Whitney Houston and American Psycho

- a marriage made in the 80s

It might seem today that there are people born to war-torn, aids-ravaged nations with a higher life expectancy than the mega-stars of the music industry. Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, and now Whitney Houston, is to name but a few of those who've recently come to a self-destructive, premature demise. And with each death there of course follows the predictable, violently-opposed responses. On the one hand, there are those who hold dear the achievements of their star, looking upon the self-destructive addictions and chaotic relationships as tragic mistakes. And on the other, opposing such sentimental remembrances, is the druggy-bitch-had-it-coming brigade, ghoulishly revelling in the star's 'deserved' fall from grace; their tweeters and yellow-top columnists alike expressing much the same puerile sentiments.

Though of course, far more interesting than such moral and aesthetic wranglings is the question as to why we've such heavy investment in our mega-stars to begin with. And not just as to the question as to why we've the the need of such mega-stars generally, but also as to what the rise and fall of each particular celebrity tells us about the specific cultural needs of the world that elevated them to stardom. And with Whitney, the most recent mega-star to have fallen from grace, the culture in question is of course that of the 1980s. And it is the gambit of this article that the function of Whitney in Brett Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho' gives us the vital clue as to understanding that social world's investment in her.

Video link to Patrick Bateman on Whitney Houston

The scene posted is one of the most brilliantly comic of the film, and points too to the greatness of the film adaptation of the novel; the Whitney Houston speech being an interior monologue in the book, but is here brilliantly scripted into a scene with Bateman and two of his victims. Why then is the scene so comic? Why does the intoxicated Elizabeth laugh as Bateman delivers a treatise on the greatness of Whitney's top hit, The Greatest Love of All? It is because she knows, as we do, that by day he lives within the ruthless 1980s world of Wall Street, in Mergers and Acquisitions- or, Murders and Executions as Bateman brazenly tells a barmaid in another scene. Bateman's world is that of a poisonously competitive world where rampant, top-end consumerism is the badge of success; a world away from the love of Whitney's theme. So too are the cold electronic beats that were the back-track to Bateman's world of greed in flagrant incongruity with his giving a tender treatise on a singer from the tradition of gospel, soul and jazz. But there is another, yet darker side to the comic effect. We know too that he has surely brought the girls back to his apartment so as to sexually assault and murder them. Indeed, the hooker Christie, who looks peculiarly on at him as he affirms his passion for Whitney, is only there because Bateman has promised her money for plastic surgery so as to cover up the damage caused by his last orgy having ended with her being cut with the sharpened end of a steel coat-hanger. With Christie and our own knowledge then, the speech takes on a rather blacker comic hue.

Why then does Bateman identify with The greatest love of all. In his reply to Elisabeth's puzzlement the reason ought to be clear- that it is just because 'it is impossible in this world we live in to empathise with others'- that he identifies with the message of Whitney's song. That in spite of such impossibility of empathising with others, 'we can always empathise with ourselves'. That is where we find 'the greatest love of all' is, according to Whitney, 'inside of me'. So though Bateman exists within the vicious world of 1980s Wall Street by day, supplemented by the excesses of his orgies of sex and violence by night, he still hopes to find some love- some transcendence- there inside himself. That in spite of all else, he hopes that the love he finds in himself might mean that 'it is not too late to better ourselves', 'to act kinder'. Or in the context of the scene, a hope that might perhaps allow him to spare the lives of the already intoxicated girls upon the sofa....

....But yet Whitney's 'greatest love' doesn't save the girls from Bateman. Why? Well, whilst we might agree with Bateman that Whitney promises a certain transcendence from a world that robs him of all empathy, of all love, of his fellow man. But yet that song must come to an end. He must return to the world where such transcendence can only ever be a fragmentary escape- something bought as a mere commodity within that world like any other. That in fact, loving himself is made impossible by the same mechanism that makes loving his fellow man impossible. An impossibility owing to the fact that his world only runs in so far as he and his colleagues are in brutal competition with one another. In so far as they hate each other. Each must hate the successful for the success that transforms their own lives into failures. And each must in turn hate the failures because to empathise with them could only weaken their will to the top- empathy as such is ideologically impossible in that world. But why does this imply that such a man cannot love himself through Whitney's transcendence from that world devoid of empathy and love for others? It is because the only traits that seem to distinguish people from their more successful colleagues are the barely perceptible upgrades in the things that they themselves identify with. In the world of American Psycho, people are always confusing one executive with another, but yet at the same time they are always squabbling over the small differences between their status symbols. Hence Bateman is horrified that his more successful rival, Paul Allen, has much the same apartment as he himself has, only with a better view of the park. Or in another iconic scene of the film, Bateman becomes feverish at the slightly better quality of Allen's business card, otherwise identical to his own.

In short, Brett Easton Ellis makes us see why the very cause of the need for Whitney's self-love in its transcendence from the cut-throat 1980s world, is the very thing that makes it an impossibility. Self-love is not an option in a world where we must hate a fellow man who is all but indiscernible from us but for small advantages in things that we ourselves aspire to. It is thereby a world whose hatred of others implies self-hatred- a realisation that can be stayed only by hating those others and the world in general in a yet more energetic, violent form. Patrick's self-hatred implied in the hatred of his colleagues is the motor that leads him to lurch between outward destructive violence and inward self-annihilation- this is the dynamic at the heat of Easton Ellis's masterpiece.

And returning to Whitney, we might note that she herself always admitted to suffering from the cut-throat world of the music industry. So perhaps a depressing implication of her own demise suggests that even the most talented preachers of transcending the hatred of the world through self-love, struggle to live by their own preaching within such a world....