The world largely holds the belief that Patrick Bateman, a yuppie serial killer from the book “American Psycho,” is not a character that you are meant to relate to. As “American Psycho” was closely adapted into a movie that maintains the same plot and characters, you would assume that this statement applies to both the book and the movie. It doesn’t. The “American Psycho” movie adaptation raises a larger question of whether books should be turned into movies. 

Some make the case that we shouldn’t listen to the author when interpreting books. Tragically for those people, the author’s explanation forms my entire interpretation of “American Psycho.” 

“I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties—a very specific time and place—and yet he’s really infused with my own pain and what I was going through as a guy in his 20s, trying to fit into a society that he doesn’t necessarily want to fit into but doesn’t really know what the other options are,” Bret Easton Ellis, the author of “American Psycho,” said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2016. 

Basically, Bateman becoming a serial killer and losing his sanity is more of a side plot than anything else. You have to wait a while before the first murder even happens in the book, and even then it feels like Ellis spends more pages describing various clothing brands and contemporary musicians than he does on the murders. Bateman is an insecure 27-year-old (the same age as Ellis was by the time the book was published) who simply cares about being perceived as cool. This is why he cares about trendy restaurants and beauty and everything else that is inconceivably shallow. Yet there is a real him under there trying to get out, a him that revolts through engaging in unusually insane actions. (Sure, there is the murdering people, but in the book there is also renting “Body Double” over and over again from the video store, or dressing in unusually weird outfits.) Every non-consumerist, strange act that Bateman does in the novel is him trying to self-actualize. And the same can be applied to Ellis in his writing the novel in the first place, as the novel officially destroyed any hope he had of becoming part of the literary mainstream. 

With all this in mind, it isn’t particularly crazy that “American Psycho” is a deeply bigoted book: Bateman views women as objects to be used to show how much of a catch you are. Bateman also isn’t attracted to women at all. This is alluded to through his homophobic outbursts, which suggest that he may be closeted. Ellis has since written other closeted homophobic main characters, which is unsurprising, as he is gay himself. It seems that Bateman is a reflection of Ellis’ own struggles with his sexuality, but this personal detail is lost in the movie adaptation.

The narrator is someone who knows he is deeply bigoted because of his internal anger at not being able to express his true self. Since the book allows for such bigotry and describes said bigotry in excruciating detail, it is unsurprising that many feminists protested against it. Mary Harron, the female writer-director of the movie adaptation of “American Psycho,” throws out Bateman’s most complicated traits and weird actions, and instead just keeps the murder. Notably, the murders in the movie adaptation are not as weird as the ones Ellis writes, which normally involve insanely disgusting actions which really could not be committed to film. However, these insanely disgusting actions are at the core of what is going on in the scenes: Bateman is protesting conformity by acting out in the most repulsive ways possible. In the movie, we only see Bateman’s misogyny in the way he treats the women. We also don’t hear enough of his internal monologue, so the link between his treatment of women and his repressed homosexuality is not established (though, truthfully, the only way to hear enough of his internal monologue would be to have it playing throughout the whole movie). 

The book is hard to adapt into a movie. 

“I kind of liked Bret’s script,” Harron said in an interview with Vulture after reading a version of the script written by Ellis. “It ended with Bateman tap dancing his way down Fifth Avenue, singing some song. It was funny, but to me, it wasn’t a movie.” 

This seems to be the problem. This is probably why several other scripts were also rejected.

“I don’t think it really works as a film,” Ellis said, many years after the movie was released. “The movie is fine, but I think that book is unadaptable because it’s about consciousness, and you can’t really shoot that sensibility…. How do you adapt ‘The Iliad?’…How do you have that experience be the same as an experience that was conceived as a book? You’re getting a watered-down, second-hand version of it, in a way. If you’ve written a novel, you’ve written a novel because it is a novel.” 

Thus, Harron simply made the movie into a surface-level thriller with themes that everyone can agree with and a character who clearly nobody is meant to relate to. It is so appealing that it becomes shallow. This is why fans primarily like it, for the jokes and the little clips. Nobody feels satisfied with the whole story. It can’t be anything more than a fun watch. 

It often seems as though some viewers misunderstood the point of the book, based on the number of internet edits that seem to idolize Bateman’s lifestyle. Many who see these edits argue that Bateman is not a character to relate to. However, these people who think that you shouldn’t relate to Bateman at all have either just watched the movie or read the book with the movie in mind. If you are someone who cares about seeming cool and suppressing your real self to fit into an archetype, you very much should relate to Bateman, especially when your real self comes out in the worst way possible. 

Perhaps books can be adapted into great movies, but personal, stream-of-consciousness books like “American Psycho” are best left alone. 

Henry Kaplan is in the class of 2028 and can be reached at hrkaplan@wesleyan.edu.