Misogynist, Not Necessarily; Hack, Yes.

Via Teresa, a very good post about Bret Easton Ellis’ new novel, which is apparently as bad as it sounds. And Dana is certainly right about the initial Times review. Ellis’ stab at pretentious metafiction demanded Kakutani’s hatchet more than any new novel since I Am Charlotte Simmons, and you give the review…to Janet Maslin? Now, I suppose her extremely generous reviewing has its merits, although myself I found her tenure as the NYT’s lead film critic pretty disastrous, but it really seems inadequate to the task of evaluating Ellis.

Speaking of which, a couple months ago IFC or Sundance screened American Psycho, and I watched a bit of it. Although I was an admirer of Mary Harron’s first feature, I Shot Andy Warhol, I thought the follow-up was a pretty terrible film upon my (admittedly somewhat lubricated) first viewing, and the more sober second look didn’t help. What I found most puzzling, though, was the idea that there would be some kind of frisson in a feminist filming American Psycho. Despite the feminist boycotts, I don’t actually think it’s accurate to call Ellis’ novel “misogynist,” despite the horrifying violence against women it depicts; bascially, this is familiar Medvedite fallacy of assuming that the characters represent the artist. Patrick Bateman is obviously not intended to be an admirable figure; Ellis is certainly not saying that the violence is somehow noble or justified. And the structure of the novel makes clear that the violence committed by Bateman is part of a vaguely lefty critique.

This is not to say, however, that the initial publisher was wrong to reject the novel, even if they did so for the wrong reasons. American Psycho isn’t a misogynist novel, but it certainly is a terrible novel. The endlessly repeated (at least as far as I could get through) cycle of product names–rock lyrics–risible sex scene–graphic descriptions of killing hookers isn’t interesting once, and the critique of materialism the bad writing is trying to generate is remarkably shallow and banal. The genuinely repellent violence is ultimately unendurable (or at least it was for me), but one can imagine a novel in which it was justified. The violence is appalling because if you’re going to put your reader through it, you’d better be up to something a lot more interesting than the being the umpteenth person to note that the 80s were the Decade of Greed.

And, ultimately, this is why the film was, I think, an almost complete failure by a very gifted filmmaker. The much less graphic violence is a relief; the film is better than the book if only because it doesn’t make you want to barf. But take the violence away and you’re left with the uninteresting story and the highly unoriginal (and by now exceptionally dated) critique of the Reagan Years, and that’s something no director is going to be able to salvage.

…Alas, my vacation caused me to miss the fact that Lance Mannion already has a better post on the subject.