American Psycho is an extraordinary book. Its antihero, Patrick Bateman, is a 26 year old "yuppie" serial killer whose life revolves around a passion, or obsession, with consumption a la mode: everything from keep fit classes, designer clothes, nouvelle cuisine, high tech gadgetry, fashionable drugs, hardcore pornography and "hard body" models with big tits - who he fucks furiously, tortures aimlessly, and kills frenziedly. Trendy shlock-horror? Pornography for yuppies? Indictment of the mindless materialistic amorality of American nouveau-riche culture? A (very) black comedy of manners? Or a critique of the post-modern condition in which the celebration of mindless "difference" effectively obliterates any notion of a hierarchy of human values?
There is, of course, evidence for all these "meanings". It is, surprisingly, extremely funny in parts, clearly critical, often gruesome, and, for those who find the explicit depiction of sexual torture and violent murder pornographic per se, pornographic. It is also - despite the seemingly endless cataloguing of designer labels and gourmet restaurant menus - riveting in its depiction of the disintegration of the "hero". What was most striking for me overall, however, was the transitions between scenes - bored dinner date to motiveless mayhem and then on to the next lunch, all effected in the same "voice" by the first person narrator - antihero, Bateman. These "indifferent" transitions echoed, for me, the central paradox of valueless "difference": when the pleasures of the new and different fail any longer to excite the passions, only bored indifference remains. And indifference to human suffering, not hatred, as someone once said, is the real enemy of civilisation.
Perhaps the central problem in all this is the absence of a particular "message" for men. Though the killer - as he almost always is - is male and the victims (mostly) female, we learn nothing about Bateman that might help us construct a motivational account. This is a cop-out. For, without biographical detail, without some sense of motivation, Bateman, like Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs, evades analysis, remains mysterious. In this mystery resides his power, as monstrous superman. If we are ever to grapple seriously with the horrors of serial sexual murder, we are going to have to get behind the "mystery", to give the killers biographies - and link them to our own.
Lonnie Athens book might be said to do just that. Based on detailed, in-depth interviews with a small sample of "dangerous violent criminals" - defined as those who have committed extremely violent crimes with little or no provocation - and a couple of small control samples, it offers an explanation for the "creation" of such offenders. Essentially, the book argues that what the dangerous offender group share, and what distinguishes them from the control groups, is a set of significant life experiences. These Athens conceptualises as a process consisting of four separate stages: (1) brutalisation, (2) belligerency, (3) violent performances, and (4) virulency. Though various contingent factors may interrupt the process and thus, thankfully, prevent the creation of a dangerous violent criminal, "any person who does ... complete ... the entire experiential process, will become a dangerous violent criminal ... regardless of the social class, race, sex, or age and intelligence level" (p81)
The stage of brutalisation involves "violent subjugation" by a close authority figure, "personal horrification", or witnessing the same happen to someone close, like a mother or brother, and "violent coaching", or being taught, through a variety of techniques, to respond violently to provocation. The troubled, disturbed aftermath to the emotional trauma of having been brutalised is resolved by the decision to respond violently to future provocation: this is the belligerency stage. Putting this latent belligerency to the test by responding violently to provocation constitutes the stage of violent performances. Once a major successful, violent performance has been achieved, and others begin to respond differently, as if the subject were mentally unbalanced or dangerous, the stage of virulency has been reached. Experiencing the power attaching to the "dangerous" persona, the subject resolves, now, to respond violently to the slightest insult to his newfound notoriety. From hapless victim to ruthless aggressor, the wheel has turned full circle.
This bald outline of the stages does less than justice to Athens' convincing discussion of the contorted thinking induced by these traumatising experiences, nor to the liberal use of case study examples. And it would certainly be a mistake to confuse this approach with deterministic "cycle of violence" explanations. Athens is quite clear on this: there is no automatic progression through the stages; and responses to the same event - being defeated in a violent performance, for example - will vary.
However, whilst the explanation would appear to hold good for certain types of violent young men - the "nutter" and the "hard" man, for example - it is not clear that it can encompass every type of dangerous, violent criminal. Politically motivated terrorists and sexual murderers, for example, are not included in the case study material. Then there is the question of women. They do appear, occasionally, as examples, in an undifferentiated way; but it is quite clear from some things that are said that gender is an issue. For example, one of the control groups consisted of six female victims of violent domestic assault. The fact that these women had not gone on to become dangerous violent criminals is not specifically taken up; they are merely used as a means of confirming or disconfirming parts of the overall theory.
While the study clearly provokes a range of questions, then, it does attempt to make the mysteries of a Bateman, or a Lector, comprehensible; and very cogently. For that, at least, we should be grateful.
Reviews by Tony Jefferson
Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective
