Next month marks the 25th anniversary of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 existentialist novel American Psycho.
The book was such an innovative masterpiece that it was adapted into a film in 2000, starring Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon and Jared Leto.
The film follows the life of successful Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman, whose pursuit of the American Dream leads to anxiety, psychopathy and lots of murder.
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Speaking to to Town & Country Magazine, Ellis revealed who Patrick Bateman's character would be if he lived in modern times.
He told them:
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"So what would I tell fans who ask me where Patrick Bateman would be now, as if he were actually alive, tactile, wandering through our world in flesh and blood?
"For a while during the mid- to late '90s-at the height of the dotcom bubble, when Manhattan seemed even more absurdly decadent than it did in 1987, before Black Monday-it was a possibility that Bateman, if the book had been moved up a decade, would have been the founder of a number of dotcoms."
Ellis went on:
"And sometimes I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder. Certainly he could also just as easily be a hedge-funder in New York: Patrick Bateman begets Bill Ackman and Daniel Loeb."
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I have to disagree with the author on this. Bateman was very, very stylish. I doubt he'd want to be seen with Zuckerberg in those shit t-shirts he wears every single day.
Ellis ended by questioning whether or not Bateman would even be a murderer in today's society, considering we have cameras on every corner.
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"Would better criminology forensics (not to mention Big Brother cameras on virtually every corner) allow him to get away with the murders he tells the reader he committed, or would his need to express his rage take other forms? For example, would he be using social media-as a troll using fake avatars? Would he have a Twitter account bragging about his accomplishments? Would he be using Instagram, showcasing his wealth, his abs, his potential victims? Possibly."
So there you have it. If one of the most captivating protagonists in literary history was alive today, he could well just be another keyboard warrior.
Fascinating.
Lead image credit: Universal Studios