Stranger-Intimacy and Stranger Danger

            Mark Seltzer’s essay, “The Serial Killer as a Type of Person”, was of particular interest to me this week because of my morbid fascination with all things murderous.

            Shortly after reading Mark Seltzer’s essay, “The Serial Killer as a Type of Person”, I found an article online that was eerily relevant. Town and Country posted an essay titled, “American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis Tells Us Where Patrick Bateman Would Be Today”. American Psycho was published in 1991 and was released as a film 2000. It tells the story of Wall Street business man Patrick Bateman, who is a serial murdered and rapist. Both the film and the book are set in the 80s and reflect on that decade’s culture of decadence and materialism, and deal with questions of identity and individuality. Bateman kills a rival business man, but gets away with the murder (and his numerous other ones) because of peoples’ inability to distinguish their peers from one another. The reader/viewer is also left questioning whether Bateman is a reliable narrator; has he actually committed all of his crimes, or are they mere vivid fantasies?

            In the Town and Country essay, Bret Easton Ellis discusses where he could see Bateman today. Ellis could imagine Bateman in Tribeca or the Hamptons “[thriving in]…the advent of new technologies that could have aided him in his ghoulish obsession with murder, execution, and torture—and in ways to record them.” Ellis could also see Bateman in modern-day Silicon Valley, “palling around with Zuckerberg…, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder”. Ellis expresses that it’s difficult to imagine Bateman living in any other time period because of how the character is emotionally tied to the 80s and that culture. Yet regardless of what time Ellis imagines Bateman living in, Ellis always makes a connection between the character and the contemporary technologies. In the book/film, Bateman uses an at-home video camera tripod to film himself and two prostitutes. The film also shows Bateman making frequent use of a Walkman and a cell phone—in all its old-school, comically huge glory. In his essay, Ellis ponders, “Would [Bateman] 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.” He goes on to say, “The idea of Patrick’s obsession with himself, with his likes and dislikes and his detailing—curating—everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches, has certainly reached a new apotheosis. In many ways the text of American Psycho is one man’s ultimate series of selfies.”

           Though the majority of Ellis’s essay focuses on the culture of the 1980s and what the novel’s themes mean personally to the author, the sections where he discusses Bateman’s fascination with technology are the most salient for me and tie in well with the claims that Seltzer makes in his own essay. Seltzer uses the term ‘stranger-intimacy’ to discuss the ways in which a serial killer might construct himself. This idea behind stranger-intimacy is all the more relevant today with the popularity of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and the countless other forms of social media in existence. People freely share intimate details of their lives online, easily accessible for anyone to view. Online friendships develop in which the friends have never actually met in person, but are familiar with every detail of each other’s life. Seltzer’s stranger-intimacy may have its origins in talk radio, but has reached its apex with social media.

Ellis, Bret Easton. “American Psycho Author Bret Easton Ellis Tells Us Where Patrick Bateman Would Be Today.” Town and Country. Hearst Communications, Inc, n.d. Web. 27 February 2016.