Karl Marx

As the patient reader knows – and as I am beginning to repeat ad nauseum – this series of interventions (which my friend JD calls 'detections') began with some casual observations concerning a Judeochristian western technical culture which has begun to resemble an incredible detective agency which in turn is allied with a vast epistemological (as well as physical) policing agency.

Much as in 'The Purloined Letter' by Poe, the evidence is all around us and yet remains difficult to see (much less interpret), even (especially) when that perception (or detection) is aided and compounded (perhaps even formed) by our rampant technical media services: video, film, computer/net.

If 'to see' is a fundamental phrase in any culture, 'to be' is perhaps even more so and 'to have' more problematic than either of those two. One can 'have' objects, things..but can one 'have' another person? can one even 'have' oneself? What happens when (ap)propriation turns into (ex)propriation? (When possession turns into dis-possession, or, more spooky still, when one becomes possessed?) There are numerous examples around us, all a part of ordinary life, but it is only when the media structures we have developed open the envelope of the purloined letter that we are able to read them...Even so, we are most often in a situation of the hand attempting to catch the fist.

(An observation by more than one reader is that I have found much more than is there to see in these films, the implicit concern by these readers being that such primal considerations cannot possibly be addressed in such minor or secondary productions as the ones with whichI have been concerned. i would take Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's point of view that minor literatures – or minor films – are less able to close up the cracks in their aesthetic surface. That is, they are less able (and for various reasons not always having to do with 'competence, e.g., D & G considering Kafka's work to be 'minor') to create an unblemished surface for their work, nor to make their work seem like a self-sufficient, fully enclosed art work, disconnected from the social, polical, or cultural concerns of their time. In other words, the very flawed aspects of these aesthetic enterprises is what makes them attractive as vehicles of discovery. One sees that they can bear a much 'heavier' critical load than more ostensible works of 'high' art. As a more oblique comment here, and one which will not be followed up on till much later in the series – although the astute reader may have caught hints of it from the very beginning – I offer Giorgio Agemben's remark: "The quest of criticism consists not in discerning its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessiblity." Indeed such an approach to cultural objects would place us far indeed from a servile obedience to the 'detecting' and 'policing' to which even [or especially] criticism must fall prey...and certainly no LESS so when it is also under the the now omnipresent sign of the 'economic'. As we are about to see.)

Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

i didn't read the Brett Easton Ellis book when it came out. I simply wasn't up to the gratuitous excess it apparently reveled/parodied in. The problem with parody many times is that it can be taken as endorsement rather than critique (and a lot of times we don't mind the critique-police as long as they are on our side, right? As long as they are wielding the big stick FOR us, right? The Elian Gonzalez case is a good pragmatic example of the complications of the Big Stick..anyway...).

But now I'm thinking: gosh it seems sort of archaic now in a way. I say that because I had occasion to go to Wal-mart recently (don't ask) and the place was packed with avid consumers...no, rather let's say MANIC consumers. I'm always struck when I go into such places (and increasingly, isn't that almost EVERY place now? The world as a vast shopping mall...). I'm struck with a kind of psychic energy that that feels almost hurricane-like in its vortexual energy. If I'm not up for the trip to this Enchanted Land of Fetish Objects it can even seem frightening in some obscure way. At the very least, it's a draining, exhausting experience far out of proportion to the physical effort it takes to walk the aisles of Stuff.

So , ok, let's go back to the movie (as if we ever left it). The book was written in the Eighties, apparently as a response to what seemed like the excesses of Wall Street at the time. Remember all the Wall Street movies that came out? The Michael Douglas thing, the one with James Garner from the Rockford Files... So now some ten or more years later, seemingly everyone with a spare dime is in on the take on Wall Street, Nasdaq and internet/tech stocks are booming through the roof, the economy is charging ahead like some sort of locomotive on supersteroids...and now we have this flick about Mr. Mergers and Acquisitions, Patrick Bateman (or murders and executions as he calls it at a party), Mr. American Psycho guy.

Let's just take the glaze off the cake then: we've ALL become ravenous Mr. and Ms. American Psychos, or we would at least like to be. The rather heavy handed allegorical constitution of the film (i.e., consuming lots of stuff=materialism=misogyny=a kind of blank soul-lessness) turns out, within the confines of the film, to be a fantastical inversion of the quest for the Holy Grail of Authenticity, which High Fidelity supplies in abundance, at least for slackers and gen-x folks. The very cartoon nature of American Psycho (some guy in front of me thought it was hilarious) assures a certain kind of deflection (I often thought to myself "hmm, wonder what would have happened if Jim Carey had played Bateman?"–which he did in a way – maybe call it That American Psycho Guy). The movie wants to be a period piece and yet we have the nagging suspicion that it wants to be more, fitting comfortably into the lineage of a number of films where guys-have-had-enough-can't-take-it-no-'mo (and pulling a few Thelma and Louises in along the way), maybe beginning most recently with Network, then Falling Down, etc.

(oh, and in keeping with our previous themes there is a cop here also – what movie almost now doesn't have one of some sort of other?–played by Willem Defoe. But his presence lulls us into a false sense of pragmatic rightness and normalcy –that is, that the 'authorities' have indeed contacted the culprit responsible for these heinous deeds we think we are seeing and that 'truth' and 'justice' are sure to follow. However, for us in the audience Defoe only serves to make the fall harder for us since apparently there have been only fantastic allegorical crimes that have been committed.)

In our prevous review of Pitch Black, etc, the presence of darkness was somehow comforting in its moral disequilibrium, seeming to act as propaedeutic to sunrise, a new dawn even if it IS an alien dawn. But here, in A. P. there is just....nothing. There is no devil, no demons (unless one wishes to call nothingness demonic). The human quest for an object universe has led to an evacuated, abject universe. Quixotically enough, materialism turns into it's very opposite, not spiritualism but it's logical opposite, no-thingnessism. Unlike a 'high' art artifact where we leave confirmed in our 'authentic' identities, our various identitarian fullnesses (as in High Fidelity), here we leave with a vague sense of contamination. Because, and let's face it reader, WE ALL LOVE OUR OBJECTS! We are no less enamoured of our facial scrubs, our computers, our whatevers, etc. than is Patrick Bateman. And make no mistake: we are given no other motivation in the movie for Bateman's extreme (and fantasied in the film) misanthropic behavior than his attachment to an Object Universe, a universe whose chief fuel and only reason for existence is flow of capital as a disembodied spectral presence, a flow which at best only sees the human presence as a 'standing reserve' to be utilized as necessary and AT WORSE sees human presence as an affront and impediment to object/capital flow. It is a universe filled with nothing but objects and ego/subjects, the only intercourse between them being money. It is the universe we all live in now dear reader, a universe where the 'search for self' has reversed itself into nihilism. (For those who wish to think more about this, I can only suggest Nihilism Before Nietzsche by Michael Allen Gillespie: nihilism comes about not with the death of god but with the expansion of ego processes into every corner of the universe. This is not a thesis which can be embraced by the extropians among us. Which can only mean that the further 'progress' of the human species qua technologcal species can only be accomplished by....the eradication of the human species! Why is that damn Nietzsche always there AHEAD of us??!!)

Well, that's one line of thought we could take, that is, the global atomization and dis-attachment of everything from everything else, the corrosive acid bath that is splashed on and by all human endeavor now (yes, i realize the hermeneutic circle there–-so take me to reality court mr. policeperson). Even to the point of the extreme dismemberment of the human body and perhaps more significantly the female body, the main competitor for rights to reproduce over and against capital/bio/techno/scientific research...(ok ok, i know you want to argue with me about this but we can take it up later; more overt films where this motif is taken up is in the Alien series and the Terminator series). This is the extreme motility of capital that Marx fretted over in the quote way above and the extreme spatio-temporal portability/pastiche that Fredric Jameson has become so exercised over in his examinations of post modernism. So let's just point to that line of thought for the moment and move over to an allied area. (Like the sign above a door seen over Bateman's shoulder, there don't appear to be any ready exits from our dilemma. But let's turn to one of the exits that Bateman attempted.)

Of greater interest to me at the moment is the notion of dissociation and ventriliquization. (It strikes me now that I think of it that Fight Club would fit into this new line of investigation, not only because of the dissociation and subsequent ventriliquizing by external forces of the protagonist in F.C. – and the concern in both films seems to be extreme commodification, a becoming thing-like. The human has simply become a marionette or doll which dances to tunes which human no longer even knows how to whistle except under extreme duress – but also the concern over physical culture, that is, exercise and the body.

Unlike the sweet. distracted protagonist in High Fidelity who is always full of himself and his memories, and scheming on how to gain MORE attachments and is in baffled mourning over those he has lost, Bateman from the very beginning seems other than himself, more capable of fusing with the object universe and reflections than any person. More like a proto-cyborg we might even say, forming attachments, as Donna Harraway has suggested postively, more as a vacuum cleaner or piece of equipment has attachments.

But Bateman himself seems mesmerized and baffled by his actions (or non-actions as it were), a bait man on the hook of a much larger string, playing out into an apparent void of intentions, a superstructural puppet whose actions can only be explained by recourse to some sort of gothic marxism where material bodies bode forth in response to changing structural conditions. (Sorry ma, the structure made me do it... )

This ecstatic frenzy of destruction and yet simultaneous concerns for the health, appearance, purity, and vibrancy of one's physical body has many echoes throughout history, most recently and notably National Socialism in Germany. This expropriative force (once marshalled by references to meterological phenomena and previously to gods) now has nowhere to go but to/from the infinitely circulating patterns of abstract capital expressing itself in techne. We are all mesmerized puppets to some depth or other, inheriting previous cultural statements, even language itself, as our strings. But a human with those strings cut is no human either. We wish to make an easy, natural exit from all this gruesome mess (all of our bloody national histories, all our Batemans) but are unable to step from the rim of the bloody pit.

It is all a dissociative 'sleep' which we wish to awaken from, both collectively and individually (and the precise point of the social trance is that there is not easy discernment between the two...and now to make things worse, material itself under the guidance of science has become a porous, unstable sieve, a thing is more no-thing in its make up than thing, a solidity composed only of oscillations, vibrancies, between-ness).

Patrick Bateman

And what political spin to put on this. we can remember becoming-insect-machine Jeff Goldblum's question to a victim in Fly II just before he gored him: "what politics does an insect have? He doesn't have ANY!"

Thus Daniel Tiffany in Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric says this of the ecstatic, tranced-out, galvanized-by-external forces body, that this 'cyborg' (or man-insect, or serial murderer, or...) "is revolutionary precisely insofar as he (or, more appropriately) she is at once an automaton and meteroic phenomenon, mechanistic yet volatile, wholly governed by necessity and instinct, yet spontaneous: an emblem of the vitality of the material unconscious. In the mesmerized, natural body of the revolutionary, a 'philosophy of sleep' coincides with the doctrine of meterological turbulence. The subtle body of the automaton is a cataract of imponderable 'fluids'" and "The topos of the mesmerized, natural body is essential to the origins of contemporary counterculture. [....] the path of the mesmeric body through modern culture defies the political antinomies (progressive/reactionary; conservative/revolutionary) on which much contemporary criticism is based."

So our detecting is leading us into deeper and deeper waters, farther and farther from any recognizable and solid shore.

Patrick bateman