Bodies as Landscapes in American Psycho

In American Psycho, however, women’s bodies have been transformed into landscape-like obstacles blocking Christie’s escape. Elizabeth becomes a landscape painted in blood after Bateman begins devouring her flesh. When Christie runs from the room, slamming the mirrored door behind her, we see Elizabeth writhing in pain on the bed. Christie meets other human obstacles as she runs down a darkened hallway, frantically opening doors, looking for an escape from a chainsaw’s roar coming from the bedroom. She opens a closet where she finds two dead women hanging inside. In another dark room, she sees a head on the top of a television. 

As she runs, Christie trips over Elizabeth's body, now halfway in the bathtub. Still screaming, Christie makes it out the front door and runs down the hall, banging on doors and pushing elevator buttons until she sees the stairwell and races for it. Bateman follows, revving the chainsaw. When he leans over the railing, aims the chainsaw at her and drops it, the stairwell looks like a canyon, and after the chainsaw stabs her, Christie’s sprawled body seems to melt into the floor.

Jean, on the other hand, survives despite the woman’s head visible in the freezer when Bateman offers her some sorbet. Although it is Evelyn’s phone call that disrupts Bateman’s attempt to shoot her with a nail gun, Jean’s desires for self-preservation saves her. When Bateman asks her if she wants to get hurt, Jean says no, “I don’t want to get bruised” and leaves, the only possible escape from gendered exploitation and a Yuppie Wendigo in American Psycho.

Women's Bodies and Wendigo in American Psycho

Women’s bodies also become landscapes captured by Bateman and his video camera in several scenes in American Psycho, as upper-class sex objects or disenfranchised female prey. Bates’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) is the most prominent of the upper-class women Bates exploits in the film. Evelyn seems powerless in voiceovers Bates provides, declaring with annoyance, “I'm trying to listen to the new George Michael tape, but Evelyn – my supposed fiancée-keeps buzzing in my ear.” 

Although Evelyn rejects Bateman’s sexual advances, choosing to watch the Home Shopping Network instead, in the end he tells her “You're just not terribly important to me” and leaves her alone to “return videotapes.” As a rich daughter of a prominent family, Evelyn could provide the status symbol Bates at least initially craves, but ultimately, Bates chooses a more literal form of Wendigo/wetiko, not only consuming resources and identities, but bodies as well.

Even though women’s bodies become territories for Bateman in the film, as Stephen Holden of The New York Times asserts, “compared with … robotic cobras [such as Bateman], the women are almost poignantly human.” Christie (Cara Seymour), a streetwalker Bateman hires, and Jean, Bateman’s secretary, most explicitly highlight this connection between women’s bodies and landscapes. Bateman hires Christie to participate in videotaped sessions. She survives the first, leaving badly bruised and bleeding after an off-screen offensive that includes a coat hanger stored in an armoire drawer. She initially refuses a second encounter, but when he waves a huge wad of bills out the car window, she relents in desperation. 

Back at his apartment, Bates videotapes himself with Christie and a second woman, a model socialite, Elizabeth (Guinevere Turner). Christie shuts her eyes and grimly concentrates on her performance, turning her head every so often to check the progress of her partners promoting David Eldridge’s suggestion that the “camera … delivers a ‘moral gaze.’” Although Eldridge asserts that “the only object in the film that could be described as pornographic is Bateman himself, fetishized in the display of Christian Bale’s buff body” (24), the rest of the scene responds explicitly to Bateman’s viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

American Psycho and American Frontiers

American Frontiers in American Psycho

Although the female body primarily bears the brunt of masculine exploitation in American Psycho, Bateman also misuses more traditional frontiers where cultures clash and both a land and its people are threatened. As David Eldridge reiterates, Bateman’s “main victims are [according to Faye Weldon] ‘the powerless, the poor, the wretched,’ those who ‘don’t rate’ in Reaganite America” (23). The same could be said of those exploited at a distance.

In a conversation with friends in one of the many restaurants cited in the film, for example, Bateman challenges his colleague Timothy Bryce (Justin Theroux) about the extent of the massacres in Sri Lanka. Bateman exclaims, “There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Sure our foreign policy is important, but there are more pressing problems at hand.” He then delineates several more potentially exploitative clashes: “Well, we have to end apartheid for one. …We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women.”

When Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), a private investigator, interviews Bateman about the last time he saw Paul Owen, one of Bateman’s victims, Bateman again invokes frontiers, claiming, “We had … gone to a new musical called … Oh Africa, Brave Africa. It was…a laugh riot … and that's about it. I think we had dinner at Orso's. No, Petaluma. No, Orso's.” Both these examples connect the consumption of food with the figurative consumption of cultures, updating the American frontier in a late 20^th century upper class economy. They also introduce an indictment of Wendigo/wetiko that Bateman reifies on the bodies of his victims.

American Psycho (2000) and Wendigo

American Psycho (2000) illuminates expanded definitions of frontier constructed on similar dichotomies found in Ravenous: colonizer/colonized, masculine/feminine, nature/culture, and Wendigo or wetiko/sustainability. According to Annette Kolodny, a frontier, and the literature and film that embody it, “may be identified by its encoding of some specifiable first moment in the evolving dialogue between different cultures and languages and their engagement with one another and with the physical terrain” (Lay of the Land 13). Kolodny’s definition of frontier expands it beyond traditional views of the American West to include multiple collisions between “a currently indigenous population and at least one group of newcomers or ‘intruders’” (13). Despite their contemporary contexts, American Psycho highlights similar collisions from a gendered perspective.

Scholars examining Mary Harron’ film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho primarily explore how the film plays with and responds to genre expectations, with a nod to Patrick Bateman’s (Christian Bale) identity construction and status as an unreliable narrator. David Eldridge’s “The Generic American Psycho,” for example, asserts that “the power of genre classifications was a constant concern” in both novel and film (19). David Robinson’s “The Unattainable Narrative: Identity, Consumerism and the Slasher Film in Mary Harron’s American Psycho” also highlights the film’s genre responses, asserting that the film “borrows the horror genre’s trademark self-consciousness and takes it to a new level, marrying the genre to a larger body of cultural narratives, including those of television, pop musing, news media, and advertising” (26). These multiple cultural narratives also provide fodder for Bates’ identity construction as both venture capitalist and real or imagined cannibal serial killer.

We assert, however, that in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New York investment banking executive negotiates a post-colonial frontier in which women become landscapes to exploit, annihilate, and cannibalize, just as he and his colleagues consume material culture and collide with those who provide it. Although Bateman hides what could be psychopathology from his co-workers and friends and dives deeper into a deviant world like that described in Wendigo mythology, his aberrant responses to the 1990s Yuppie world of excess merely amplify theirs. According to Jennifer Brown, in American Psycho “the cannibal has become the reviled image of overindulgence, overspending, and overexploitation of resources” (214), more “us” than “them.” As a contemporary Wendigo, Bateman bumps up against the feminine underclass on Wall Street, negotiating a modern frontier without the sanity Forbes prescribes. Only Jean (Chloë Sevigny), Bateman’s secretary, survives the crash.

Ravenous and Wendigo, continued

In Antonia Bird's Ravenous, Colqhoun’s (Robert Carlyle) cannibal story prompts George to recount the Wendigo myth, highlighting Colqhoun’s literal cannibalism as well as the imperial repercussions his journey westward represents. As Danette DiMarco articulates so well in her “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous,” the film “is an appropriative text that invokes the Wendigo myth and evaluates cannibalistic discourse more broadly in order to critique Western cultural crisis” (134). 

Through the figure of the Wendigo, the film elucidates a direct relationship between literal cannibalism and figurative consumption of the American frontier Jack D. Forbes calls this figure the wetiko disease, “the disease of exploitation” (xix). According to Forbes, wetiko is a Cree term (windigo in Ojibway, wintiko in Powhatan) which refers to a cannibal or, more specifically, to an evil person or spirit who terrorizes other creatures by means of terrible evil acts, including cannibalism” (24). 

For Forbes, “imperialism and exploitation are forms of cannibalism and, in fact, are precisely those forms of cannibalism which are most diabolical or evil” (24). Jennifer Brown reinforces this connection between imperialism and cannibalism in Ravenous, asserting “Rather than the colonial use of cannibalism as tag of the savage, it is the white man who is barbaric and the Native American who is calm, intelligent, and reminds us that ‘whites eat the body of Christ.’” (226).

In Ravenous, Colqhoun and Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) of Fort Spencer illustrate conflicting responses to both the frontier myth and Wendigo. To save the land and its people, Wendigo/colonizer must die. 

Ravenous Wendigo Analysis 1

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. 

The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it. 

Frostbitten and famished, Colqhoun provides the narrative that transforms Ravenous from Western to horror. Colquhoun’s Westward movement story first connects him with the Manifest Destiny of both the Mexican-American War and the westward movement. According to Colqhoun,

We left in April. Six of us in all. Mr. MacCready and his wife, from Ireland. Mr. Janus, from Virginia, I believe … with his servant, Jones. Myself - I'm from Scotland. And our guide … a military man, coincidently. Colonel Ives. A Detestable man … and a most disastrous guide. He professed to know a new, shorter route through the Nevada's. Quite a route that was. Longer than the known one … and impossible to travel. We worked … very, very hard. By the time of the first snowfall we were still a hundred miles from this place. That was November.

When the journey from Virginia to California is disrupted by the horrific winter conditions of the Sierra Madres, however, their pioneering spirit transforms to the Wendigo to which it is compared:

Preceding in the snow was futile. We took shelter in a cave. Decided to wait until the storm had passed. But the storm did not pass. The trails soon became impassable, and we had run out of food. …We remained famished. The day that Jones died I was out collecting wood. He had expired from malnourishment. And when I returned, the others were cooking his legs for dinner. Would I have stopped it had I been there? I don't know. But I must say, when I stepped inside that cave … the smell of meat cooking … I thanked the Lord. I thanked the Lord. And then things got out of hand. I ate sparingly. Others did not. The meat did not last us a week and we were soon hungry again only, this time our hunger was different. More severe, savage.

Colqhoun embodies and embraces Wendigo--both literally as cannibal and figuratively as colonizer in frontier America. 

Ravenous and the Frontier Myth

In a pivotal scene in Antonia Bird’s cannibal Western, Ravenous (1999), F. W. Colqhoun (Robert Carlyle), a stranger suffering from frostbite and seeking solace in the California fort at the center of the film admits he survived a lost wagon train journey from Virginia by feeding on the travelers who “expired from malnourishment.” Instead of offering sympathy, however, the fort’s American Indian guide, George (Joseph Runningfox), grows anxious and calls him Wendigo, showing the fort’s commander, Colonel Hart (Jeffrey Jones) a Wendigo Ojibwa myth illustrated on a blanket. According to the myth, when a man eats another’s flesh, usually an enemy, he steals his strength, his essence, his spirit, so that his hunger becomes craven and insatiable. The more he eats, the more he wants, and the stronger he becomes. For George, when men become cannibals, they become Wendigo, superhuman monsters with insatiable appetites. In the context of the westward movement Colqhoun embodies, Wendigo may also coincide with the white man’s voracious hunger for land.

Set in 1847, immediately after the Mexican-American War and right before the California gold rush, Ravenous explicitly addresses the Wendigo cannibal myth. In Ravenous Wendigo is both reality and metaphor for Manifest Destiny and the environmental and human exploitation that accompanies it. Inspired by the Donner party incident of the same year and the trial of 1870s cannibal prospector Alfred G.Packer, the film follows Capt. John Boyd (Guy Pearce) to Fort Spencer, a desolate military outpost in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He has been banished because he is viewed as a coward; yet he is also honored as a hero because he bravely defeated a Mexican fort after ingesting the blood of his peers. His commander General Slauson (John Spencer) belittles this bravery, however. After watching Boyd’s inability to consume a large steak at a victory dinner, he declares, “You’re no hero. I want you as far from my company as possible.”

In cannibal horror films like Ravenous, gendered bodies and the volatile agents of the material world they inhabit may become violently intertwined. At Fort Spencer, Boyd joins a group of misfits with little to do on this empty range: Hart, the commanding officer; Toffler (Jeremy Davies), the company chaplain; Knox (Stephen Spinella), the drunken doctor; Reich (Neal McDonough), the only real soldier of the group; Cleaves (David Arquette), the heavily medicated camp cook; and George and his sister Martha (Sheila Tousey), the troops’ Indian guides. The dull life they maintain in this wilderness fort is shattered, however, when Colqhoun/Colonel Ives arrives and introduces cannibalism and the Wendigo myth into the plot. Colqhoun also gives a name to the cravings Boyd so wishes to end and amplifies the impact of gender on its manifestation. Although an emasculated Boyd resists Wendigo, and Martha escapes its effects, Colqhoun embraces it.