American Psycho, American Censorship, and the Dahmer Case

Pornography is violence we cannot bear to confront — not a complete definition, but one serviceable to our own time at least. By such a standard, the pornographic may almost be regarded as a nul category these days. To be sure, we are busily censoring all sorts of ideas under the rubric of correctness, but we are flooded — in film and video, in advertising, and not least in print — with images of the most graphic, grinding, pulverizing violence ; it has become a kind of mobile decor, moving with us from telescreen to billboard to tabloid photo. Only during the Gulf War did the government feel an obligation to protect our sensibilities by any image suggesting actual violence : a needless no doubt, in view of the evident public thirst for it.

All of this makes the case of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho particularly compelling. Simon & Schuster paid $ 300,000 for the manuscript, with the clear hope of acquiring a property that would launch Ellis into the kind of literary stardom that pays the rent in

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