“Uh, I'm a pretty sick guy”: The dialogue of American Psycho in fiction and film

Abstract

This paper examines how dialogue in Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho (1991) serves to project the identity of its controversial protagonist Patrick Bateman. A comparison with the dialogue in Mary Harron's film adaptation (2000) further highlights the importance of dialogue for characterisation by analysing how changes in Bateman's conversational behaviour on screen result in a different interpretation of the character. A pragmastylistic analysis reveals that dialogues are characterised by a strong discrepancy between their form and their content. While Conversation Analysis exposes few irregularities in the turn-taking structure of the dialogues, a Gricean pragmatic analysis confirms the impression that the content of the dialogues is often vapid – the participants fail to establish a meaningful connection with one another through a cooperative exchange of information. Bateman tries to disrupt the vapid interaction by confessing ever more openly to his killing sprees in a desperate attempt to establish some genuine contact. However, as the dialogues maintain the semblance of conversation, his shocking confessions go completely unnoticed. A scene-based analysis of the film, complete with a multimodal transcript, provides an insight into how the reduction of Bateman's deviances significantly alters his characterisation.