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Bret Easton Ellis Talks Modern Day Patrick Bateman Before ‘American Psycho’ Broadway Opening

Ben Walker is getting ready slay them on Broadway in American Psycho the Musical. Walker is playing Patrick Bateman, the role made famous by Christian Bale in the Recently, author Bret Easton Ellis addressed a question that has been plaguing fans of American Psycho for decades. That question is where is Patrick Bateman now?

Bret Easton Ellis recently penned an easy in Town & Country about the fate of Patrick Bateman:

“After 25 years I'm occasionally and increasingly asked by readers of a book I published in 1991 called American Psycho (later made into a movie in 2000) about where its narrator, Patrick Bateman, would be now. This question has become even more prevalent lately, on the book's 25th anniversary, either at appearances and signings or on social media, usually while fans share this year's Halloween costume pic--almost always the blood-splattered sheer slicker that Christian Bale's Bateman wears in the film as he kills supposed Pierce & Pierce rival Paul Allen (Jared Leto) with an ax to the head. In particular they wonder where the Wall Street yuppie and serial killer, haunting the late '80s streets and nightclubs and restaurants of Manhattan, would be residing if he were recreated and resituated in 2016.”

After noting Bateman’s fictitious address, Ellis goes a little deeper, adding:

“If you read the book carefully and have a sense of Manhattan geography, you know that Bateman's sleek and minimalist Upper West Side apartment has an imaginary address. This suggests that Bateman might not be a completely reliable narrator, that perhaps he's a ghost, an idea, a summing up of the values of that particular decade filtered through my '80s literary sensibility: moneyed, beautifully attired, impossibly groomed and handsome, morally bankrupt, totally isolated and filled with rage, a gorgeously dressed and empty thing, a young and directionless mannequin hoping that someone, anyone, will save him from himself. All of this happens during the end years of the Reagan '80s.”

This is just a tiny taste of the insight that Ellis shared. You can and should read his full essay here.

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