Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho

The 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic thriller, Psycho and the psychological thriller novel, The Talented Mr.Ripley by notable American author Patricia Highsmith both challenge the audience’s perception of the noir protagonist through pronounced exploration controversial themes via the. Through the use of a range of stylistic features, the authors aim to blur the line between innocence and guilt in order to develop a false sense of empathy for the protagonists Tom Ripley and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). Characterisation of both of these protagonists, used in a way that forces the audience to connect with them and adopt an controversial point of view, transforms the audiences perception of how the murderer of a psychological thriller should behave. Hitchcock uses

He remarks on how most Americans seem much more interested in what goes on in the daily lives of celebrities and reality television, as opposed to the detrimental health of the nation, the “bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.” He goes on to compares Americans to psychopaths, stating that they share many similar traits like an incapacity for feeling guilt or remorse, grandiosity and self-importance, and a need for constant stimulation. We Americans are only concerned with ourselves, we view fame and fortune as the ultimate goal and have no qualms with stepping over friends and family to achieve it. With consumers in this state of mind, media and corporations make billions of dollars by helping assure everyone that we don't have to worry about others, that “everything is

In the Movie, American Psycho, Patrick Bateman demonstrate challenges to identify his unique type of personality theories. The purpose of this essay is to review a selected film as a Psychology student, and discuss it from a psychological perspective. Also in this paper providing a diagnosis for a character in the movie and discuss the behaviors that support the selected diagnosis, and to explain and discuss the mental illness depicted in the film.

Patrick Bateman is a wealthy investment banker living in Manhattan in the late 1980s. His life revolves around dining at trendy restaurants while keeping up appearances for his fiancée, Evelyn, and for his circle of wealthy and shallow associates, most of whom he dislikes. Bateman describes the materialistic nature of his lifestyle: his daily morning exercise and beautification routine, his music collection including performers such

Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut chooses to use special literary techniques that better explain his own encounters in war as well as help his readers bare the horridness of war. Vonnegut adds black humor in his text to benefit readers as well as “an author-as-character” perspective to set barriers and help protect his own memories in the war. Without adding these two specific devices, Vonnegut could possibly have lost reader’s interests in the book or lost his own interest in writing the book.

discusses the image of the ''Macho mans'' as an ideal for the American people. Throughout his

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.

This film presents a worldview of business that drips with materialism. The late 80’s was a fairly prosperous time for America. For the characters represented in the film, success was measured by how nice your apartment was, what types of suits you wore, and where you had dinner reservations for the evening. According to literary critic Jeffrey W. Hunter (2000), American Psycho is largely a critique of the "shallow and vicious aspects of capitalism. The characters are predominantly concerned with material gain and superficial appearances, traits indicative of a postmodern world in which the 'surface ' reigns supreme.”

Similarly to Ellis in American Psycho, Sloan Wilson suggests the harmful essence of the ambitious quest for riches in America first, by connecting money and material to violence in a more realistic and believable sense. Where Bret Easton Ellis uses bloody caricature of the wealthy to criticize the “American Dream,” Sloan Wilson takes a different approach, describing a realistic domain that more accurately reflects the lives of the middle class. In The Man in The Gray Flannel Suit, Tom Rath races through his mind searching for impressive stats to share with his possible future employer, then admitting, “Another statistical fact came to him then, a fact which he knew would be ridiculously melodramatic to put into an application for a job a

Coming from an “unconventional” background, George Saunders is readily able to relate to the circumstances the everyday working laborer goes through (Wylie). However, Saunders has an advantage to spread out his ideas and concerns about life in the U.S. via his short stories and novellas. Because of neoliberalism and capitalism and its correlation to the huge wealth gap in the U.S. Saunders focuses his protagonists’ view from a proletariat standpoint, allowing the reader to see the life of consumerism has impacted our society. Saunders does not use conventional methods to portray this reality. Instead, Saunders emphasizes on the “absence” of certain moral human characteristics in order to take

The future Americans in the novel reflect how Americans currently are today, such as how most citizens do not know how their government works, but would know more about popular products for entertainment soon to be available. Bachelder brings this issue to focus in his novel how Americans only become more and more self-absorbed in their own lives and their properties, and less in touch with the reality that surrounds

Bret Easton Ellis's dark and violent burlesque of America in the 1980s is taken to

Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian

Harron’s production of American Psycho being a black comedy is necessary when taking into consideration of the film being accepted into society. Being able to laugh at Christian Bale during his performance as Ellis’ unstable character Patrick Bateman helps the audience overlook the murders taking place and be drawn into Bateman’s humorous character, which is innocently a result of the times.

Entrails torn from the body with bare hands, eyes gouged out with razor blades, battery cables, rats borrowing inside the human body, power drills to the face, cannibalism, credit cards, business cards, Dorsia, Testoni, Armani, Wall Street; all of these things are Patrick Bateman’s world. The only difference between Bateman and anybody else is what is repulsive to Bateman and what is repulsive to the rest of the world. Bateman has great interest in the upper class life, fashions, and social existence, but at the same time he is, at times, sickened by the constant struggle to be one up on everybody else. On the other hand Bateman’s nightlife reveals a side of him never seen during the day. Bateman is relaxed, impulsive, and confident