
“I guess the alcoholic, social, and televisual aspects of it.” An airtight case.
I want to know more about Kim, though, despite how televisual she is. It’s challenging in a pleasing way to try to imagine her as real, unlike imagining, I don’t know, Bill Gates. I wouldn’t want to think that he’s a human being, and I don’t.
I got even more interested in Kim when I read Bret Easton Ellis’s essay collection White. I’m a Bret Easton Ellis completist; I have to read everything he writes because American Psycho is so good and the rest of it is so bad. I have to figure out what’s going on. American Psycho is a true American psychological mystery: is (the iconically named) Patrick Bateman really doing these horrific crimes in the reality of the novel? Ellis makes you want so badly for it not to be real, but you keep asking yourself, why? Why do I care so much? And what would it even mean for it to be real or not? So you’re sort of hounding yourself while you’re reading, asking yourself, what is this? And that, that self-hounding and reality-questioning, that’s real.
Also, it has these extremely detailed, self-important record reviews, presumably written by Patrick Bateman, breaking up the action. (“It was Duke (Atlantic, 1980), where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent, and the music got more modern, the drum machine became more prevalent and the lyrics started getting less mystical and more specific (maybe because of Peter Gabriel’s departure), and complex, ambiguous studies of loss became, instead, smashing first-rate pop songs that I gratefully embraced.”) It is clever and shocking to put this obsessive-record-collector/cool-guy discourse right up against descriptions of a psychopath torturing people. Music review language is familiar; it combines extreme bravado with extreme sensitivity. For some reason, these reviews are supposed to be really important and cool; it’s been that way for as long as I’ve been alive. I remember reading reviews like these in the Reader when I was a kid, then, when I was in college, in Pitchfork or in the A.V. Club section at the back of The Onion, on paper. Ellis’s implication that they’re the work of psychopathics is one of the most hilarious pieces of cultural commentary I’ve ever encountered. Ellis reminds me of Matthew Arnold, saying that we have bad art and we think about our bad art in stupid ways, which makes us bad people. But he doesn’t even say it at all, he just shows it.
And then you read his other books, and you have to ask, the guy who wrote American Psycho also wrote Lunar Park? Imperial Bedrooms? The Informers? The Rules of Attraction (that one might be the least terrible, but still bad)? I don’t know another writer like that, with just one great, excellent book, and the rest totally awful, nothing interesting or good about them at all. How did that happen, and will he ever write something like American Psycho again?
The other books are bad because they lack, precisely, what makes American Psycho great. He doesn’t believe any of this stuff is real, so there’s none of that scary suspension of the drama hovering slightly above the theatre of reality. (That’s the only thing I ever don’t like about a piece of writing; I think it’s the only thing a writer could do to make me not enjoy reading. But writers do it all the time!) Ellis writes about this quality of American Psycho a bit in White (which I wish was as provocative and jarring as its title):
I suddenly decided—apropos of nothing in particular—that Patrick Bateman would be a serial killer. Or would imagine himself to be. (I never knew if it was one or the other, which in turn made the novel compelling to write. Is the answer more interesting than the mystery itself? I never thought so.)
Ellis put himself in the same position as his reader, in that place of fear and mystery. He didn’t elevate himself above us. But in his other books, it doesn’t seem like he believes any of the action is real, and so we don’t either.
And Kim. There’s a part in White where he hangs out with Kanye West.
I’d known Kanye since 2013, when out of the blue he texted me to ask if I’d like to work on a movie idea of his. We’d never met, but I was intrigued enough to go see him in a private wing of Cedars Sinai the day after his first child had been born. We spent four hours there talking about the movie project and a wide range of subjects—everything from Yeezus to porn to The Jetsons—until Kim Kardashian came out of her room cradling their newborn North. This seemed like the time for me to excuse myself, though it also seemed that Kanye wanted me to stay indefinitely, even offering me a Grey Goose that he was pouring out of a magnum as I prepared to leave.
Kanye is surely a genius, and when you only think about American Psycho, so is Bret Easton Ellis. But what is genius for if you cannot READ a woman who had a baby yesterday as a fellow human being? If she hardly even registers in the syntax of the sentence you wrote about her? What kind of genius is that? Here, Ellis abdicates the novelist’s number-one duty. He doesn’t even bother to imagine her. Maybe it’s disgusting to him that she had just had a baby, I don’t know.
What if no one believed you were real? Is that hell, the very definition of hell? Here are you are living, another person, another whole, real person just sprung out of you, in pain, hearing through the wall your husband meeting a new friend now of all times and having a four-hour-long self-aggrandizing conversation about any random shit they can think of, interrupting each other to give really stupid monologues, you finally gather the strength to come out of your room, and neither of them even looks you in the eye?
This horrible scene should be a play. I think she deserves a play.
Someone else needs to write it, though. I’m busy.
Sincerely,
Lucy