American Psycho and the Post Modern Self----9/2/10

In this week’s reading, the author discusses identity. We all think that we have a handle on who we are. If asked today, who are you? We like to think that we could answer confidently and truhfully without any hesitation. Yet Barker suggests that perhaps the identity is not some entity created out of thin air and brought to fruition by yourself, with you being the biggest influence on your identity. But, that maybe identity pre-exists us. Anti-essentialist philosophy says that our identity is “culture specific”. That is to say that at the time of your birth the dominant culture, and the time and place that you live are already deciding what exactly your identity within your culture will be.




I must admit I found this all a bit “heady” and at times difficult to understand. But perhaps I was attempting to defend my own identity. That sense of self that I have always felt I determined for myself. I did not want society and its language to have such a hold on me that even though I think I have decided who I am; in actuality society had already made that decision for me.



Another aspect of identity is the concept of the post-modern self. The post-modern self is a socially constructed self comprised of multiple identities. This post-modern self is many things at many times depending upon what society requires of it. In class we watched a few scenes from the film American Psycho. The main character is a man named Patrick Bateman. In the first fifteen minutes you see vignettes of him having a fancy dinner with colleagues, paying his way into a swanky club, defending Jews from anti-Semitic remarks and taking us through his daily morning routine. In the end, while peeling a beauty mask from his face, he makes a startling declaration, “There is no real Patrick Bateman”. The mask itself symbolizes the different masks Bateman wears in his own life depending on society’s needs. He is a great example of the post-modern self. The movie takes place in the 1980’s on Wall Street and Bateman has been socially constructed to be every bit the commodity that society expects him to be. There is no real Patrick Bateman because every influence on his identity is materialistic and unreal. His life is so much based on the cold and the plastic that his identity is nothing more than extension of that. He is society’s coat hanger, so to speak, he wears the designer suits, drives the expensive car, lives in the high end condo and meticulously keeps up his appearance. Bateman’s identity is not fixed; it changes from scene to scene, just as the post-modern moves fluidly from identity to identity.