Correlated Contents – Page 14 – the peace and safety of a new dark age

DO YOU REVERSE?

The summer lull begins.

I find myself wasting a remarkable amount of time in the hopes that I will feel relaxed once my summer obligations come to bear. In a little over a week I’ll be back on campus, working on a small research project about Measure for Measure. It’s common knowledge (more or less) that Shakes lifted the plot from Machiavelli, but I think it’s worth investigating exactly how he’s dealing with Machiavellian politics in the play. (If I manage to get something useful out of this, I also suspect there are variations on this theme in Coriolanus and The Tempest, and maybe that will also be a profitable area for further research.) Anyway, that’s boring.

After I finish that up I’ll be a teaching assistant for a two-week course for high school students, during which they’ll hopefully read Hamlet and come to like it. I’ve taught high school kids before, but that was Anglo-Saxon lit, so they were understandably not very receptive. Hamlet, at least, can be related to by most teens in ways of differing profundity; the riddles from the Book of Exeter, not so much.

There are a few other things I could talk about here. For instance, how less than a week after I leave London the country is so lost without me that they just cocked things up royally. But again, that’s boring.

Instead I’ll leave off with a delightful glimpse into the past, when a little girl named Mary O’Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards. She also became one of the greatest American writers of the past century and probably my single favorite writer of all time (which is obviously saying something), but that all happened much later.

The Proscenium and the Percipient

As Stephen King once wrote:

Let’s talk about fear, you and I. Let’s talk about fear.

But not just any fear. King already beat me to talking about fear in written fiction (though that doesn’t stop me from going at it every so often, of course) and King already beat me to talking about fear on film (again, something I occasionally have made a foray into). But I want to talk about a type of fear — a variety of what Noel Carroll calls “art-horror” — that King doesn’t take into account in his Danse Macabre, and which Caroll (as I recollect) does not even mention in his own treatment of the genre.

I want to talk about theatric horror.

There are two ways you might respond to the idea of theatric horror. The first is that it is ridiculous: a man wearing a bedsheet onstage is an actor playing the ghost of Old Hamlet, and nothing more; it is (this line of thinking implies) silly to be scared by anything onstage because, quite paradoxically, all of it is illusory, so anything that appears unnatural (like a ghost) is, in fact, naturally explicable (a man in a bedsheet). The other way to think about it is that theatric horror should be about the same as cinematic horror, that if you can be scared of Jason Voorhees on a screen then you damn sure can be frightened by a man wearing a bedsheet.

The key thing to take from both of these examples is that both make the assumption that horror is participatory. This is no big revelation; all fiction is participatory in varying capacities. This mostly takes the form of making the viewer/reader/audience’s desires the same as one or some of the characters’ desires. It’s about interest, and it’s about sympathy. You want to know why Old Hamlet’s ghost is stalking the battlements, if it’s telling the truth or not; you want Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to get together; you want to figure out what the fuck is going on with that island and the polar bear and the time-travel and you hope to god it all makes sense in the end.

But horror is special.

You don’t want the zombie apocalypse to happen — and listen, I know it’s fashionable to be excited about zombies and the end of the world, but trust me, almost everyone who insists on proclaiming they’ll have a good time when the shit hits the fan will be among the first to either die or become a quivering, sobbing mess. This is what Noel Carroll calls the paradox of horror: it is a genre set up specifically to show us things we hate or despise, things designed to make us unhappy, and we flock to it. So yes, horror is participatory, but it is participatory in a way that is distinct from the way other genres are. The closest thing to it is tragedy, which generally focuses on a handful of repulsive things, but by definition there is a catharsis, a final release of tension; horror, on the other hand, has no such obligation. At the end of, say, The Blair Witch Project, the story doesn’t actually end. It just stops; the monster is still on the loose, there is no return to order.

The idea is that horrific things do not end, terror does not end, and above all, you are subject to the same fears and forces that govern the lives of the characters. The toys and props of horror aren’t put neatly back into the box and hidden away at the end of the game; they continue to litter floor, and you step on them in the middle of the night when you least expect it.

So horror, despite its paradoxes, is quite a participatory thing indeed. And it should be noted that of the modes of storytelling I’ve brought up — fiction, film, television, theater — it is the latter that is the most participatory. After all, it’s not words on a page and it’s not an interplay of light from a projector — things are happening there in front of you, and it’s the closest you can get to it actually happening. Given the participatory nature of horror and the participatory nature of theater, the two ought to be a match made in heaven.

So how do you make a play scary?

I’ve recently seen two horror plays, and the remainder of this blog entry will be me outlining the way each production attempts to develop an atmosphere and, above all, a feeling of terror in the audience — the percipients. A percipient being, of course, one who perceives; it’s also a pseudotechnical term tossed around by some parapsychologists to describe those who ‘perceive’ themselves as having had supernatural experiences. Added to that, it sounds fortuitously similar to participant, and in case you couldn’t tell, that’s going to be a cornerstone of my discourse.

Now: Play number one. The Woman in Black, currently running at the Fortune Theatre in Covent Garden, a few blocks from where I work. This thing has been on forever — for me, almost literally, since it’s been going nonstop since 1989, when I was barely a year old. It’s been through its share of actors, too — the cast in that trailer the website is running is a completely different cast from the one I saw. That’s a notable, if tertiary, facet of the play: it has a cast of two. Three, maybe, but then things get a little complicated. I’ll explain that in a bit.

WiB is obviously a pretty successful venture, having run for 21 years, and I personally think it mostly succeeds as a play and as a piece of horror fiction. I’m not going to say it frightened me — it didn’t, I don’t frighten easily — but the people in the audience who kept screaming seemed pretty scared. Of course, the people who were screaming were mostly teenaged schoolgirls — the curse of the matinee showing, from what I hear — and they were screaming at the ‘jump-scare’ bits, things like doors slamming and so on. I’m not going to fault the play for that. I tend to look down on jump scares in film only when they are predictable and when they are the only mechanism used (or overused); suffice it to say that WiB‘s jump scares are very often unpredictable and they only become grating if, like me, you have to listen to a few dozen sixteen year old girls shouting every time.

Where the play succeeds most admirably, I think, is the more insidious horror it attempts to instill through use of atmosphere and two or three wonderfully executed images. My favorite was the titular woman in black, lying corpse-still in a madly careening rocking chair which then threw her forward with such force that she seemed to fly and, without any misstep, landed on her feet (assuming she has feet, below her tattered skirts) to glide soundlessly across the stage.

The plot is often billed as being an MR Jamesian ghost story, which is half a truth and half a lie. James’s ghost stories have a very particular pattern and a particular way of presenting the supernatural that is wholly absent in the play; where the two more happily coincidence, however, is in the manner of narration. I have a love-hate relationship with Jamesian narration; it seems like sometimes he just decided to be as fucking roundabout as he could in getting to the story he had to tell.

In order to create what he called a “pretense of truth” he often sets up webs of narrators to tell a single story.

A typical James story will be narrated by the first-person-I, a scholar or antiquarian who is presumably James himself; this narrative voice will do such wonderful things as tell us, rather blatantly, that he is not telling us everything he can so that he may explain details more chillingly later, or he may off-handedly dismiss a secondary character as nameless because he’s just not important to the story. Below the James-narrator there is often a second voice belonging, supposedly, to one of his friends or acquaintances, to whom the events of the story occurred; though James will talk about the character in third person, his narrative voice occasionally gives way to the other character’s first person narration of the events in question. The secondary narrator, for his (and it’s almost always his) part will often find an old manuscript — a court transcription, a diary, whatever — that also relates events in the first-person voice of someone who is long dead, often providing a clue as to the nature of the hauntings. The text-within-the-narration, with its archaic syntax and occasional rambling passages in Latin, will often consume a large portion of the narrative structure.

If this all sounds a bit complicated, trust me when I say that it is. Sometimes James gets so caught up with himself it’s impossible to tell who is narrating what and when and how. If you’re also thinking this all sounds awfully postmodern, keep in mind that James was writing in the 1900s, and had no real reason to be this damn complicated. His narrators are like nightmarish Russian nesting dolls, each one trapped inside the other and more removed from the reader than the last.

Now, The Woman in Black very admirably follows up on this tradition of being obfuscating as fuck by having the same narrative confusion, but on stage.

It works something like this: an older man, sort of bumbling, wants to tell a story to lay his conscience to rest. He consults an actor, the other main character, to help him work on his public speaking skills for this purpose. The older guy, Arthur Kipps, is a terrible speaker, though, and so the actor (who finds the story interesting and has designs on making it a play) takes over Arthur’s role for the purposes of flashback. So right there on stage, one character literally becomes the other, a lighting change telling you that you’ve entered a flashback. The real Arthur, for his part, becomes every other character in the play, changing his outfit or glasses slightly and affecting multiple accents to fill various roles. So then suddenly you’re not watching these two guys put on a play about Arthur’s experience, you’re actually watching the memory — until, for one reason or another, we jump back and Arthur turns into the actor and the other actor turns back into Arthur.

It all gets very confusing, as you might imagine; you never know if the people on stage are people “on stage” practicing their play in an empty theater or people in a haunted house, and the fact that they can go from one to the other at any time doesn’t help. When the ghost, the woman in black, finally shows up, is she actually there? Is she on the stage with Arthur and the actor, or is she part of a flashback, a memory? The implication, quite horrible indeed, is that if she is in fact on the stage in the play’s “present” then she is also there on stage in front of you. And since she operates sort of like Kiyoko from the Ju-On films — she passes on from person to person, seeking vengeance for the wrongs done to her in life — there’s the equally unsettling implication that the woman in black, if she is there, is now after you.

This is underscored by the play’s curtain call. As the audience applauds, the two actors you know quite well by now come out and bow, try to run back stage, come back to the continued applause, bow, and leave. Just them. Only those two.

And, after they have gone, the woman in black appears at the very back of the stage, just visible, staring out at you. She does not smile, she does not bow; she only stares. For her, it seems, the play is not over.

Then she disappears, and you’re free to go. Or so you think, anyway, but the play has already taught you that the woman in black can show up where you least expect her, be it an ancient house in the marshlands or a London park on a sunny afternoon.

We should also take time to consider the other play I saw, Ghost Stories at the Lyric Hammersmith. There are a few things to note about this play, the first being that it is new and has a modern day setting, unlike The Woman in Black, which was written in the 80s but takes place in the early 20th century. The second is that it is co-written and directed by Jeremy Dyson, one of the writers for a black comedy television program that is very near and dear to me, The League of Gentlemen. What this means is that the story is very consciously influenced by horror films and at certain points it becomes as bizarre as all get-out.

Ghost Stories is also the better of the two plays. I’m wary to talk much about it for fear of spoiling it — not that I expect anyone reading this to see it, really, but I am loath to give away the play’s secrets. In structure the plot works something like this: you are part of an audience watching a Dr. Goodman present a short seminar on ghost stories, which he collects from various people. As he replays recordings of these experiences to you, the audience, the action on the stage takes over and we “see” what is happening in flashback. There are in total three vignettes of this type, linked by Goodman’s lectures on them, giving the entire thing a sort of classic anthology movie feel — think Creepshow or something of that variety.

The play’s resolution held no surprises for me, but it was well executed; I will not discuss it further, except to say that if The Woman in Black is an MR James story, then Ghost Stories follows, appropriately enough given Dyson’s own apparent interest, in the footsteps of Robert Aickman. Aickman is woefully under-read, I think, and this is not helped by the fact that his work is almost entirely out of print and very hard to find in any other way — in my travels through used bookstores here I found a shop that had two of his early collections (first editions, about £95 each) and both volumes of his collected ghost stories (£400). At any rate, there’s a quote from Neil Gaiman on that Wikipedia page that I feel gives a very accurate description of what it is like to read an Aickman story: as a reader, you are slowly overcome with a sense that something is horribly, terrifyingly wrong, and by the end you know it is, and yet afterward you can never figure out exactly what went wrong, where it went wrong, and how.

Ghost Stories is less coy about the why and how parts of the equation, but it does indeed do an admirable job of slowly breaking down the audience’s complacency. In other words, while watching Ghost Stories, you think you’re seeing one thing, but you slowly begin to understand that you’re really witnessing something else entirely.

I’m sure that’s vague to the point of being useless, but it’s the way the play goes, and I really don’t want to say any more about it. They even ask you kindly after the show not to tell anyone! And, anyway, I hear John Landis was in the audience a few nights ago, which (if his career weren’t dead) might bode favorably for a film adaptation.

Except.

This isn’t a post about horror films. It’s a post about horror theater, and I sincerely believe that Ghost Stories could not work as a film. Neither could, I think, The Woman in Black, though the BBC apparently tried.

I have come to understand that the way theatric horror works — and the reason it is unique — is that the audience participates in a way completely unlike their participation with other genres and other forms. The common trend in both plays I’ve described is that the barrier between the audience, the percipient/participant, and the action on stage is broken down — the proscenium, the fourth-wall, is presented as permeable. You leave the Woman in Black thinking you might be her next victim, but you don’t leave a production of Oedipus Rex thinking you’re going to murder your dad and bone your mom. (At least I hope not.)

Likewise Ghost Stories, with its wraparound frame of a parapsychologist’s lecture, makes you personally a part of what is happening. It’s simpler than WiB‘s layering of narration, and while I actually think WiB is very clever and successful in that regard, it’s also a bit cold. Ghost Stories‘s technique is simpler, perhaps cruder, but far more effective in bringing the audience into the world of the play. In other words, while the former is a technical success, I believe the latter is a general success.

To go back to MR James, when writing on his ghost stories, he claimed his multiple narrators and pretense of truth were required to make the reader think, “If I’m not careful, this could happen to me!” This is the point of theatric horror, I think — even more so than a horror story or a horror film.

I also think this is why horror theater is not a widely considered part of the spectrum: it’s really easy to do it badly, so there’s not much of it. The percipients have to be participants in the fullest sense; they have to feel what is going on, they have to be sympathetic, because you (the writer/actor/director/whatever) are essentially asking them to make themselves feel intensely uncomfortable. It’s not a request many people are inclined to comply with, and if this sort of thing were to fail, it would do so spectacularly.

This may be a lot to base on only two plays, but it’s all I have to go on, so it’s the best I’ve got. It’s an allegation supported, I think, by the rather famous and experimental Punchdrunk company, who stage their plays in actual buildings, having the actors go about their business while the audience wanders around, observing and ignored. In other words, they do away with the proscenium entirely. From what I hear, Punchdrunk’s Faust was absolutely fucking terrifying.

Punchdrunk’s approach also underscores another observation I’ve made about theatric horror, and perhaps theater in general. You’ll recall that in The Woman in Black, part of the action takes place in an empty theater — the characters refer to the theater multiple times, talking about how empty it is. Of course this garners a few laughs, because the theater is not empty at all.

But it’s a rather uncanny notion, nonetheless — to be outright ignored by another human being, for him to pretend you don’t exist. There’s a similar sort of dynamic in Ghost Stories and — hell — I feel like the same sort of thing goes on in almost any play.

When theater works well, there’s always that uncanny feeling that you are in a place you shouldn’t be, that you have somehow become unseen or insubstantial. Horror plays tend to involve the audience more directly perhaps because the actors need your consent to make the monsters real, and so you’re invited, in a sense, to become part of the play.

In other words, in good theater, the audience should feel that they are real ghosts.

Dunsinane @ Hampstead Theatre

And now for something completely different.

Unlike the other plays I’ve talked about in this space, Dunsinane is a modern play that premiered near the beginning of February. However, because I am completely monomaniacal in my interests, there is of course a Shakespeare connection: it’s billed as a sequel to Macbeth. Which it is, sort of.

Obviously doing something like this has the potential to blow chunks of epic proportions, but I was pleasantly surprised by Dunsinane. In fact it is… Not Bad At All. Of the plays I’ve seen here, it’s number two — right behind that Measure for Measure production I didn’t really talk much about. But anyway, I’m writing about Dunsinane now. Let’s do this.

It should be noted that David Greig, a playwright of no little renown, makes a smart decision and does not choose to make Dunsinane a straight sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth; rather, he places his play more distinctly within historical reality. Macbeth (who is never referred to by name and never appears on stage) is a well-regarded king who has ruled for fifteen years after seizing the throne from the weak and tyrannical Duncan; Duncan’s son, Malcolm, has meanwhile convinced the English that Macbeth rules against the wishes of the people of Scotland, and so a contingent of English soldiers led by Siward and Macduff (one of the handful of Scottish nobles to turn against Macbeth) storm the castle of Dunsinane and implement a bit of regime change.

That should sound kind of familiar, and it’s intentional. The play mirrors the Iraq situation, with mixed results. Much better is the way it blurs the line between actual history, Shakespeare’s play (Birnam Wood does indeed come to Dunsinane — it’s the opening scene), and Greig’s own imagination. This mixture also allows Greig to bring Shakespeare’s most famous character, Lady Macbeth, back under her real name — Gruach. She died for Shakespeare, she lived historically; she also had a son by her previous marriage, another detail preserved and one that invalidates Malcolm’s claim to the throne.

Malcolm, for his part, turns out to be a corrupt jackass who simply wanted the privileges of being king and not the responsibilities. He’s also ruthless; he wants Gruach (who he’s captured) and her son (who has gone into hiding) killed to consolidate his power. The Englishman Siward, the protagonist of the play, only wants wants stability and peace — as he calls it, justice — in the country he has invaded, and he’s willing to commit himself and the English forces indefinitely to enforcing a stable regime in Scotland.

I think it’s a great setup. There are, in fact, a lot of really great things about this play. It’s RSC-sponsored, so production values and set design are no problem; the actors are all generally strong, especially Gruach, who proves to be just as overwhelming a presence as a wronged mother and monarch as she does when she’s a batshit crazy regicide. The structure of the play, though it’s four acts based on seasons, still manages to have some neat nods to Shakespeare, such as the mixture of Siward’s higher tragedy with the banter of his soldiers, vulgar young boys who discuss sex and homesickness before encountering with Heavy Stuff like death and warfare.

There’s actually a heavy dose of comedy; the opening scene of the march on Dunsinane is played mostly for laughs, underscoring how ridiculous it is to have soldiers pretending to be trees. This is intercut with more serious scenes, as you may expect, but even Siward and Gruach have highly comedic lines. Malcolm, for his part, is the worst; he’s played as a spineless, pseudo-Tony Blair parody, a leader who equivocates and lies but has no solid ideas for what he plans to do. The humor written for his character is so brash and forthright, so damn modern, that it actually broke my suspension of disbelief, especially when thrown up against large, serious, questions of justice, warfare, and colonialism.

That is the play’s biggest fault: it doesn’t know what the hell it is, or wants to be. It’s either a silly allegoric satire of the Iraq War in period dress, or it’s a serious treatment of the motivations for and effects of doing what you think is the right thing, and how far some people are willing to go for what they recognize as justice. It’s either watching ill-equipped, unprepared young men die horribly while making sex and shit jokes, or it’s watching a committed idealist be slowly destroyed by the corrupt world around him.

All in all, the play actually has very little to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth other than setting and a few revisionist takes on shared characters. Thematically it’s in a different ballpark entirely. I’ve talked before during the Psycho series about the concept (borrowed from a professor) of the “rewrite” — and in one sense Dunsinane is an attempt to rewrite Macbeth. But that’s only skin-deep; Greig wants to call Shakespeare out on his historical inaccuracies, his limited understanding of Scottish culture, and rectify these mistakes. But on a deeper, more profound level, Greig isn’t working with Macbeth at all.

This is clear enough in the last scene: Siward, with only a single foolish young soldier to keep him company, confronts Gruach in the midst of a bitter snowstorm. We’ve been watching this man break down for the past two hours, we’ve seen his hopes shattered, we’ve seen him betrayed, and now we see him, hunched, obsessed, perhaps driven mad, crying out for revenge and justice in the midst of a storm.

No, Dunsinane isn’t Macbeth; it’s King Lear.

Which is interesting in and of itself, since by the time this entry is posted (remember, I’m writing a week in advance and autoupdating) I in theory will have seen the RSC’s new production of Lear running in Stratford-Upon-Avon. And later this month, I hope to see the new RSC-sponsored play and counterpart to Dunsinane, The Gods Weep — which, when you read the plot synopsis, also happens to very obviously be a Lear rewrite.

Will something come of this? Only time will tell!*

*Also assuming I haven’t met with some horrible accident during my week of being homeless.

Twelfth Night @ The Duke of York’s Theatre

This was a Royal Shakespeare Company production, and not just any RSC production, but an RSC production directed by Gregory Doran. Doran is most recently famous for taking a huge risk in 2008 and casting Doctor Who‘s David Tennant in Hamlet, a move that apparently paid off in spades. I obviously wasn’t here to see it, and I haven’t yet gotten my hands on a copy of the DVD, but I’ve heard good things (also, Patrick Stewart as Claudius? Daaaaamn). Anyway, in addition to his Hamlet cred, in 2000-ish Doran put on a Macbeth that I think, despite its few faults, might be the closest thing to definitive we’ve got. So I have a lot of respect for (and expectations of) Gregory Doran.

It really saddens me, then, to say that his Twelfth Night is not that good.

Which isn’t to say it is bad, really. The word my professor used, and one that I think is most appropriate, is “patchy.” The play stopped and started, came and went, and ended up feeling generally uneven. Doran tried his hand at casting a TV actor in the meatiest role, this time famous (over here, anyway) grumpy old man Richard Wilson as the puritanical steward Malvolio. Malvolio, as it happens, is not even a main role, but 12N is one of those plays where the subplot is more famous than the actual plot; Malvolio is the character people care about, and putting Wilson in the role was meant to draw more scrutiny, speculation, and (most importantly) audience members than any other aspect of the production.

Needless to say this is what most of the reviews focus on; in earlier stagings, apparently, Wilson wasn’t impressive. This was his first turn on Shakespeare, but by the time I saw the play (it was very near the end of its run) I thought he was adequate. A little stiff and hollow, perhaps, but that is probably the best way to describe the whole production. During the first two acts, all I could say about it was that it was definitely Twelfth Night, with various actors playing various characters I know are in the play, all with the expected lavish RSC set design and high production values. Aside from that, it was lifeless.

Things picked up in acts 3-5, following the interval, where it seemed like the entire cast had ducked into their dressing rooms and snorted cocaine before coming back on. The actors weren’t any better, exactly — Viola/Cesario, Orsino, Olivia, and nearly everyone else was still pretty bland (Sebastian, by the bye, was bad and stayed bad) — but the smaller characters like Toby, Andrew, and Fabian seemed to really get into what they were doing, and everyone seemed more lively and happier to be on stage.

The two real bright spots of the production were Fabian, who is really a very small part but the actor had a good control of the character, and Feste, who was the only major character who seemed consistently on. They really emphasized his songs (we’re talking entire dance numbers), which was odd, considering the actor didn’t seem to be a very strong singer to begin with. But I give him points for getting out in front of people and singing, anyway, and I give him the benefit of a doubt since it’s cold season and he might have been losing his voice.

But aside from those two performances, the play was very flat. “Oh look,” the actors seemed to be saying, “we are putting on a Shakespeare play. What a thing to do!” (The Olivia was especially guilty of this — also, they made her character a slut, which has its fun moments but overall is unengaging, especially when the player is Very Obviously Acting, as this one was.)

The sole moment of real almost-brilliance, in my opinion, was the ending, where Feste sings his famous bit about the rain. Like the film version I just linked, it was played as a sort of montage of Feste singing while various scenes occurred on stage around him. The key difference was that the song was much slower and the scenes were not of journeys ending in lovers meeting, but snapshots of all the characters who ended up on the losing side of things — Antonio the gay sailor, robbed of his bland, uninteresting boycrush Sebastian by an insane cougar, and Andrew Aguecheek, robbed of his insane cougar by a bland, uninteresting boy, and (this was kind of neat) Toby and Maria, who pantomimed a very bitter and angry domestic dispute. Naturally this ended with Malvolio, the biggest loser in the play, and as Feste finished his song the two of them stood side by side on the stage, glaring at one another, the Fool and the Puritan — and the lights fell.

I actually got chills from that, man. It suggests, I believe, a very powerful reading of 12N that could make a very, very fine production.

It’s too bad that Gregory Doran didn’t, you know, use it.

Richard III @ Riverside Studios

This was not a very good production.

The thing about R3 is that it works best when the title character is played as an over-the-top hilarious cartoon — a sort of evil ain’t-I-a-stinker Bugs Bunny. What this means is that you need a Richard who is crazy, zany, hilarious, and carries the production on his hunched back. Unfortunately, the folks at Riverside Studios decided to attempt deep emotional resonance, and while they actually achieved this to some degree — the Elizabeth was absolutely amazing, especially when Richard proposes marrying her daughter and she rips him to pieces, and the elderly Margaret (played by a man!) was quite convincing as a drunken, curse-spitting old woman fallen on hard times. The guy playing Richard was actually good, spinning it as a kind of Crispin Glover thing.

Despite this, the play was just boring. It was far too somber and therefore very grueling to sit through — the last third was nicely abridged, especially the procession of ghosts, but the first two-thirds were plodding. Richard needs to be energetic and awesome in a love-to-hate-him way; the audience needs to know he’s unquestionably evil, yet at the same time really want to see him fuck people’s shit up. It simply works better when it’s a crazy Marlovian spectacle. My evidence: Ian McKellan’s Nazi-flavored 1995 adaptation, which plays hell with the source text (they all do, as R3 is ungodly long and sloppy) but it’s loads of fun and pretty damn stylish.

A more positive note about the Riverside production: Catesby was also very good. The staging was a sort of modern multinational corporation boardroom setting and they chose to make Catesby a smartly dressed young female secretary with a clipboard and a constant uncertainty about what the hell was going on around her, and who slowly realized she was both in over her head and pretty much stuck in the plot for the long haul. This worked.

On the other hand, both sides of the stage had this industrial scaffolding that, at various points in the play and for no specific reason, Richard would climb around on despite apparently suffering from palsy. I think the idea was to make him sleek and dangerous, and the acrobaticsmaybe would recall the “bottled spider” remark Margaret makes about him. A neat idea, kind of awkward in execution. SPEAKING OF WHICH: the Battle of Bosworth Field was a dance party. I am not kidding. Both sides glowered at each other from across the stage, dancing slightly while techno music played and strobe lights went off. Occasionally they staggered as if they’d been hit. It was like watching a Final Fantasy battle screen, which again was pretty neat, but within the context of the play and production completely crack rock.

And that’s all I have to say on Richard III’s Jungle Gym and Rave from Hell. On Wednesday keep an eye out for my thoughts on the RSC’s recent production of Twelfth Night. Here’s a preview: it’s also not very good!

American Psycho Part 4: THERE IS, IN FACT, AN EXIT

Hello to anyone who’s stumbled this way from Professor Brainworm’s blog! I hope you’ll bear with me, since I can be pretty longwinded. Anyway.

Our journey through the wonderful world of Bret Ellis’s novel American Psycho thus far could be summed up in the following way if it were a game of Clue: Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Dante’s Inferno with Reagan’s Manhattan. Today on the ominously dubbed Black Friday, I’ll finish up my little ramble. I plan to for a rebuttal to the issue that, after the explicit pornography and violence, is the most challenged aspect of the novel: its nihilism.

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I encountered something like this when I first read the book when I was 14. You’ll recall I took it as a straight satire, and so in the end I didn’t feel like it had accomplished the actual goal of satire: I didn’t know what better lifestyle was possible, because in the novel if you are not Patrick Bateman then you are one of his shallow friends or a homeless person, and none of these options are very good. But as I’ve said, Psycho is not a satire. It has satiric elements, certainly, in a similar way the recent film version of New Moon inexplicably has a scene that satirizes modern Hollywood action films. Bret Ellis’s satire is much more deft, of course, and much more regularly implemented; it’s not a one-off scene, but a large part of the text. Yet it is not, as we may be tempted to think, the heart of the text.

The heart is salvation.

Rewritings of Dante are always about salvation in the same way sonnets are always about love. A traditional if boring sonnet is one that lists, without irony, the traditional values that make a loved one, well, loved. An exciting sonnet is one that talks about how love is impossible, a lie, fake, a delusion — but even when it tries to negate those things, it is still a poem about love. Similarly, a traditional rewriting of Dante is going to be about a dude going through some hardship, suffering, and becoming a better person in the end. An exciting rewriting of Dante, like American Psycho, is going to pull the same trick as the not-about-love sonnet: it will try say that salvation does not exist, is impossible. But the idea of salvation is still there, lurking behind every venomous negation, and sometimes — sometimes — it manages to glitter through.

The pattern is pretty straightforward in Dante. Dante and Virgil travel through Hell in Inferno, where they see the consequences of sin, and then move onward to the Mountain of Purgatory in Purgatorio. Purgatory, of course, being the place where sins are purged from the soul prior to entering Heaven. To enter Purgatory, however, they have to pass by a robed angel who guards the gate; Virgil urges Dante to beg the angel to let him enter, and the following transactions occur:

Devoutly prostrate at his holy feet,
I begged in mercy’s name to be let in,
but first three times upon my breast I beat.

Seven P‘s, the scars of sin,
his sword point cut into my brow. He said:
“Scrub off these wounds when you have passed within.”

Canto IX, 109-114

Each of the seven P‘s on Dante’s forehead represents one of the seven cardinal sins that Purgatory is supposed to rid him of; after passing through each circle one disappears and Dante feels lighter.

miquel-barcelo-purgatorio If you’re in any way religious — particularly if you are Catholic — this may have echos of Ash Wednesday. If you’re a godless heathen, then the short of it is that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the period of penitence and fasting leading up to Easter. On Ash Wednesday, the penitents are marked by the priest with a cross of ashes on the forehead, a reminder that human beings come from dust and, but for the grace of God, they’ll someday be to the dust returned. In other words, it’s a humbling process, just as the journey through Dante’s Purgatory is meant to humble those souls that were sinful in life but not beyond hope.

Now that’s all well and good, you’re saying, but what in the hell does Ash Wednesday have to do with American Psycho?

Since there’s nothing I like more than tossing away conclusions I’ve already made, think back on our initial reading of the Inferno influence on Psycho in Part 2. We mapped out a set of relationships between the characters to mirror that of the Comedy’s Dante-Virgil-Beatrice triad, and our best Virgil candidate was a sort-of-friend of Patrick Bateman’s named Timothy Price. He’s like Virgil, I said, because he’s the most interesting person Bateman knows, someone he seems to admire in a really odd but genuine way, the closest thing Bateman has to a friend, and he leaves Patrick before the end of the novel.

But Tim Price is unlike Virgil in one very important way: he comes back.

….[F]or the sake of form, Tim Price resurfaces, or at least, I’m pretty sure he does. While I’m at my desk simultaneously crossing out the days in my calendar that have already passed and reading a new best seller about office management called Why It Works to Be a Jerk, Jean buzzes in, announcing that Tim Price wants to talk, and I fearfully say, “Send him… in.” Price strolls into the office wearing a wool suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass, cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m pretending to be on the phone. He sits down, across from me, on the other side of the Palazetti glass-top desk. There’s a smudge on his forehead or at least that’s what I think I see.

…

“You’ve been gone, like, forever, Tim. What’s the story?” I ask, again noticing the smudge on his forehead, though I get the feeling that if I asked someone else if it was truly there he (or she) would just say no. (p.383-384)

Price disappears within the first 60 pages of the novel and returns in the last 20. After he ran off into the fake train tunnel in the club, he has not been mentioned at all — but suddenly here he is, with a peculiar smudge on his forehead. The chapter he reappears in is called Valentine’s Day, which is on February 14th, and it so happens that this part of the novel takes place in 1989, when Ash Wednesday fell on February 8th.

I’m sure you see what I’m driving at. ash

So Price, when he returns, comes in the form of someone penitent — or at least that’s how Bateman feels. We know he’s prone to hallucinating, and here he openly questions whether or not he actually sees the smudge. Nevertheless, we know that Price is someone Bateman admires — “I’m wondering and not wondering what happens in the world of Tim Price, which is really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets world, boy gets it” (384). There is something about Price, some spirit or personality or agency, that Patrick sees as lacking in himself; suddenly it makes a whole lot of sense why the opening paragraph I quoted in Part 2 almost makes it seem like the novel is going to be a third-person narration about Tim Price, but is actually just Patrick thinking about Tim Price.

So what is it Price has that Bateman doesn’t? In Part 3 I said Bateman’s chief sin is that of despair — he does not think the world can be made better, and his only attempts to even try are simply gross, violent parodies of the shallowness and greed he sees all around him. Price, it would seem, is not a victim of this despair. He’s just as rich and shallow as Patrick, just as obnoxious, but in the scene at Tunnel when he becomes fed up with the empty life he leads he doesn’t just lapse into a murderous frenzy (or fantasy) like Patrick seems to have done. Instead, he actually tries to get out, something Patrick has never attempted — something that he is, in fact, probably afraid to do.

Is Price actually on his way to salvation? After all, he left, but he came back. His first conversation with Bateman may — just possibly may — imply that he is looking for girls to hook up with, since he asks Patrick for the number of a woman they both know who is in a relationship with a mutual acquaintance. Like Patrick, we can’t be sure if Price is really penitent, and we don’t see much of him at all until the very last chapter, the one that ends with Patrick reading the NO EXIT sign.

Bateman and some of his friends, including Price, go out to a club.

On the [TV] screen now are scenes from President Bush’s inauguration early this year, then a speech from former President Reagan, while Patty [the talk show host] delivers commentary. Soon a tiresome debate forms over whether he is lying or not, even though we don’t, can’t, hear the words. The first and really only one to complain is Price, who, though I think he’s bothered by something else, uses the opportunity to vent his frustration, looks inappropriately stunned, and asks, “How can he lie like that? How can he pull that shit?”

“Oh Christ,” I moan. “What shit? Now where do we have reservations at? I mean I’m not really hungry but I’d like to have reservations somewhere.” (p. 396)

nancy-ron And from that, the conversation devolves into everyone arguing about where to eat, Price’s concerns left unaddressed. Even if something else seems to be bothering Price, he does seem to have a bone to pick with Reagan — what was he lying about? What sort of shit is he getting away with? I wasn’t watching much TV back then, but one possibility is that Reagan is speaking about the 1989 IRS investigation of him and his wife Nancy for unpaid taxes on various gifts they received while in the White House. It was eventually determined that the Reagans owed three million dollars on “fashion items” (to quote Wikipedia) that had been given to Nancy.

Reagan here represents the freewheeling economic attitude and casual greed that characterize Ellis’s portrait of the decade, the broad symbol of the lives that all of the horrible characters in the novel lead, and it is only Price who questions him. And it’s Patrick, bored and uninterested, who changes the subject.

Price looks away from the television screen, then at Craig, and he tries to hide his displeasure by asking me, waving at the TV, “I don’t believe it. He looks so… normal. He seems so… out of it. So… undangerous.”

“Bimbo, bimbo,” someone says. “Bypass, bypass.”

“He is totally harmless, you geek. Was totally harmless. Just like you are totally harmless. But he did do all that shit and you have failed to get us into 150, so, you know, what can I say?” McDermott shrugs.

“I just don’t get how someone, anyone, can appear that way and yet be involved in such total shit,” Price says, ignoring Craig, averting his eyes from Farrell. He takes out a cigar and studies it sadly. To me it still looks like there’s a smudge on Price’s forehead.

“Because Nancy was right behind him?” Farrell guesses, looking up from the Quotrek. “Because Nancy did it?”

“How can you be, I don’t know, so fucking cool about it?” Price, to whom something really eerie has obviously happened, sounds genuinely perplexed. Rumor has it he was in rehab.

…

“Oh brother.” Price won’t let it die. “Look,” he starts, trying for a rational appraisal of the situation. “He presents himself as a harmless old codger. But inside…” He stops. My interest picks up, flickers briefly. “But inside…” Price can’t finish the sentence, can’t add the last two words he needs: doesn’t matter. I’m both disappointed and relieved for him. (p. 397)

Here we see that the sort of will Bateman perceives in Price is not a delusion — it’s real. Price has the ability to change, he has the desire; only he is offended that a person in power lies, cheats, and steals. Only he’s been to rehab, only he wears the phantasmagorical smudge of the penitent. His description of Reagan as a harmless-looking man never seems to finish, perhaps because it frightens him: Reagan can look like an old movie star, an aw shucks nice guy, but within him dwells the capacity for cruel and casual evil. Bateman is the same way: he looks normal, but there is something terrible inside of him, something he has decided to stop fighting, and that is why he finishes the sentence in a way Price probably wouldn’t agree with: he claims that what’s inside doesn’t matter. Price’s gradual realization seems to be moving in the opposite direction, the idea that the inside does matter. Success has a greater dimension than economics, than wealth and power and being physically attractive; it is a moral and spiritual matter.

Remember that the beginning of the story makes it seem like Price will be the main character — we are told what he is doing, who he is, we are told that he notices the words ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. And now here we see him beginning to understand how life should be lived — with honesty and compassion. Timothy Price is the Dante figure here, and he’s traveled through Hell and seen the results of a sinful life; now he’s penitent, the ash is on his brow, and it is his responsibility to cleanse himself, to work toward a more honest and compassionate life.

We don’t know for sure if he does — he’s a little afraid, as Patrick notes — but the fact that he can do this makes all the difference. There is an exit, but it’s not easy to get to and even more difficult to pass through. It’s a path Bateman doesn’t want to acknowledge, and thus he is damned. He’s not Dante, and he’s not Virgil; he’s one of the screaming shades, tortured for eternity in Hell, punished in accordance to the decisions he’s made in life.

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In a purely aesthetic sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel: it is well written — extremely well written, in fact, and though Patrick Bateman’s endless recitation of brands and clothing lines may get grating, it’s also an inextricable part of his character, a fundamental element of his voice and his psychology. The novel is also, I think, in meaningful dialogue with other works of literature that have come before it — it shows us how Macbeth may play out in the modern day, the unassuming madman, and it turns Dante on his head by showing us how one can so easily despair into Hell, or Hell on Earth.

In a more personal and moral sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel: It tells us something very profound and very important about human existence — not how to live in an obvious, satirical way, but more in the sense of what it is like to live. We are surrounded on all sides by greed, cruelty, injustice, and horror; in such an environment it may seem like there’s nothing to do but give up, to become greedy and cruel and unjust and horrific in our own turn, and while that is always a possibility it is never the only choice. There is a moral way to live, a good way to live, a better way to live; the trick is to remember that it exists, even when so many people around you don’t believe it. saturn

And this is why I think that American Psycho is a great horror novel: Obviously the reasons above apply, horror should not be above the requirements for something to be a piece of literature, it should be well written and canonically articulate. But it actually adds another criterion: a horror novel has to be scary.

There are two types of scary, as far as I am concerned. One is the splatterpunk approach, graphic violence for violence’s sake, gallons of gore that gross you out, make you feel like barfing. The thing about this type of horror is that it doesn’t last, it’s too physical, too visceral; it’s also, unfortunately, the more popularized part of American Psycho. Yes, splatterpunk is here — loads of it, in fact, and yeah, it’s gross as hell and effective for what it is. But there’s something more clever than that at work, too: the second type of horror, what you might call metaphysical horror or philosophical horror, the sense of fear and unease resulting from the sudden realization that the world does not function according to whatever rules you take for granted and the universe might be, in fact, a much more dangerous and inhospitable place than you believed.

Bret Ellis combines both splatterpunk and philosophical horror by making Patrick Bateman so unreliable. Whether or not he commits the murders is unimportant in the splatterpunk sense, because the descriptions of them are just as graphic and gut-churning. But the fact that these may all be fantasies — that Patrick is just some hopeless, repressed guy living out psychotic daydreams behind an ordinary exterior — takes it to another level. Suddenly everything is thrown into question. I’m thinking of a part near the end of the novel, where Patrick mentions his housekeeper coming into his apartment and cleaning bloodsplatter off the walls and floor — as if it didn’t matter, as if it weren’t a problem for her at all. If the blood is really there, is the maid keeping her mouth shut just to save herself, or does she simply not care enough to report Bateman? If Bateman is making it all up, how many people do you meet every day are just like him? How many repressed psychotics walk among us? If Patrick isn’t lying, if he does some or all of the things he claims to, then how believable is it? Do we live in a society so disconnected, so unfeeling, that we would just allow this stuff to happen so long as we didn’t have to deal with it?

The cannibalism and rape make you queasy, and the implications make you uneasy. You can forget about all of the murders in time, but can you get rid of the nagging question: How does the world work?

To answer that is to overcome or make peace with the philosophical horror the novel instigates. The easiest way to read the book is to say that yes, the world is cruel and senseless and evil and no one cares, the world is terrible and we are all trapped in it and THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. But I hope that over the past few weeks I’ve shown that there is another answer. Sure, it’s small and difficult to find, requiring a careful and thoughtful reading of the text, but it’s there.

There is hope; there is possibility; there is salvation; there is, in fact, an exit.

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The pains of celebrity

Last night my friends and I were just walking out of Wal-mart when we were greeted with an uproarious cry of “DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE” from some girl a couple yards away. She was walking with another girl and some guy, and I just assumed they were having some conversation among themselves and she was screaming about that. But as we walk to the van she keeps shouting and it turns out she is, in fact, talking to us. My friend Abner wheels around, seeing an opportunity for… something. Anyway, he asks the girl what she wants and she replies that she wants to know if we are Death Cab for Cutie, and if we are, would we sign something for her — specifically her breasts. Abner says, Sure of course we are Death Cab for Cutie and we will do this thing.

So while the dude hangs out near the front doors of the Wal-mart the two girls come running toward us, completely excited, me and my friends who aren’t Abner try to figure out exactly what direction our lives are taking at the moment. The girls eventually figure out that we are not Death Cab, but claim it was an honest mistake because “you [referring to me, your humblr narrator] look just like Ben Gibbard.” I laugh at this, but the girls don’t seem to notice. Let me describe these girls so I can distinguish them as the story goes on:

The shouty one is blonde, has glasses. The other girl is brunette and doesn’t seem to be enjoying the events quite as much. When I say I don’t think I look like Gibbard, the blonde says, “But he has a really good voice.” Presumably, she means Gibbard?

I reply, “I don’t,” to which she insists I sing her a song anyway.

Okay so.

I consider doing a few lines from Running with the Devil, but the brunette interrupts us by saying that my “coat looks depressing, like you got it from a funeral. Did someone in your family die?” [To explain, I wear a black wool blend overcoat in the colder months, which I guess looks kind of funereal?] I respond, yes, people in my family have died many times. I in fact got the coat off a dead guy.

My gameplan is to just be weird and hostileto get these people freaked out and gone, but unfortunately they’re already too off-balance to really pick up on that. The blonde cuts in now, asking that, even if we are not Death Cab, would I please sign her boobs. Not even the whole name, she says, just D-C-F-C would suffice.

Without confirmation from me, they start shouting to their dude friend, who has been hanging out by the doors this whole time: “Trevor! Trevor!! TREVOR WE NEED A MARKER!” Trevor trundles over looking as if he might be genuinely sober and embarrassed. “Trevor,” the blonde says, “this guy looks like Ben Gibbard and he needs to sign my boobs, do you have a marker?”

Trevor doesn’t have a marker. “But I have this,” he says to me, and pulls a Bic lighter out of his pocket. “You could brand her.” And my hopes of him being sober, or rational, or whatever, go flying out the window.

“I feel like we’re being punk’d,” says my friend Travis, and I reply, “But I’m not even an actual celebrity.” The blonde is still harping on how much she wants this goddamn autograph, on her breast, from me, I guy that is not the celebrity she apparently mistook me for. I reply that I won’t do it, taking a page from Trevor’s book she says I could brand her, I say no, I am not going to permanently scar a woman in a Wal-mart parking lot.

“Oh,” she says nonchalantly, “I already have scars.”

Okay. “We’re all scarred, in our own way,” again hoping if I can remain stoic I can divert their attention. The blonde, though, comes right over to me and pulls up her shirt sleeves to show me the many scars and bruises crisscrossing her wrists. Then she opens her shirt, and without removing her bra traces a few scars up her abdomen for the benefit of me and my friends.

She ends with talking about the scars on her legs, and says she’d show them to us but wouldn’t want to pull down her pants in public. Of course. But I refuse to sign/brand her, and tell them all good evening as we try to get back to our van. We get fifteen feet before she comes back: “Wait! I at least need a hug!”

I don’t want to hug anyone because right now, but me, being Ben Gibbard, am the object of most of her attention. She attempts an embrace but I suggest we go for a handshake instead; she says we have to do her “special high five,” which I go along with: high five, followed by fistbump, and then the girl screams, “NOW TO MAKE IT DIRTY” and holds up her hand with the index finger and thumb in a circle.

I am genuinely confused at this point and it takes me about five seconds to realize I am supposed to thread my finger through her fingers in a crude imitation of sexual intercourse, but I decide to run with my confusion, because I am not going to fucking do that. “Huh?” I ask.

“Make it dirty!”

“I don’t understand!”

“Come on, like, you know, make it dirty!!”

“I’m afraid… I don’t understand.”

At this point the brown-haired girl, who’s been pretty chill so far by comparison, gets tired of me being so dense so she stomp over. “Jeez, it’s like, don’t you get it’s like” — she completes the gesture with her friend, sticking her index finger into the circle.

And I say, completely amazed, “Well what the hell does that mean?!”

The brunette turns to me, huffing with frustration, and shouts, “It’s like A DICK and A PENIS!”

That fucking does it, I can’t hold it back anymore and start laughing, and the blonde berates her friend for this simple and redundant mistake in anatomy.

My friend, by the way, left me to go stand by the van, not bothering to, like, help me or anything. Christ, Abner was such an asshole. Anyway, they’re all standing over there basically rolling on the ground and giggling, and whatever I’ve done seems to have broken a spell because now the two girls are walking back over to Trevor. I think I’m finally free, but the brunette says over her shoulder as she leaves: “I’m sorry about your family member who died.” I tell them all to have a good evening.

So finally we’ve gotten back to the van, but of all people Trevor has one last thing to say:

“Hey!” he shouts at my friend Travis. “You know you look like Demetri Martin?”

American Psycho Part 3: “Is this a dagger which I see before me”

So far I’ve given a brief overview of Dante’s Divine Comedy with a special emphasis on Inferno and how the Dante-Virgil-Beatrice relationship works. From this we were able to conclude that 1) American Psycho is a rewriting of Inferno, and 2) it is not just any rewriting of Inferno but one from the perspective of the damned, ie the narrator, successful 80s investment banker and serial killer Patrick Bateman. But this raises plenty of questions, like: why is Bateman damned? What did he (or does he) do wrong? More complicatedly, what do we get by retelling the Inferno from the view of someone who can never escape it when Dante’s story originally is, by nature, about the actual change Hell puts the traveler through, eventually allowing him to evade its punishments?

I’m going to answer these questions, or at least try to. To start, though, we have to step away from Dante and skip over a few hundred years and a couple city-states until we find ourselves in England with William Shakespeare. Why is Shakespeare important? Because, silly, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, and while Bret Easton Ellis has his own special rewriting of Inferno in American Psycho, it’s a very particular rewriting of the Bard’s Scottish Play.

macbeth_cat — Macbeth, ladies and gentlemen.

So if you’re unfamiliar with Macbeth here’s the rundown: Macbeth and his pal Banquo are thanes to the Scottish king Duncan. They bump into three witches, who make some prophecies about Macbeth being king and Banquo being the father of kings; Banquo shrugs it off but the prophecy upsets Macbeth, who we begin to suspect is pretty insecure about things. I think — I am probably wrong because I’ve never bothered to count and haven’t even read every play, but it strikes me this way — that old Mickey-B speaks in asides more often than any other Shakespeare character. He’s constantly bopping off to mutter to himself about the witches, their prophecy, whether they were good or evil, who suspects him, who doesn’t, and on and on and on. In modern cinema this would be conveyed by having a character almost constantly being heard in voice over, stressing over whether or not everyone around him thinks he’s cool or a dweeb.

As is so aptly illustrated by the kitties above, eventually Macbeth tells his wife about the prophecy, which turns out to be something of a mistake. She goads him into murdering Duncan by essentially telling him that a Real Man would totally kill the king if it meant he could have the throne. This convinces Macbeth pretty quickly, which only further proves how weirdly neurotic this guy is. But it gets worse, of course, because soon Macbeth goes from “sort of pitiable henpecked regicide” to “completely fucking bonkers (but also still really insecure and a murderer).” The bonkers part is hinted at early on, when Macbeth prepares to enter Duncan’s bedchambers and murder him, pausing to remark to the empty air, “Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee” (II.ii, my copy of the play ludicrously doesn’t have line numbers so screw you I’m not counting these things for my citations).

Now, it’s completely possible Macbeth has decided to be extra contemplative and poetic in this momentous time prior to coldblooded murder, but the other explanation is that Macbeth is hallucinating. During the murder itself, as he tells his wife, he also thinks he hears phantom voices decrying his misdeed, in response to which she tells him to sack up goddammit. But Macbeth’s mental state only declines further; due to an unfortunate confluence of events, he decides he must also have his old friend Banquo murdered — which happens, with more or less no complication. Things get hairy, though, when the ghost of Banquo appears during a banquet, sending Macbeth into a babbling tizzy and leaving Lady Macbeth scrambling to explain to her guests what’s wrong with her husband. You see, though there are stage directions for the ghost and Macbeth is very strongly responding to it, absolutely no one else can see it, meaning that it’s entirely possible that Macbeth is imagining the whole thing.

For me, this idea that a lot of the crazy stuff happening is all in Macbeth’s head is what makes the play so damn cool, and it’s a big part of how Macbeth ties in with American Psycho. My linking of Inferno to Psycho relied a lot on narrative arc and inter-character relationships; this isn’t true for Macbeth, because the links here are not about the little clues Ellis scattered around the novel. He quotes Dante directly, but unless I missed it, he never quotes Macbeth; if you comb through Psycho looking for an analogue for the witches or Lady Macbeth you’re not going to find them. The connections between the play and the novel are much more subtle, in that there is really only one big link: a character type.

bateman To put it quickly and simply, Pat Bateman is Macbeth. It’s so cleverly updated, I think, that it’s pretty easy macbeth to miss: one of Macbeth’s defining early characteristics is his insecurity, so Bateman constantly obsesses over what he is wearing in comparison to what everyone else is wearing, which stereo system is the best or most expensive and can he get one, and in one scene practically has a panic attack when he sees that a colleague has a more stylish business card. And just as Macbeth is prone to seeing things, so is Bateman, who imagines that Satan is speaking to him through Bono at a U2 concert, an anthropomorphic Cheerio is being interviewed on his favorite sensationalist talk show, a park bench is stalking him, and, in a scene launched into the general pop culture by the film version, an ATM wants him to feed it a stray cat.

And even though I said that the main connection is the character type, there is actually a tiny little Macbeth/Banquo parallel for Patrick and another banker at his firm, a guy named Paul Owen. Bateman mostly resents Owen, with the implicit reason being that Owen is marginally more successful — he’s handling a very high-profile account but is being stingy on the details, something that annoys the other Wall Street guys but seems to drive Bateman up the wall. So, of course, Bateman kills him, stages it to look like Owen took off for London without any advance notice, and starts mutilating prostitutes in Owen’s vacant apartment.

A detective shows up for a chapter or so to investigate Owen’s disappearance, and for a moment it seems like Bateman will be caught. But, no, that doesn’t happen — because even though Bateman completely made up the story about Owen going to London, it holds water. Other people claim to have seen him there, to have had lunch with him. This is made entirely questionable because a recurring situation in the novel is Bateman and/or his friends trying to remember the name of someone they’ve seen in a club or, even more frequently, Bateman calling guys he meets by the wrong name only to find out later they are someone else, or Bateman himself being mistaken for another person. There’s a lot of stuff there about how disconnected these guys are from each other and from their own identities, but in more practical terms it means that someone in London from the New York circle could have easily mistaken someone else for Owen.

Except it gets trickier. A dozen or so chapters after Bateman defaces Owen’s apartment, he drops by again — only the entire place is clean, spotless, and a real estate agent is showing a young couple around. Bateman is shocked and tries to figure out what happened to all the viscera he left behind, asking the agent how long the apartment has been for rent and who lived there last, but she seems oddly guarded. Patrick notices the place smells especially clean, as if a lot of disinfectant or deodorizer has been used recently to get rid of a stench. There are then two possibilities for what’s happened: the agent is complicit in a conspiracy to cover up the murders in the apartment, which were never reported, or Bateman has imagined the whole thing, even the excess of deodorizer. The strange looks the agent gives him could either be hints that she knows that he knows she knows — or they could be because some random guy just barged in on her appointment and started asking questions. Is Owen alive or dead? It doesn’t matter, really, because either way, like the ghost of Banquo only Macbeth can see, Owen’s status is something that only Bateman has cause to doubt, and it threatens to overturn his entire life.

SA/TELLER10 — I can't tell if that dagger's been photoshopped in or if it's the ugliest prop ever. Either way, fantastic.

And this is where Ellis turns the volume way, way up on my favorite part of Macbeth: not only are the floating daggers and phantom voices and ghosts possible hallucinations, the murders themselves are also of questionable authenticity. We can’t trust a thing Bateman says, and as he comes to realize, he can’t trust himself. Both Macbeth and Bateman suffer from this same self-doubt — they’re both neurotic as hell, after all — and though Macbeth and everyone around him eventually knows and understands what he has done, for Patrick this never happens. No one ever catches him, no one ever even comes close to suspecting him, and to top it all off, maybe he’s actually never done anything to make himself suspect. Say what you want about Macbeth, he at least managed to kill a king, but for all we know Bateman is simply a delusional psychotic, a man who can only assert himself — murderously or otherwise — in daydreams and fantasies.

The end result for both characters, though, is pretty similar. When Macbeth sees where his choices have gotten him — his wife has committed suicide and he’s facing an insurgency of other thanes who think that king-and-Banquo-killing are not proper traits for a ruler to have — he has this famous, nihilistic little ditty:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing. (V.v)

This is the point where Macbeth basically loses it. He decides that nothing means anything — not even his choices, whether he chooses to murder people or not, because no matter what you do life is going to be a bitch and then you are going to die. I’ll say it again: it’s nihilism, a complete and utter lack of faith in anything.

Here’s what Pat Bateman has to say on the subject:

…where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so real and clear and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This is what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality is no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire — meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged… (p. 375)

Wow, okay, so a lot less pithy than Shakespeare, but it’s much the same sentiment. It’s still similar in tone and tenor to Macbeth’s little outburst. This is something a guy today — or a guy in 1980s Manhattan — would actually say, this is how he would articulate a revelation of nihilism. This is the modern description of despair.

And despair brings us back, believe it or not, to Dante.

dante-and-virgil-in-hell

Despair, by definition, is a state of losing hope or hopelessness. And remember those words over the gate to Hell, those words Bateman reads in graffiti in the very first line of Psycho: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. In Dante the inscription is meant to be read only by the damned themselves — they have nothing to hope for, obviously, because they’re already in a situation where there’s no recourse. Dante-the-Character is simply a special case, a living man traveling through Hell; he’s not meant to lose hope but regain it. And when you think about it, that’s a pretty strange thing to happen, especially when he sees the following things going down in Hell:

1) Dudes running around in circles for all eternity, being chased and stung by giant hellwasps, the stings on their back blistering and producing pus which runs to the floor on which they are running
2) Dudes encased in eternal flames
3) Dudes being bitten and transformed and burnt up by a never-ending series of snake bites from the pit of serpents in which they are rolling around for all eternity
4) Dudes turned into trees and torn apart eternally by bird women
5) Dudes submerged in lakes of fire or boiling shit, as the case may be

And that’s just some of the punishments — Hell is a big, violent place. And that’s another way Ellis rewrites Inferno: the violence of Hell’s punishments is turned into the graphic violence of Pat Bateman’s murders (or murderous fantasies, as the case may be). This was, as you probably know, the most controversial element of the novel, and yeah, it would probably make any reader laugh queasily when Patrick decides he is going to eat a woman he’s killed but, since he’s lived a privileged life and doesn’t know how to cook, he instead eats a bit of her raw and weeps at the absurdity of it. But come on, Dante is just as bad — I mean, rivers of boiling shit and running around on a mixture of your own blood and pus? Jeez.

But there’s a snag. In Inferno all of the punishments are justly deserved and justly dispensed according to God’s love and infinite wisdom (or that’s the way things are set up in the moral universe of the poem). In American Psycho many of the people Patrick kills are just as shallow and pettily cruel as he is, but Patrick is not an omniscient and loving God, he’s just some yuppie asshole, and some of his victims are actually innocents (even children).

This is crux of what Bateman is and what he has done: in his rant about the meaninglessness of existence, of how horrible society is, he almost sounds like he’s a guy who wanted to hope in the opposite direction but never quite grasped it. And true, earlier in the novel he gets a little offended when his friends make anti-Semitic remarks, but otherwise he takes just as much delight in teasing bums as they do. But maybe that’s because of Patrick’s neuroses — he doesn’t have to work, for instance, but he says he does because he wants to “fit in.” He wants to be what everyone else is, he wants to make sure he is in good standing, he is attracted to a society that he on some level knows is despicable. And since he knows it’s despicable, what does he do?

He murders people, or thinks about it. And he constantly talks about it in conversations, slipping Ted Bundy trivia into debates on fashion, he calls his lawyer and confesses his real-or-imagined murders, everything. Bateman, in fact, wants to be caught. He wants to shatter the smug, superficial complacency of everyone around him, and apparently the only way he can think to do it is by being a psychopathic killer. And it doesn’t work, nothing changes, nothing happens, he’s never caught, and he loses hope — what little he had. But is murder the best way to change the world?

My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world now. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this — and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed — and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing… (p.377)

No. And Bateman, deep down, perhaps never believed otherwise, as he tells us earlier: “it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness.”

So the final despair is actually the endpoint of a much larger and more encompassing despair that Patrick’s been dealing with for a while. He began with the assumption that the world was stupid and depraved, and he tried to change it by being very obviously stupid and depraved himself. When it didn’t work he despaired in his despair.

In the seventh and eighth cantos of Inferno, Dante and Virgil come to the fifth circle of Hell, which is a rancid swamp surrounding the River Styx. This is where the wrathful and sullen are punished — the wrathful run through the swamp, rolling around in the muck, clawing and tearing and biting at one another. The sullen reside below the swamp itself, lying beneath the muck and visible only because their breathing causes bubbles to float to the surface, saying over and over again:

‘Sullen were we in the air made sweet by the Sun;
in the glory of his shining our hearts poured
a bitter smoke. Sullen were we begun;

Sullen we lie forever in this ditch.’
This litany they gargle in their throats
as if they sang, but lacked the words and pitch.

So what are the sullen guilty of? Of seeing the world, made for them and made beautiful by God, and saying, “Ugh, so what?” Their punishment is to stay forever in one place, drowned, because they felt it was useless to act or care about anything in life. They had no hope for anything — they despaired. And so it is interesting to note that Patrick Bateman, regardless of what he has done, belongs there in the fifth circle of Hell: he is in pain and wants others to feel it, so he is wrathful, but if he never manages to actually go through with his desires, if he only fantasizes but maintains his hopelessness, then he is one of the sullen.

We have the THIS IS NOT AN EXIT episode because Patrick’s done his best to avoid every saving grace afforded him: he let his Virgil sleep with his girlfriend, he killed and dismembered his Beatrice. He never believed he could do otherwise; Bateman’s despair is what damns him. Macbeth at least gets to die fighting but Patrick is condemned, like the damned in Dante’s Hell, to live on in his sullen (perhaps murderous) stasis.

That does it for this installment. I have to give props here to The Acquaintance Who Says Bret Ellis Is the Best Novelist for mentioning the probable Macbeth connection offhandedly once, since I obviously followed through on it for a lot of helpful stuff.

Next time: I’ll explain how there is, in fact, room for hope and redemption in the world of American Psycho, and how we see it play out. There will also, I think, be a short wrap-up where I explain why this book isn’t simply a great novel, but a great horror novel, and that should be it for this series. See you then.

6a00d83452412b69e2011168981d2a970c-250wi — Significance to be explained in Part 4: THERE IS, IN FACT, AN EXIT

American Psycho Part 2: “Midway in our life’s journey I went astray”

Last time I gave some background on my own thoughts and experiences with Bret Easton Ellis and his book, American Psycho. Naturally it is now time to talk about Dante.

Dante Alighieri composed the epic Italian poetic masterpiece The Divine Comedy, made up of three books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) that chronicle an obsessively constructed and heavily allegorical religious journey made by the narrator (a fictionalized version of Dante himself) as he is guided through Hell, Purgatory, and finally Heaven, and is in the process expunged of all sin and allowed to gaze upon the glory of God. Of these three books, the part of the Comedy that sticks with readers (and with the generations) the most is Inferno. In much the same ironic and paradoxical way that Satan is the most interesting character in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Hell is the most intriguing and interesting part of the Comedy.

dante

So it is that Inferno has been rewritten and restaged and adapted countless times to various means and ends, including what sounds like an absolutely hysterical Niven/Pournelle SF version. If you’re unfamiliar with the basic premise of the whole Inferno thing: Hell is a series of concentric circles within the earth (below Jerusalem, even), and in each circle all the sinners of a particular type (the gluttonous, or the lustful, or even simoniacs) are punished in a multitude of allegorical and surreal ways that are the type of brutal you only get from medieval theology (like being buried upside down with the soles of your feet eternally aflame in a grotesque parody of baptism).

In the plot of the Comedy, the whole thing works like this: Dante tells us that “Midway in our life’s journey [he] went astray,” meaning that in the middle of his life he wandered off the correct spiritual path and found himself “alone in a dark wood[.]” (By the by, all of my Dante quotes are taken from the superb John Ciardi translation, so if the wording seems different than what you know because you’ve grown up reading blank verse translation of the Comedy or something, that’s why.) The allegorical bits here are clear enough — I’ve lost the correct path through life and now I am in a spooky woods, oh no! Fortunately, the spirit of the Roman poet Virgil shows up and explains to Dante that Beatrice, a fictionalized version of a woman who Dante had hella courtly love for and who now resides in Heaven, has demanded Dante be saved, so she’s pulled some bureaucratic strings and now Virgil is here to get the party started.

Dante and Virgil set off on their whirlwind journey through the afterlife, the idea being that once Dante sees the wide variety of earthly sins and their appropriate punishments, along with the virtues and their rewards, he’ll be better equipped to ward off sin and move toward virtue on his own. So to start things off, Virgil takes Dante through the Inferno, or Hell, and pretty much right off the bat we get what is probably the single most famous line from the entire Comedy and one of the most famous lines in all of Western lit:

I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.

SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.

ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR
WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND,
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Pretty heavy stuff, man. This is the inscription Dante reads over the gates of Hell, and the “Abandon all hope” thing is everywhere in popular culture. It’s also a launching-off point for me, since this series is ostensibly about Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho and so far I’ve written 600 words on a medieval Italian poet. So what do these two dudes have in common?

bret_easton_ellis As it turns out, quite a lot. Let’s take a look at the very beginning of Ellis’s novel: dante

ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.

So there’s that pesky phrase, that thing about abandoning all hope, and right here at the beginning of the novel! Perhaps — just maybe — it is not simply graffiti but a clue that the story we’re about to read is, in many ways, not about a successful investment banker on Wall Street in the 1980s but really about Hell?

Well, yes, of course that’s what it means. This isn’t a one-off reference, either, something Ellis threw in to make us associate Wall Street with the Inferno; the novel has many parallels to Dante. American Psycho is not, however, a one-to-one adaptation of the original in the same way, say, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is a pretty close retelling of King Lear, where the narrative architecture is almost exactly the same. In Psycho Ellis consciously uses Dante for what might be termed the foundation of the story: certain ideas, certain character relationships. But Ellis scrambles Dante’s vision, moves it around, cuts up characters (literally, I guess) and puts them back together as others; certain themes from Dante are excised entirely, while others that seemed pretty minor are pushed to the center-stage and exaggerated and elaborated for all they are worth.

In other words, what happens is that Ellis reads Dante, says to himself, “That’s pretty cool, I can do something with that, but I don’t need all this stuff about allegory or Heaven or Catholicism or which Popes are going to hell.” So he tosses all the crap doesn’t interest him, takes what he likes, and builds a new piece of literature based on that. The same acquaintance of mine who says Ellis is the best 20th century novelist calls this sort of thing rewriting, and I see no reason to call it something else.

So American Psycho is a rewriting of Dante. But Michael, you say, you’re basing this all on one line at the beginning of the book! Surely there is something more to it! And boy, are you in luck, because there is.

Before I get into the real nitty-gritty of what’s going on between Psycho and Inferno, it may help to map out a few points about character relationships. Remember that Dante was his own main character, though he in a sense reduces himself to an allegorical everyman; Dante is led through Hell by his artistic hero, the Roman poet Virgil, and the entire journey takes place at the behest of Beatrice, who is a woman beautiful and holy beyond mortal love, hence requiring the courtly stuff. Virgil has no trouble guiding Dante through Hell and most of Purgatory, but once it’s time to tour Heaven he has to turn back because, as a pre-Christian, it’s simply not in the cards for him. So when Dante finally does get to Heaven, it’s Beatrice who takes on the role of his guide.

Now, I have a very specific reading of these relationships that is not necessarily shared by anyone else, but it goes something like this: a confused and troubled guy is helped through a tough situation by his best friend, but the friendship is ultimately not enough to make the troubled dude okay and so he gets handed off (baton-like) to the woman he loves so the real healing process can begin (or something phrased in an equally asinine way). The reading relies mostly on dramatic structures that I’ve seen in both old and new forms of popular entertainment — like say, romantic comedy films. The wacky sidekick characters to the protagonist are always plenty interesting, they usually get the best jokes or the snappiest lines, but they’re never enough to get the protagonist to stop pining after the love interest. It’s always the same: your friends can help you, but it takes love to make you whole.

So naturally in adaptations and rewritings of Inferno we get relationships that mirror this setup. There’s the troubled and/or somehow naive and/or clueless main character, almost always a smarter/sharper guide, and usually a wise third third party, beloved by the main character but in some way unreachable. American Psycho follows this pattern to some extent — or seems to.

delacroix_dante

The first paragraph/sentence is actually pretty disingenuous. It makes you think the story is going to be told in third person, but it mostly isn’t. It’s the first-person present tense almost stream-of-consciousness narrative of Patrick Bateman, the titular psychopathic American. The first paragraph is him describing to us Timothy Price, who is a friend of his from the same firm. The relationship between them is odd. I mean, most of Bateman’s relationships with other people are pretty odd — whenever a character enters or re-enters he describes for us their clothing in excessive detail, including brand names and his own personal opinions on how well the outfits come together and I mean this happens every time — but with Price it’s even stranger.

You see, Price is having an affair with Bateman’s girlfriend Evelyn. It’s something he suspects and is pretty much confirmed in the first few chapters when Bateman watches Price and Evelyn practically make out in front of him. Surprisingly, Bateman doesn’t really care about this — it’s our first clear view of how amazingly detached he actually is from everyone, including the woman he is supposed to, in theory, love. (Later, we find out that almost all of Bateman’s circle have quasi-open relationships like this, but here it seems like a contained incident.) You also get the distinct impression that he’s letting Timothy get away with it because, as he tells us, Price “is the most interesting person” Bateman knows. Of the various peripheral characters Bateman goes clubbing with, Price is the only one to emerge with a distinct personality at the beginning, and if Patrick has a best friend, well, it’s probably him.

So we have our Virgil. And not only that, but our Virgil runs off within the first hundred pages of the book. While in a club called Tunnel, named after the fake railroad tunnel and glow-in-the-dark tracks that run into it, Price suddenly begins to wonder where the it leads — “Where do those tracks go?” No one seems intent on answering him, and besides, the tunnel’s fake, but Price keeps asking. He and Bateman do some subpar cocaine and finally, in a scene everyone except Bateman handles with surreal, amused complacency, Price jumps the railing and follows the tunnel away into the darkness.

“Price! Come back!” I yell but the crowd is actually applauding his performance. “Price!” I yell once more, over the clapping. But he’s gone and it’s doubtful if he did hear me he would do anything about it. Madison is standing nearby and sticks his hand out as if to congratulate me on something. “That guy’s a riot.”

McDermott appears behind me and pulls at my shoulder. “Does Price know about a VIP room that we don’t?” He looks worried. (p. 62)

Price is not mentioned again for another three hundred pages. I mean it, he’s not even mentioned in the next paragraph. He simply disappears — the most interesting person Patrick knows, poof, gone! I’m sure you see what I’m driving at here: the friend who leaves. And if Price is our Virgil, then who is Beatrice?

One candidate seems to be Jean (“My secretary who is in love with me,” as Bateman repeatedly refers to her) but really, though she is a kind and honest person, Jean seems to be just as susceptible to the materialism and superficiality of the world as anyone else — Bateman plays her like a piano, telling what she should and shouldn’t wear, what’s classy and what isn’t, and she’s in love with him but he is unreachable to her. The better candidate is a fairly incidental character named Bethany.

She is Bateman’s ex-girlfriend from college, and he implies that he habitually beat her and this is the reason they broke up. Nevertheless, when he runs into her by chance they make plans to have lunch together and catch up. Bateman, in his relationships with women, usually lusts for control (he hires prostitutes, orders them around with very specific instructions for various sex acts, records them doing as he asks, then usually kills them and records that too) and, as with his secretary Jean, he usually has it. After all, he’s fit and handsome and rich. Bethany is notable, then, because she is someone who has escaped Patrick and, strangely enough, comes back; he seems to assume it’s because she wants sex, and when it turns out she really does just want to catch up, he becomes furious. To add insult to injury, Bethany is actually engaged to someone else now, and she shrugs off all (or most) of Patrick’s advances.

So here we have the girl with a pre-established relationship to the main character, and she has somehow ended up in a situation where she is estranged from him and seemingly beyond earthly reach. Seeing the connections here? And what does Patrick do with his beatific guide once he finds her?

Why, he beats her, drives nails through her knuckles, maces her repeatedly, rapes her, mutilates her genitalia, dismembers her, partially cannibalizes her, and then leaves some of her remains sitting around his expensive Manhattan apartment to rot. Of course.

So obviously something’s wrong here. Either Ellis is doing a hell of a deconstruction of Dante or we’re approaching this from the wrong angle. Virgil bails too early and Beatrice is ripped to shreds, and suddenly our Dante Pat Bateman starts looking like a very confusing character.

This is the part where I play the pedant and say, yes, I’ve been laying out this reading in the completely wrong way to prove a point: if American Psycho is a rewriting of Dante, then obviously we expect the main character to have the relationships I’ve described and have them play out in the expected manner — for sake of example, another Dante rewriting that pulls this off with remarkable skill and subtlety is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.

But that is not what happens in American Psycho. The plot of the Comedy means the protagonist (in our case, Pat Bateman) needs to undergo expurgation, some change, he needs to become better.

He doesn’t. Bateman kills what seems to be countless people, is chased by the police, confesses everything, and is still never caught. The book ends with him clubbing, like always, and looking at a sign: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. We never leave the Inferno. Why?

Well, this is when the novel goes from “pretty good” to absolutely fucking brilliant.

You see, Pat Bateman isn’t Dante. He’s one of the damned. He’s a shade condemned to Hell, enduring eternal torture, that Dante passes on his way to bigger and better things. If Pat went astray midway through his life’s journey, then he never got out of the darkened wood again — his Virgil is a womanizing cokehead who left too soon and he kills his Beatrice out of sheer wrathful spite. So not only is he damned, but, when you get right down to it, he chooses to be damned.

This installment ended up being longer than I expected, but the third may surpass it. Next time I’ll explain in more detail how Bateman is damned, how it continues to relate to and rewrite Dante, and, in a surprise twist, how it also relates to and rewrites the work of this man:

See you then!

Finally

Just got word from the UK consulate in Chicago that my visa application has been approved and the visa itself is in the mail. So ends this chapter in the horrible, drawn out saga of Paperwork.

Also, I now have a twitter for some reason, and if you like the random thoughts that pop into my head that don’t warrant 3000 word rants here then maybe you will like that.

Also also, speaking of 3000 word rants, the second part of the series on American Psycho should be up Friday-ish, I am thinking. The third part might be a little delayed since we are getting to crunch time for school work and the entries are a little more time intensive than anything else I write here.