(Credits: Far Out / Lionsgate Films)

There exists an idea of the music journalist as some kind of abstraction. We sit at desks, listen to albums, judge them, and sometimes lurk in the crowded pit at gigs. You can shake our hands, see that we’re real, and maybe even get a sense of our varied interests—but we’re just people. Or rather, just an entity. Easily replaced, it seems, by a fictional figure in Bret Easton Ellis’ most twisted psychological horror novel, American Psycho.

“I simply am not there,” Patrick Bateman, Ellis’ protagonist, states in the book, and the majority of the reading experience is spent questioning how true that is. While the movie makes everything slightly more literal as the viewer sees Bateman’s crazy, bloody crimes on the screen, the book is more abstract. Throughout the 383 pages of the 1991 novel, there is no actual answer as to whether the man is doing any of these things. He gets away with it all with not even a risk or a semblance of consequence. Things seem to get cleared up and cleaned up without effort; figures disappear but then seem to reappear. 

There’s also the matter of the million names Bateman is called, leaving the reader utterly unsure who is real and what the man is really doing. But he tells you all of that: “There is no real me, only an entity, something illusory,” he monologues, adding, “Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being.”

But through it all, one personality trait comes through clearly and certain about Bateman—the man loves music. In the 2000 movie adaptation, that’s shown in little glimmering details, mostly to bring comic relief to the dark flick. Christian Bale is there dancing around to ‘Hip To Be Square’ before brandishing an axe. Bateman’s big stereo setup in the film is more just a further flex of his wealth and his neuroticism over being and having the best. 

In the novel, though, there’s more to it. Music isn’t just a soundtrack or a detail; it’s often an all-consuming thought. Ellis dedicates entire chapters to Bateman stepping into the role of a music journalist, leaving me to read it and wonder if I should be taking notes.

At one point, he offers an entire career overview of Genesis, contemplating Peter Gabriel’s departure and the growing influence of Phil Collins. He declares that their earlier music was “too intellectual,” but that either way, “Genesis is still the best, most exciting band to come out of England in the 1980s.”

Whitney Houston gets the same treatment as Bateman, who narrates a thorough analysis of her work, giving a near track-by-track rundown of her records and rounding it off with perhaps the most music journalistic phrase ever: “We can expect new things from Whitney […], but even if we didn’t, she would remain the most exciting and original Black jazz voice of her generation.”

While a small moment in the film, Huey Lewis and the News get a whole chapter in the book. Bateman pauses trying to cook and eat the bodies of his victims or putting rats inside people to contemplate instead just how square the band are and if their public persona does their music justice. He monologues about them for eight whole pages, a type of op-ed that any editor would be calling for a hearty cut down of the word count.

However, if there’s one musical moment the film should’ve included, and that Luca Guadagnino will hopefully see its worth in his version, it is the bizarre scenario when Bateman, who canonically hates live music, goes to a U2 concert and seemingly falls in love with Bono.

“Bono has now moved across the stage, following me to my seat, and he’s staring into my eyes, kneeling at the edge of the stage,” Bateman narrates, suddenly enamoured. “Suddenly, I get this tremendous surge of feeling, this rush of knowledge and my own heart beats faster because of this, and it’s not impossible to believe that an invisible cord attached to Bono has now encircled me, and now the audience disappears, and the music slows down, gets softer, and it’s just Bono onstage—the stadium’s deserted, the band fades away…”

Maybe this is where Patrick Bateman, the music journalist, falters because if I had filed that in a live review, I’d probably be called unprofessional for essentially writing a romance fanfiction between me and the lead singer.