Patrick Bateman Tortured Joe, Giving Birth to Tyler Durden
And Bateman continues to torture us all to this day. My interpretation of "Fight Club" and "American Psycho."
Fight Club's disenchanted strivers are the spiritual successors to the psychopathic Wall Street bros of American Psycho's 1980s. Patrick Bateman and Gordon Gekko won the cultural-political war, and they transposed their socio-economic values onto the middle class.
The living (or dying) room of Bateman's fancy apartment is full of chairs made by famous designers that cost thousands of dollars. He has too much money to spend even after dropping it on nightly feasts at five-star restaurants and drug binges at glitzy clubs. But behind the labels, he's just a boring man who listens to Genesis. He's not disenchanted with life so much as he's doesn't even have anything to be disenchanted about. He's completely empty. He has no body and no needs to be filled, no personality, though he tries to fabricate a personality out of brand names and sadistic sexual rituals.
He can't even find satisfaction in torturing a homeless man to death--at McDonalds a short time after the murder, his high was already dissolving. But he's not the victim in any way. He bought into the vapid "Greed is Good" culture of the 80s and helped spread it to everyone in every economic class.
Fast forward to the 1990s, and Joe/Jack/Edward Norton/the Unnamed Narrator of Fight Club is sitting on his toilet looking at a catalog and thinking about what else he should buy for his condo. The camera pans across his crib, showing the brands and prices of everything Joe owns.
He's merely a white-collar risk assessor (still, a better-paid job than the waiters who become the foot soldiers of Project Mayhem), so he can only afford rugs and desks that cost in the low hundreds of dollars. But he has thoroughly absorbed Patrick Bateman's values; he attempts to find happiness in buying and maintaining things for his middle-class condo.
Greed was supposed to be good, but we don't have enough money to be greedy. If Patrick Bateman couldn't even have real fun with his money, what hope do we have? Greed just makes us strive for some shitty new rug by our front door. Greed makes us work harder for a couple of hours of overtime. Greed is good for our bosses and Patrick Bateman's pocketbook, but it's not good for our physical or mental health.
We, the Joes, Jacks, and Tyler Durdens of Patrick Bateman's economy, are the victims of the Randians' takeover of the political system. We have become disconnected from our instinctual needs. We are chasing after things that will never fulfill us or provide our lives with meaning.
That's why we are driven towards mental illness by the present-day culture (which hasn't really changed much since four decades ago, has it?). That's why we need to hit and get hit. (Incidentally, that's why I started practicing Muay Thai a couple of weeks ago.) Getting hit is a key component. That's why Tyler directed the members of Fight Club to start a fight and lose. That's why they fought people the same size with their own hands.
Contrast that with Patrick Bateman, who mostly targeted those weaker than him and used or fantasized about using high powered weapons or technological implements to torture and kill. Bateman is the killer. Joe is one of the victims he is ultimately torturing through the use of socially-enforced violence enacted against the whole economy.
Joe/the Narrator has been driven towards self-destructive tendencies by his job and his consumerism. He is unable to sleep. He's pretending to suffer from every possible condition. His pursuit of pain as a means of feeling something--anything--is over the top to the point that it hurts himself and his friends. His real problem is his cowardice.
He doesn't need to buy shit for his apartment just because the social economy tells him to. He doesn't need to buy into it. And he doesn't need to act like a macho jerk around Marla.
He needs to balance his need for dopamine fixes with the need for self-preservation. When the towers came falling down with the controlled explosions in the final scene, that was Joe blowing up his bullshit beliefs that were holding him back. That's why Marla comes to him and gets ready to kiss him. That's my interpretation, anyway.
Mentioned in this essay
Fight Club, novel (1996) by
, film (1999) by director David Fincher and writer Jim UhlsAmerican Psycho, novel (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis, film (2000) by director Mary Harron and writers Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner