The Men Who Make the Killings: American Psycho , Financial Masculinity, and 1980s Financial Print Culture

The Men Who Make the Killings:American Psycho, Financial Masculinity, and 1980s Financial Print Culture Leigh Claire La Berge (bio) Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 American Psycho traditionally has been read as brat-pack fiction, a compendium of 1980s postmodern works that includes Ellis's first novel, Less Than Zero; Jay McInerey's novel, Bright Lights, Big City; and Tama Janowitz's short story collection, Slaves of New York.1 Unlike the labyrinthine, encyclopedic postmodern fictions of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon or, more recently, David Foster Wallace, brat-pack fiction underwhelms rather than overwhelms, reading more like advertising copy than prose. American Psycho pushes the lifeless world of the brat-pack commodity-aesthetic to its limit with rambling descriptions of branded commodities newly rendered in deadening prose and broken by the representation of lethal violence.2 The novel is structured through short, interchangeable chapters that detail the habits and banalities of upper-middle class, urban consumerism, the contents of which are reflected in the titles, such as "Shopping," "Lunch," and "At Another New Restaurant."3 American Psycho is chronologically the last of the brat-pack releases; it contains a chapter entitled "End of the 1980s" and, indeed, the novel seeks to exhaust the period and one of its most contested literary aesthetics.4 My reading of American Psycho departs from this tradition of criticism. I take Ellis's text out of its brat-pack grouping to focus on finance rather than consumption as the novel's structuring representation of economic forms. I argue that American Psycho's primary historical engagement is less with its postmodern contemporaries than with 1980s financial narratives in fiction, autobiography, and economic journalism, what I refer to collectively as financial print culture. Indeed, I claim that American Psycho renders legible [End Page 273] a logic of 1980s financial writing through its intertextual connections to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities; a series of memoirs by financiers and moguls including Ivan Boesky's 1985 Merger Mania, Donald Trump's 1987 The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens' 1987 Boone; and, finally, 1980s economic journalism.5 First reporting in 1982 on a new category of businessmen, the corporate raiders, the New York Times noted that "they have even developed their own language laced with images of aggression and sexual conquest."6 Soon after, periodicals quit analyzing this language and began employing it. Time's description of venture capitalist Arthur Rock, the man who arranged the initial financing for Apple, as one of "the men who make the killings," is one of many examples.7 In part responding to this cultural representation, Boesky, Boone, and Trump authored their own texts, seeking to show that their financial success could be mimicked and to dispel the myth that, as Boone joked, "we show up to meetings with a shot-gun."8 Boesky, too, wanted to correct popular perceptions of his profession: "I doubt there are more exaggerated stories told about any single activity other than risk arbitrage," he opined.9 And finally, Wolfe employed the theme of finance to mark his fiction as global, historical, and realist in The Bonfire of the Vanities, which became one of the most popular novels of the decade and was one that Wolfe hoped would spur a return to literary realism. Mirroring these concerns, Ellis's text uses financial, journalistic language to synthesize the content of The Bonfire of the Vanities—the story of a financier who becomes known as a murderer—and the form of the financial autobiography—first-person, masculine grandiosity based on successful financial deals—into a fictional autobiography, a novel whose manifest violence caused its circulation to become as scandalous as the 1980s financial world it represented.10 American Psycho, then, is a collection of what might be categorized as realist and autobiographical modes of financial representation. From each mode Ellis borrows and to each he appends both his own and the other texts, thus pulling a series of seemingly incommensurable texts into a common representational and discursive space whose object is finance, a practice and concept that underwent discursive redefinition both economically and culturally throughout the 1980s.11 In bringing together a collection...