American Inequality in American Psycho Essay

Set in the Manhattan of 1989, Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho sketches the life of Patrick Bateman, an attractive 26-year-old Harvard graduate who earns a six-figure income on Wall Street. Bateman and his Ivy League educated friends enjoy all the luxury Manhattan has to offer, including expensive restaurants, exclusive nightclubs and excessive amounts of cocaine. However, what their money, education and beauty truly affords them is the right to humiliate, harass, and in Bateman’s case to kill, those in the social classes beneath them. The satirical, yet horrific, story that unfolds throughout American Psycho highlights the inequality between the richest and poorest Americans, a gap that widened substantially in the 1980s thanks in part to the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. In addition to reducing the tax rate on wealthy Americans from 70% to 28%, President Reagan authorized deregulation that encouraged corporate mergers and made cuts to social programs that left many Americans homeless (Foner 1037). By reducing the tax rate, Reagan intended to encourage sound private investments thereby creating jobs. However, many affluent Americans used the money saved in taxes to purchase luxury products instead. Corporate mergers, or more bluntly corporate takeovers, spurred the deindustrialization of America. While deindustrialization eliminated many high-paying manufacturing jobs and left several Americans unemployed, the corporate takeovers that spurred the deindustrialization created a tremendous amount of wealth on Wall Street. Reagan also reduced funds allotted for public housing and psychiatric hospitals. This fiscal decision only increased the number of homeless individuals across America, especially in urban areas such as New York City (Foner 1037-40). Throughout American Psycho Bateman’s Wall Street cohorts address the rampant homelessness in Manhattan with a mixture of contempt and amusement. In the first pages of the novel, Timothy Price, a young stockbroker on his way uptown, complains about his six-figure income as he counts the thirtieth homeless person he has seen that day (3-7). Leaving an exclusive nightclub, Craig McDermott, another rich stockbroker, teases a homeless woman and her child with a single dollar bill before setting it on fire (210). Bateman, however, is more sadistic than his friends are. Before mutilating and killing a homeless man, Bateman offers the man money but asks him why he does not get a job. When the man says he was laid off, Bateman asks rhetorically, â€Å"Do you think it’s fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work?† (129-30) The text contains a strong theme of Social Darwinism. Bateman and his friends do not feel a twinge of guilt over their treatment of those less fortunate because they adhere to the belief that the underclass deserves the mistreatment society allots them, just as the privileged are entitled to the special treatment society grants them. Although Ellis addresses the gap between the rich and poor in America through mordant satire, his depiction of the yuppie lifestyle and how the homeless are treated is not entirely hyperbolic. While on vacation in New York City, I observed the hostile and often indifferent treatment the homeless receive. In the financial district of Manhattan only blocks from Wall Street, I saw a young, well-dressed professional woman nearly bump into a homeless man and, after glaring at him for a moment, remarked, â€Å"You’ve got to be kidding me.† In Patrick Bateman’s world, a world where the privileged enjoy a lavish lifestyle, no one asks why. Their sense of entitlement overrides their curiosity, so that not a single character asks why the homeless line the streets. In the preface to American Psycho Ellis quotes a lyric from a Talking Heads song that reads, â€Å"And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention.† In that novel, and perhaps outside it, things fell apart, and nobody paid much attention. Works Cited Ellis, Brett. American Psycho. 1st ed. New York City: Vintage, 1991. Print. Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York City: W. W. & Norton, 2007. 1037-140. Print.