an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 8, September - December
2011, ISSN 1552-5112
American Psycho,
Cosmopolis and the Coiffure?
Throughout the centuries hair has been a
symbol of status for wealth, class, rank, slavery, royalty, strength, manliness
or femininity. And, it still holds a
place of value in our postmodern era.
Two novels that include hair as a major theme are Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) and Don Delillo’s
Cosmopolis (2003). These two authors create characters heavily
involved in the Wall Street world but also swallowed up in their depthless
narcissism. In American Psycho we are introduced to twenty-eight year old Patrick
Bateman, a psychopath serial killer who is also a wealthy, narcissistic Wall
Street broker. Bateman’s first person
narrative is filled with the gruesome crimes he commits, but they are narrated
in such a way that it is never clear if he is actually performing the murders. He is obsessed with the material world and
confines his life to eating at fancy restaurants, womanizing, purchasing name
brand clothes and the most up-to-date electronics, and ensuring the preciseness
of his hair. Twenty-eight year old Eric
Packer of Cosmopolis follows many of
the traits of his predecessor, but, instead of aimless wandering from
fashionable restaurants to name brand designer shops, Packer sets out across
The societal function or importance
of hair is not the focus in the novels; rather, it is the connecting link
between the inner person (i.e. the Ego and libido) with the greater world of
status and economy. From Biblical
examples of Absolom and Samson to cartoon characters such as Marge Simpson,
hair is clearly a symbol of varying meaning.
In director Jeff Stilson’s documentary, Good Hair (2009), Chris Rock interviews Shelia Bridges, Time magazine’s interior designer of the
year in 2001. Bridges has been diagnosed
with Alepecia which causes hair loss on both the head and body, and she
believes that “The reason hair’s so important is because our self esteem is
wrapped up in it. It’s like a type of
currency for us, even though those standards are completely unrealistic and
unattainable…” (Good Hair). As
Stilson’s documentary elucidates, Western and Eastern societies place a high
cultural and monetary value on hair. For
both Patrick Bateman and Eric Packer, their lives are directed (either everyday
for Bateman or a specific day for Packer) by their awareness of their hair.
Perhaps one of the major differences between
the characters is in the structure of the novels as narratives: Packer’s
journey for a haircut is linear, he moves through the course of his day, hour
by hour, in a clear direction from one side of the city to the other. He spends his day knowing of his impending
financial devastation; his death impulse leads to his physical destruction by
the end of the day. Not so for Patrick
Bateman. Ellis has literally trapped
Bateman in a circular world of no escape.
Chapter titles repeat themselves, and restaurant scenes, conversations,
even the gruesome murders[1] are all
part of Bateman’s cyclical nightmare—he cannot even break free from renting the
movie, Body Double, thirty-seven times.
Set in the last few years of the 1980s, American
Psycho emphasizes chaos, but not just for a generation. Set almost fifteen years later, Cosmopolis also depicts an overwhelming
sense of chaos. As Packer drives across
the city, a man lights himself on fire, a mob of communist protesters set fires
and attack his bullet proof limousine while the police launch counter-attacks,
and his friend Nikolai Kaganovich dies and his death is announced on the
digital tickers all around the world.
Chaos clearly still exists just as much in Packer’s
The references to hair in American Psycho and Cosmopolis go far deeper than some critics have deemed worth
pursuing. Symbolically, hair goes deeper
than just the surface level of appearance.
One critic has noted that the slang wording for a haircut merely
“suggests that one’s investments have been rather severely trimmed by unfavorable
market pressures” (Varsava 103); however, I would argue that this definition is
inadequate. In “Scissors or Sword?: The
Symbolism of a Medieval Haircut,” Simon Coates reveals that even in medieval
times, “[t]he relationship between long hair and high birth was an ancient one”
and that “cropped hair denoted a servant or a slave” (9). Receiving a haircut symbolically represents a
drop in economic rank, but also a reduction of social status. This metaphor, however, is not applicable to
Patrick Bateman, per se. His attention
to hair and the repeated scheduling of haircuts represents a public fear of
humiliation and detection of the inner imperfections of his inhumanity.
Patrick
Bateman Just Wants To Be Loved
The restrictions a society places on
its inhabitants are reflected in Bateman’s fears of standing outside accepted
norms. Freud posits in Civilizations and Its Discontents, that
“Taboos, laws and customs impose further restrictions, which affect both men
and women…the economic structure of the society also influences the amount of
sexual freedom that remains. […]. Fear of a revolt by the suppressed elements
drives it to stricter precautionary measures” (59-60). In his role as a pathological killer, Patrick
Bateman’s rapes, killings and cannibalism breaks many taboos and laws; however,
he still remains hidden from public detection—drawing suspicion that he may not
actually be committing the crimes. The
author himself has expressed uncertainty: “The weird thing is, I was never
really sure whether Patrick Bateman committed the crimes or not. Even thought he tells the reader that he has
committed these brutal murders, there were so many hints that suggested he
hadn’t committed them” (qtd. in Woodward 35).
Bateman’s killing sprees and personal musings on his actions are his
internalized/externalized (yet hidden) revolt against society; yet, his need
for sex is never truly gratified, causing it to reach a sadistic level. Regardless of his reality, what becomes one
of Bateman’s biggest fears of being detected is his externalized phallic
symbol. Charles Berg claims, in “The
Unconscious Significance of Hair,” that “it is granted that hair is
conspicuously a genital symbol, and that our mental attitude towards hair and
our activities with it are a displaced expression of our sexual conflict (at
the genital level)…” (85). Bateman’s
dread of not fitting in is exhibited through the paranoia of his hair and its
perfect image controls his image in society.
Patrick’s brief encounter with an
old college girlfriend, Bethany, demonstrates his societal concern with hair
and appearance. Walking down a street in
the city, Patrick randomly bumps into
I stop
tapping my foot and slowly scan the restaurant, the bistro, wondering how my
hair really looks, and suddenly I wish I had switched mousses because since I
last saw my hair, seconds ago, it feels different, as if its shape was somehow
altered on the walk from bar to table. A pang of nausea that I’m unable to
stifle washes warmly over me, but since I’m really dreaming all this I’m able
to ask, “So you say there’s no nonsmoking section? Is this correct?” (222).
The concern represents the fear of public castration
over a poor display of hair, but also the fear that the particular mousse he
has purchased is not the correct product, and that it is now “altering” his
appearance as he walks across the room.
Patrick has an extensive array of cosmetics products meant to perform
every act of age reduction possible. He
purchases numerous machines for exercise and essentially commodifies his body
through his application of these products.
Ellis employs a bit of sly humor here by having Patrick consider that
perhaps his mousse is changing his hair as he walks across the room.
Yet, this scene also supports
Theodore Adorno’s belief that American society was moving towards “an
increasing reduction of human reason to purely mechanical ways of thinking, to
the spiritual desert present in the mercantilism of culture in the form of
cultural industry and to the ethical fault implicit in the submission of human
interests to economical priorities” (da Silva and Lírio 218). Surrounding himself with his cosmetics,
clothes, electronics, and empty friends, Bateman’s thoughts exhibit no sense of
depth: “The constant listing of brands, makes, and models is unmistakably
evocative of catalogue-speak or a consumer guide. Even his political comments are contradictory,
nonsensical, and above all utterly trite…” (Storey 61). The agitation over his exterior appearance,
brought on by his choice of mousse, causes his mind to turn against himself and
he becomes so panicked that he can barely function when they finally sit
down. What fuels Bateman’s
oversensitivity to his appearance is that he cannot rationally[2] conceive
of people or society judging him for who he is rather than for what he is. For Adorno this was the primary concern with
the “mercantilism of culture”: it dealt with “the uncanny functioning of human
rationality, which, far from constituting a mere human tool used to achieve a
control of nature, turns itself against the very nature of man” (da Silva and
Lírio 218). And in American Psycho we see Bateman’s internal self revolt and, as it
inevitably must, turn to his outward rebellion against social mores.
When they finish lunch, Bateman is
able to coerce
In the numerous
appointments at Gio’s, Bateman, and other characters in the novel, such as Paul
Owen, are performing what Charles Berg considers a social duty: “His ego
requires him to do what society expects of him.
He cuts his hair and shaves his beard, and, in spite of the attendant
inconveniences, he feels better for it” (80).
However, Bateman’s satisfaction is very short lived, and while admitting
at times that he realizes he has received an eye-catching haircut at Gio’s (11), his emptiness and the empty society in
which he exists cannot hold onto that fleeting sense of worth. The recurring need for the haircut exists
partly because, as with almost all humans, hair never stops growing and
therefore it is constantly in a very microcosmic state of flux. As I have emphasized previously, since hair
acts as an external phallic symbol it becomes linked with sexuality through the
libido, “whose symbol is hair” (Berg 81).
In the connection between hair and sexuality, there is also a link
between Bateman’s preoccupation with his hair and the consumer society around
him; as Foucault posits, “the deployment of sexuality is linked to the economy
through numerous and subtle relays, the main one of which however, is the
body—the body that produces and consumes” (Foucault, HS 106-07). Bateman consumes
and consumes: food, cosmetics, electronics, clothing, bottled water,
technology—but he doesn’t produce. In
fact, the only two things that he might arguably produce is hair and sperm (for
fetuses he pays to abort); the dead hair continues to grow on his head, forcing
him to be ever conscious of its refusal
to fit neatly into his consumer based lifestyle.
Bateman has
removed himself to such an extent that he can no longer become part of what
Freud calls the “human community.” His
quest for significance and some form of happiness finds only meaninglessness in
the death and carnage which he brings around himself. When discussing the Pleasure Principle, Freud
notes that the person who removes what is disliked from their life “will as a
rule attain nothing. Reality is too
strong for him. He becomes a madman, who
for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion”
(Freud 31). In his unhappy childhood,
the wealthy family estate, Harvard education, and the little that we know of
Bateman, his past is shown to only bring him to this state of emptiness and
madness. And in the downward spiral of
events, we begin to see more of Bateman’s desire for human recognition creeping
through his chilling world of emptiness:
The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I
don’t notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for
myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing “I just want
to be loved,” cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles,
distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer—all of it
was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt.
(332)
The fast paced nightlife of New York City, copious
amounts of drugs and liquor, hard-bodies, fine restaurants—literally everything
Bateman has surrounded himself with has been employed to fill his narcissistic
need of attention and status. He has
everything—and nothing: “Neither drugs nor fantasies of destruction—even when
the fantasies are objectified in ‘revolutionary praxis’—appease the inner
hunger from which they spring. Personal
relations founded on reflected glory, on the need to admire and be admired,
prove fleeting and insubstantial” (Lasch 23).
Ellis is making a very bold statement about the emptiness, which the age
of industrial capitalism has created; the loss of mores and the focus on self
has escalated, at least for Patrick Bateman, to the point of self destruction.
A scene in the
novel which has perhaps not garnered enough critical attention is the two-page
chapter entitled, “Sandstone.” In this
minute section we get one of the very brief glimpses into Patrick Bateman’s
family life. Sometime during the month
of April, Bateman visits his mother’s nursing home. The conversation is sparse but the
psychological implications all reveal some aspect of Bateman: his narcissism,
his hair infatuation, the brutal murders, and the materiality of his life. An extended look at the passage is necessary
to see how Ellis orchestrates and combines all the elements of Patrick’s empty
life. “Sandstone” begins in this
fashion:
My mother and I are sitting in her private
room at Sandstone, where she is now a permanent resident. Heavily sedated, she
has her sunglasses on and keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my
hands, pretty sure that they're shaking. She tries to smile when she asks what
I want for Christmas. I’m not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my
head and look at her. […]. It’s nearing
the middle of April.
“Nothing,” I say, smiling reassuringly.
There’s a pause. I break it by asking, “What do you want?”
She says nothing
for a long time and I look back at my hands, at dried blood, probably from a
girl named Suki, beneath the thumbnail. My mother licks her lips tiredly and
says, “I don’t know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.”
I don’t say anything. I’ve spent the
last hour studying my hair in the mirror I’ve insisted the hospital keep in my
mother's room.
“You look unhappy,” she says suddenly.
“I’m not,” I tell her with a brief sigh.
“You look
unhappy,” she says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark
blinding white, again.
“Well, you
do too,” I say slowly, hoping that she won’t say anything else. (351)
Bateman is
overly concerned with the image he presents to his mother. The mirror which he places on the premises
allows him to feed his narcissistic tendencies.
There is a correlation between Bateman’s hair and his unspoken sense of
wanting to appease his mother: “Beneath the manifest adult behavior of suing
for social approval of the hair, we can discern the little Oedipus suing for
his mother’s permission, approval of love of his phallic sexuality” (Berg
83). Bateman attempts to prove himself
to his mother through his well groomed hair.
And, perhaps suspicious of this, his mother continuously touches her own
hair in order to ensure it equals her son’s attention.
The Oedipal
drive fueling Bateman’s extensive attention to his hair reflects both his fear
of rejection from his mother but also shows a desire for acceptance from the
one person in the world he should find reception. When discussing the complicated intricacies
of the complex Oedipal drive, Erich Fromm notes:
This ‘incestuous’ striving, in the pre-genital sense,
is one of the most fundamental passions in men or women, comprising the human
being’s desire for protection, the satisfaction of his narcissism; his craving
to be freed from the risks of responsibility, of freedom, of awareness; his
longing for unconditional love, which is offered without any expectation of his
loving response. (97)
Nowhere, however, does Patrick find this
acceptance. His mother is too sedated to
even realize that April, ironically “the cruelest month,” is a bit early to be
taking requests for Christmas gifts. Bateman
finds none of the elements which Fromm suggests should exist between a mother/son
relationship. Instead, his attention is
drawn to the blood under his fingertips finding its way there due to his
pursuits to find meaning elsewhere in his life.
Neither his mother, nor his father, have any influence, nor did they
likely ever take an interest at an earlier stage.
Jules Henry claims, in Culture Against Man, that “the collapse
of parental authority reflects the collapse of ‘ancient impulse controls’”
(qtd. in Lasch 177); Henry also believes that due to this collapse, the
“society in which Super Ego values (the values of self-restraint) were
ascendant” have begun shifting towards a society in which “the values of the Id
(the values of self-indulgence)” have begun to take priority (Henry 127). Ellis takes this to an extreme in the both
Bateman’s physical acquisitions but also his indulgence in blood-lust.
The functioning of the Bateman
family clearly plays into Patrick’s current plight in life. “American family life is shaped in large part
by the industrial system” observes Jules Henry; furthermore, “[t]he economic
system generates competition; it is within the family that parents and children
must try—and often fail—to live a life without competition” (128). The Bateman’s are the epitome of a family of
competition—a family of economics.
Patrick and his brother Sean compete to outdo each other in status and
when Sean reserves a dinner for the two of them at the coveted restaurant,
Dorsia, Patrick admits to the reader: “My mind is a mess. I don't know what to
think or how to feel” (216). Their
animosity and mutual dislike of each other (and perhaps their unhappy
childhood) can be summed up by a photo near his mother’s bed: there sat a
“photograph of Sean and me when we were both teenagers, wearing tuxedos,
neither one of us smiling” (352). When
his mother requests his Christmas wish, Patrick replies in the negative with
his reassuring smile, while shortly after he notes his gifts: “She sits on her
bed in a nightgown from Bergdorf's and slippers by Norma Kamali that I bought
her for Christmas last year;” and later, “She pauses again, straightens her
sunglasses, black Ray-Bans I bought her from Bloomingdale’s that cost two
hundred dollars” (351, 352). And
finally, Patrick’s father owns a brokerage firm, but Patrick works for P &
P, a competing firm. Christopher Lasch
cites the work of Arnold Rogow who argues that “the decline of parental
discipline, the ‘socialization’ of many parental functions, and the
‘self-centered, impulse-dominated, detached, confused’ actions of American parents
give rise to characteristics that ‘can have seriously pathological outcomes,
when present in extreme form’” (qtd. in Lasch 178). To tie in with a previous point, Foucault
points out that the formulation of the Oedipal complex occurred about the same
time that legal parental controls were weakening (HS 130). While I would argue
that American Psycho is primarily a
diatribe against 1980’s society and culture, this dense little chapter lays
heavy implications on the destruction of the family entity and the failure of
Patrick’s parents to prohibit the encroachment of consumerism and materialism,
which led to Patrick’s incessant narcissism displaying itself publically in the
intimate touches to his hair.
The
Digital World of Eric Packer
Setting off on his journey through
“We're in the car because I need a haircut.”
“Have the
barber go to the office. Get your haircut there. Or have the barber come to the
car. Get your haircut and go to the office."
“A haircut has
what. Associations. Calendar on the wall. Mirrors everywhere. There's no barber
chair here. Nothing swivels but the spycam.” (15)
Shiner does not see the need for barbershop
associations because he is more interested in the time Packer is wasting to
fulfill what seems to be a whimsical desire.
Packer, on the other hand, needs to escape from the digital image of the
spycam and see himself in a real-time mirror.
The barbershop mirror can provide Packer the relief from the monitors
constantly bombarding him.
The slow drive
across the city allows Packer to observe some of the chaos that his financial
maneuvers have created. Just off
Broadway, Packer and Kinski, his “chief of theory” (77), step out of the
limousine to observe the marketplace panic unfolding on the digital screens:
Beneath the data strips, or tickers, there were fixed
digits marking the time in the major cities of the world. He knew what she was
thinking. Never mind the speed that makes it hard to follow what passes before
the eye. The speed is the point. Never mind the urgent and endless
replenishment, the way data dissolves at one end of the series just as it takes
shape at the other. This is the point, the thrust, the future. We are not
witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information
made sacred, ritually unreadable. (80)
The speed of the information becomes obliviated in the
spectacle of the dissolving and renewing digital information of a digital
economy: “The world the spectacle holds
up to view is at once here and elsewhere; it is the world of the
commodity ruling over all lived experience.
The commodity world is thus shown as
it really is, for its logic is one with men’s estrangement from one another
and from the sum total of what they produce” (Debord 26). On this day, Packer has become the producer
of the spectacle and he looks at the digital ticker and witnesses what he has
created. When they return, “The car
moved forward, clearing one stream of southbound traffic but stopping short of
the next, suspended in the compressed space where
Inching his way across
In one of the many scenes where
Packer leaves the creeping limousine, he enters a hotel to continue an affair
with his body guard, Kendra. Before
leaving her, Packer inquires about the stun gun his security provides her;
wanting to experience something outside of his digital world of money, he tells
her, “Stun me. I mean it. Draw the gun and shoot. I want you to do it, Kendra.
Show me what it feels like. I'm looking for more. Show me something I don't
know. Stun me to my DNA. Come on, do it. Click the switch. Aim and fire. I want
all the volts the weapon holds. Do it” (114-15). Immediately after, the narrative jumps and
Packer is in his car “borrowing yen and watching his fund’s numbers ink into
the mist on several screens;” the stun gun, which briefly “deprived him of his
faculties of reason” has now allowed him to process and grasp “well enough to
understand what was happening” (115). He
continues to wastefully invest the money of “many key institutions” to the
point “that the whole system was in danger,” during which time “[h]e smoked and
watched, feeling strong, proud, stupid and superior” (116). As Niall Ferguson has noted, “Every day, men
and women subordinate their economic self-interest to some other motive, be it
the urge to play, to idle, to copulate or to wreck” (qtd. in Varsava 81). The stun gun cleared Packer’s mind for a
quarter of an hour as he writhed on the floor; after which, he willingly
manipulates his digital currency bringing disruption to his entire portfolio
and the market. There is a correlation
between the physicality of the stun gun and the intangibility of the screens in
front of him. Packer has lost, or may
never have had, the connection with the figures with which he gambles. As Foucault elucidates in The Order of Things, “Wealth is wealth
because we estimate it,” and “it becomes wealth because it is a sign” (176,
177). Since Packer has nothing
meaningful to link to the sign, it is worthless to him—he cannot see the value
of the sign. Throwing away his wealth—and that of his wife and the clients
depending upon him—brings only conflicting feelings.
The lost connection with meaning can
be seen in Packer’s evident dislike for his body guard, Torval. Although Torval is intent on protecting
Packer from a recent death threat, Torval is inhuman in Packer’s eyes: “bald
and no-necked, a man whose head seemed removable for maintenance” (11). As the trek across the city becomes more
dangerous and disrupted, Torval’s presence increasingly aggravates Packer: “He
found that Torval's burly presence was a provocation. He was knotted and
sloped. He had the body of a heavy lifter, appearing to stand and squat
simultaneously. His bearing was one of blunt persuasion, with the earnest
alertness that thickset men bring to a task.
These were hostile incitements” (20).
As with all the humans in Packer’s life, Torval has become devoid of any
value. He is incapable of seeing Torval
as a fellow human being; he also has difficulty regarding himself as human, but
rather sees himself as a ghost on a screen, predictably moving and seeing his
future movements arrayed on the monitors.
Torval’s close proximity to Packer makes
him a threat to his self identity and one that must be eliminated. Packer’s quest for a haircut is also a quest
for change. And, following his own
reasoning that “The logical extension of business is murder” (113); Packer,
having exhausted his finances, moves onto the next step. Failing to find newness or change through the
stun gun, he asks for Torval’s company-provided gun and then intentionally
fires and kills him: “He shot the man. A small white terror of disbelief
flickered in Torval's eye. He fired once and the man went down. All authority
drained out of him. He looked foolish and confused. […]. He had mass but no
flow. This was clear as he lay there dying. He had discipline and a sense of
pace, okay, but no true fluency of movement” (146). Torval is a barrier to Packer in his quest;
by shooting him, Packer removes an obstacle but also seals the envelop of his
downward direction: “Torval was his enemy, a threat to his self-regard. When you pay a man to keep you alive, he
gains a psychic edge. It was a function
of the credible threat and the loss of his company and personal fortune that
Erica could express himself this way.
Torval’s passing cleared the night for deeper confrontation”
(147-48). Packer is not weighed down by
a conscious guilt; in his mind, the removal of Torval was a removal of an
impediment. As Herbert Marcuse notes in One Dimensional Man, “[c]onscience is
absolved by reification, by the general necessity of things” (79). Freed from his financial constraints, Packer
has removed yet another barrier. Both
the stun gun and Torval’s death “clears” Packer’s path and he returns to the
limousine which is ready to transport him to the barbershop.
Late at night,
Packer finally arrives at the barbershop of his old neighborhood. The actions which Packer has taken through
the course of the day all come into focus if viewed as, what Freud calls man’s
internal death drive. “As the source of
negativity and destructiveness” the death drive “performs its dark task in two
ways. It can be turned outwards, externalized as sadistic aggression, or it can
be masochistically internalized, as aggression directed towards the ego” (Carel
3). The death drive has led Packer to
the barbershop to symbolically castrate himself through the process of hair
cutting, because, “[t]hrough narcissistic mechanisms the phallus has now become
the self (hair) and it is this which we are destroying (death-impulse) with our
cuttings and shavings” (Berg 81-82).
Packer is struggling against his death-impulse, or death drive. His actions (i.e. the stun gun, losing the
money, now the haircutting) all point toward a subconscious desire for death:
“DeLillo codes Packer’s trek, both financially and personally, as suicidal from
the start” (
Tired from his nights of insomnia,
the two voices of the men lull Packer to sleep: “In time the voices became a
single vowel sound [like a sacred Aum] and this would be the medium of his
escape, a breathy passage out of the long pall of wakefulness that had marked
so many nights. He began to fade, to drop away, and felt a question trembling
in the dark somewhere. What can be simpler than falling asleep?” Upon awakening, Packer “opened his eyes and
saw himself in the mirror, the room massing around him. He lingered on the
image. […]. There was the foaming head of hair, wild and snarled, impressive in
a way, and he nodded at himself, taking it all in, full face, remembering who
he was” (165). While looking at this
reflection, he begins to remember himself; at the same time, Anthony begins to
tell the story of Packer’s first haircut as a child: “He wouldn’t sit in the
car seat. His father tried to jam him in there. He’s going no no no no. So I
put him right where he’s sitting now. His father pinned him down” (165-66). Perhaps Packer’s mind is makes a connection
between his youth and the reason he has wound up in this chair on this night.
There seems to be a direct correlation between
Anthony’s story and Patrick’s reaction to his own presence in the chair. According to Berg, haircutting can be decoded
“as the original parental castration, now taken up with diligent and repetitive
insistence by the super-ego (the parent successor); or we may choose to delve
to a level deeper than that of the Oedipus Complex and detect here the death
impulse barely disguised as aggression and repetition,” and this also can be
seen as a “destructive aggression against the narcissism of the whole self”
(81). Packer stares at himself in the
mirror during the haircut, and as he watches Anthony trim away the hair, he
perhaps feels this as a castration. He
may see himself changing from the Packer who has made his fortune on the stock
market, to a Packer that has allowed himself to be robbed of his identity. Jane Melman, chief of finance for Packer, had
told him earlier that day that even in the worst of markets he has
“outperformed it, consistently, and you've never been influenced by the sweep
of the crowd. This is one of your gifts” (53).[4] Packer has always been able to make a Bull
market for his investors and himself, even when there was a Bear market. If Packer sees himself as the maker of the
Bull market, a castration would forever prevent him from returning to his
previous status in the financial world.
According to Lacan, “castration undoes the certainty and given character
of visual space” (
Packer eventually finds his way
through the night and comes face to face with his alter-ego, a Jewish[5] man named
Benno Levin. He appears as a forty-one
year old squatter, with a “high forehead” and “scarified hair, hanging in
unwashed strips, thin and limp” (188); he is determined to kill Packer because,
as he says, “You have everything to live and die for. I have nothing and
neither” (194). Packer has alienated
himself from the rest of the world, trying “to attain mastery over ideas and
people” (52), and when confronted by Benno he refuses to see himself in his
“other” but instead views Benno as a stranger.
Everything in Packer’s eyes has a dollar value associated with it; Benno
just falls into the category of a previous employee who failed to fulfill his
potential. What ultimately occurs is
that Packer cannot realize his true other:
The distancing from one’s body and wishes towards ‘an
other’ are compulsively imposed by financial interests. When the real dimension
of one’s body becomes visible, it is disregarded as if it were the body of a
stranger. The body then becomes
something alien, something to be transformed through plastic surgery,
liposuction, tattooing, piercing, burning, cutting, scarification, etc. When the body finally comes back to the
subject, it comes as a property. But if a body can be thought of and handled in
terms of the property model, it is already tragically incompatible with any
kind of intimacy. (da Silva and Lírio 221)[6]
When Levin tells Packer his real name, Richard Sheets,
Packer’s response is simply: “Means nothing to me.” And then, “He said these
words into the face of Richard Sheets. Means nothing to me. He felt a trace of
the old stale pleasure, dropping an offhand remark that makes a person feel
worthless. So small and forgettable a thing that spins such disturbance”
(192). If Packer treated all people as
if they were meaningless, it is understandable that when faced with his double,
he would treat Benno with the same disregard.
In a reaction against his death
drive, Packer attempts to shoot Benno with the last round in a gun given to him
by the barber. Instead, he ironically
shoots his own hand: “He looked at Benno and squeezed the trigger. He realized
the gun had one round left just about the time it fired, the briefest instant
before, way too late to matter. The shot blew a hole in the middle of his hand”
(197). Packer’s last gunshot creates a
Hasma of his own hand, a superstitious symbol intended to ward off the evil
eye. And, if Benno is Packer’s
alter-ego, then the image he had seen of himself in the barbershop mirror is
his own emptiness staring back at him.
Packer knows that there is no escape for him, just as Benno says that he
must shoot Packer because “there’s no life for me unless I do this” (201). After Packer is shot, he “imagined his wife,
his widow, shaving her head, perhaps, in response to his death” (208), and he
realizes that this is the inevitable end of his death impulse, and that “[m]aybe
he didn’t want that life after all, starting over broke” (209). For Packer, even as he is bleeding out his
life, he can only think that he has become a valueless object and in his last
moments his thoughts are on the posthumous events that may surround his burial.
In
Conclusion: It Was All Just To Keep the Game Going
What happens to
Eric Packer that he is able to leave the barber shop with an incomplete
haircut? An action, needless to say, that Patrick Bateman would never conceive
of doing. It is possible that sitting in
the barbershop chair, looking into the mirror, Packer comes to a realization,
or awakening, and instead of continuing to feed into his death drive he must
assert himself and go face the “credible threat” on his life. This threat turns out to be brought on by his
financial isolations—through accumulation of meaningless amounts of money—and
he is unable to remain in touch with the signs that signify value to human
existence. He exists in a world of
digital finances, and when Benno Levin kills him and searches the body, he
finds Packer lacking anything of value: “After I turned him [Packer] over I
went through his pockets and found nothing. One of his pockets was torn. He had
a crusty purple wound on his head, not that I am interested in description. I
am interested in money. I was looking for money. He had one half a haircut but
not the other…” (DeLillo 57). Packer’s
haircut would certainly garner a harsh reaction from Bateman, and he would likely
note that it is “A haircut that’s bad because it’s cheap” (Ellis 20).
In the world of digital money in which Packer lives, there is very
little likelihood that Benno would find tangible money on his persons.
Patrick Bateman
does not have the luxury of death. As
the oft quoted last line of the novel states: “This is not an exit” (384);
Bateman is trapped in his world of insanity and materialism. Only once does he truly come close to having
his world overturned by an external force.
Riding one day in a taxi, the driver recognizes Bateman as the man who
attacked a fellow taxi driver the year before.
Taking him out to an abandoned pier, the driver robs Bateman at gun
point. After this event, Bateman makes
his way back into the city:
While walking back to the highway I stop, choke back a
sob, my throat tightens. “I just want to…” Facing the skyline, through all the
baby talk, I murmur, “keep the game going.” As I stand, frozen in position, an
old woman emerges behind a Threepenny
Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she’s homeless and begging,
hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a
shaking red hand. “Oh will you please go away?” I sigh. She tells me to get a
haircut. (379)
Both Packer and Bateman come to
their end, or near end, at gunpoint and both are robbed by someone they don’t
know, but who knows them. The
significance of this demonstrates how far removed both characters are from the
world around them. Their only remote
connection is through their ever growing hair, and whether they meet or fail to
meet the expectations of their surrounding world. Packer’s partial haircut and Bateman’s
unmanaged hair becomes signifiers of the disorder of their inner life. This disorder results from the emptiness with
which they have surrounded themselves in the meaninglessness of a postmodern
society of consumerism and narcissism.
The castration fear relating to haircutting influences both men. For Bateman, if his hair is not absolutely
perfect he fears castration from his social world which is desperately needed
to feed his narcissism. Packer’s fear of
castration results from the possibility of being removed forever from the
financial world. In each case, hair
symbolizes the confinements of American culture and society which heavily
influences the actions of both men.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 8, September - December
2011, ISSN 1552-5112
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Notes