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ATLANTIS Vol. XXIV Núm. 2 (Diciembre 2002): 7-24. ISSN 0210-

THE AESTHETICS OF SERIAL KILLING: WORKING

AGAINST ETHICS IN THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1988)

AND AMERICAN PSYCHO (1991)^1

Sonia Baelo Allué Universidad de Zaragoza Classical serial killer fiction and films offer their readers or viewers many sources of pleasure: the control over disorder, the pleasure of pattern-discovering, the identification with a strong representative of the law, and of course the enjoyment, from the reader's secure position, of the murders as art or simply as an intellectual game. These narratives have the power of making us forget about ethics and the serious implications of murder, turning serial killing into a kind of aesthetic game that can be enjoyed as simple entertainment. However, what happens when ethics dominates over aesthetics in serial killer fiction? This question will find an answer through the analysis of Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991), both dealing with serial killers although in entirely different ways. In this paper I want to deal with the phenomenon of the serial killer, which is a cultural manifestation prone to be considered under different disciplines. It is a subject treated in sociology, the arts (cinema, literature, photography), the media or psychoanalysis to mention just a few. It belongs to the realms of both reality and fiction and as a consequence of this cultural criss-crossing, on some occasions reality and fiction become mixed and influence each other. Nowadays we witness how, on the one hand, real-life serial killers are "narrativised" by the media by turning their killings into coherent patterns,^2 or how they copy the murders of fictional serial killers;^3 on the other hand, we see how "serious" literature writers of great prestige write true-crime literature,^4 or how fictional serial killers copy the (^1) This paper has been written with the financial help of the DGICYT, research project nº BFF2001-1775. (^2) See Sara Knox for an account of how the media has turned real-life murder cases into stories fitting the conventions of literary forms such as the gothic tale or the romance, especially in the case of the so-called "Heart Killers" (1998: 79-127). (^3) Joel Black deals with the cases of Mark David Chapman's 1980 killing of John Lennon and John W. Hinckley's attempt on the newly elected President Reagan. Both Chapman and Hinckley were trying to imitate fictional characters. Chapman assumed the identity of Caulfield as the alienated saviour of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Hinckley was trying to perform Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver (1991: 135-187). (^4) See Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song (1980); Kate Millett, The Basement: Meditations on a

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing 9 offender associated with the killing of at least four victims, over a period greater than seventy-two hours" (Seltzer 1998: 9). This "cooling-off period" (distributing the murders serially over time) provides the working distinction between serial and mass murder, with spree-killing falling somewhere in between. The term was coined in the mid-1970s by the FBI veteran and ex-Army CID colonel Robert Ressler, who writes: Also in my mind were the serial adventures we used to see on Saturday at the movies.... Each week, you'd be lured back to see another episode, because at the end of each one there was a cliff-hanger. In dramatic terms, this wasn't a satisfactory ending, because it increased, not lessened the tension. The same dissatisfaction occurs in the minds of serial killers. (in Seltzer 1998: 64) Ressler's words invite different reflections. First of all, the strong link between reality and fiction that has accompanied the serial killer from its very beginning can be perceived. A cinematic serial influenced Ressler in his creation of a "technical" name capable of defining in real life a manifestation that was already present in fiction. The second important idea that can be extracted from this quotation is the concept of seriality. Under capitalism, seriality has become a principle of production. Seltzer understands the phenomenon of serial killing as the most characteristic form of public violence in our "machine culture" or era of the "information society". In the Network the flood of numbers, codes and letter seems to replace real people, which may bring forth a complete failure of distinction between self and others. This confusion comes as a consequence of "an utter absorption in technologies of reflection, reduplication, and simulation" (1998: 20), which may also account for the serial and repetitive aspects of the killings. The seriality of serial killers, or at least, the seriality of the myth-like serial killer created through the arts and the media, has similar effects to those produced by different forms of serialised mass culture such as the television serials and series, the film serials, the novels in instalments,^6 or even the newspapers. Repetition makes us understand patterns and know what to expect next time. Thus, after each new instalment the audience is left wanting more, enjoying a mix of repetition and anticipation. In the case of serial killing each new murder becomes a new instalment, a new chapter in the news. People keep "buying" the chapters, craving for a conclusion that may disclose a pattern or may impose an interpretation on the random material. As Judith Halberstam points out, the interpreters of the crime are the police, the tabloids, the public, the detective, the psychologist, the critic... (1995: (^6) The literary serials may seem something more characteristic of the nineteenth century, however the World Wide Web seems to be reviving this way of publishing in instalments. Stephen King started distributing in June 2000 his on-line serial The Plant at the price of one dollar per chapter. In December 2000 he posted the sixth and by now last instalment, promising to continue after a year or two break for working in other projects. Readers felt cheated because even if they love serials they also love an all- embracing conclusion, which King failed to provide. Douglas Clegg's attempt had been more successful in 1999, when he posted the Net's first serial thriller.

10 Sonia Baelo Allué 172), anyone capable of discerning a pattern that will impose order on an uncontrollable situation. As Richard Dyer argues, people enjoy the posing of questions such as what will happen next? When will he strike next and whom? When will they get him? What have all the victims in common? Is there a pattern emerging out of all the killings? (1997: 16). This obsession with finding a pattern that allows a self-contained conclusion has also permeated the interpretation of real murders. For Joseph Grixti this fictionalising process takes place since "popular fiction, because of its very generic and formulaic nature, frequently acts as a frame of reassurance which allows us to safely engage in this exploratory process" (1995: 90). The "Atlanta Child killings" is an example of this curious process. The victims were killed in different ways, their bodies found in different places, and they were not even all boys, (two girls died), or all children. In spite of all this evidence, the murders were considered the product of a single man (Knox 1998: 150-1). A more recent example can be seen in the investigation of the killing of two women and the missing of a third one in Perpignan, France. The February 2000 issue of Vanity Fair (Burrough 2000: 86-99) speculated about the idea that the killings might have been committed by a serial killer copying some of Salvador Dalí's most gruesome paintings. If the story was included in a selective, high-class magazine like Vanity Fair , was precisely because a possible pattern was being imposed on a number of killings. As it has been seen in the case of King's on-line serial, readers love instalments but they also love order and conclusion. For people to sit back and discern patterns, both in real life and in fiction, they need to forget or at least diminish the role of the victims. They need to forget the ethical implications of the crimes and consider their aesthetic possibilities. Already in the nineteenth century there was a change from an essentially religious or moral consideration of crime to a more aesthetic approach. Thomas de Quincey's 1827 "Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" defended the idea of considering brutal crimes as works of art if viewed from an aesthetic or disinterested amoral perspective. In fact, detective fiction adopted these ideas, although the genre chose to concentrate on the detective rather than on the criminal, creating an art of detection. The idea that crime has aesthetic implications may be considered socially unacceptable. However, this is something people do without noticing when they follow the deeds of a serial killer in the news or when they read in Vanity Fair that a serial killer may be copying some paintings of Salvador Dalí. In his informed book The Aesthetics of Murder , Joel Black further considers these possibilities and their implications through history. This aesthetisation of crime is also reflected in real life through the words of the former FBI profiler of serial killers, John Douglas: "I always tell my agents, 'If you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the painting'. We've looked at many 'paintings' over the years and talked extensively to the most 'accomplished' artists" (in Seltzer 1998: 121). For Joyce Carol Oates, the enigma of the serial killer, s/he who murders not for money but for its own sake, is the stuff of poetry and art (1999a: 234). She even explains the "aesthetic" attempts of some real serial killers to arrange their victims in "artistic" ways, like the New

12 Sonia Baelo Allué Starling, a student about to become an FBI agent, is asked by her superior, Jack Crawford, to interview Lecter in order to find out who is killing these women. The process is clearly aestheticised because Clarice has to discern a pattern out of the bodies of the previous victims, and, to do so, she must forget her feelings towards them, the fact that they were women like her. As Toni Magistrale points out, she must transform the daily anger and outrage she feels as a woman into something useful (1996: 34-5). In some passages of the book this idea is made very clear: The proximity of madmen —the thought of Catherine Martin bound and alone, with one of them snuffling her, patting his pockets for his tools— braced Starling for her job. But she needed more than resolution. She needed to be calm , to be still , to be the keenest instrument. She had to use patience in the face of the awful need to hurry. (Harris 1988: 136. M y Italics ) As explained in the introduction, for the aesthetic game to be enacted the less it is know about the victims the better. To find out a pattern Clarice cannot think about Catherine Martin (the last captured woman) bound, alone and suffering. Clarice must have calmness, stillness and patience, rational feelings that allow the triumph of aesthetics over ethics and that favour the reader's enjoyment of the narrative. This is also seen in the scene in which Clarice has to analyse one of the corpses. After some seconds of real horror she pulls herself together and proceeds to examine the body, discovering the woman's skinned back and the rare moth introduced in the victim's throat: clues that will become very useful in the course of the investigation. Accordingly, readers can interpret the murders as clues without feeling guilty because they behave like Clarice. They are only being rational in order to discover who the criminal is. Apart from the pleasures obtained through the presence of a strong detective for readers to identify with, we must also take into account that Clarice is a politically correct detective. A woman fighting against patriarchy who will make a male serial killer pay for his crimes against women. For Linda Badley, this innovation is a reversal of the "woman-in-peril" or the "psycho chases girl", a formula seen in nearly all "slasher" movies of the seventies and eighties.^7 Badley even considers the film a "woman's picture" (1995: 145). Jonathan Demme, the director of the film adaptation, has a similar opinion. As he says: "I did like that The Silence of the Lambs was a woman's picture.... I love that he's (Harris) taking some really good pokes at patriarchy while spinning this tale. And I think the movie sort of manages to do that, too" (in Smith 1991: 30). In this way, the film and the book (^7) In her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film Carol J. Clover makes an impressive analysis of these slasher movies that tend to place women as victims. The genre seems to have gone mainstream thanks to films like The Accused , Alien , Sleeping with the Enemy , Thelma and Louise and, of course, The Silence of the Lambs. For her, low-budget horror is the formula that most obviously trades in the repressed, becoming itself the repressed of mainstream filmmaking, expressing the things that a politically correct film could never express. Thus, Clover claims that films like The Silence of the Lambs are just politically correct versions of the seventies and eighties horror films adorned with 'niceties of plot, character, motivation, cinematography, pacing, acting, and the like' (1992: 20).

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing 13 became attractive for both genders, recovering a genre that had been widely considered misogynist. As it has already been pointed out, the book became a crossover bestseller since the audience comprised both women and men, while the film was a sweeping success both at the box office and the Academy Awards. However, although both the film and the book obtained many positive reviews, there were some critical voices that attacked them for their portrayal of women and transsexuals. According to an editorial of The Nation the film was amoral, politically incorrect and a defence of "sadomasochism, homophobia, misogyny and worse" ("Dark Victory": 507). Jane Caputi agrees with this view and wonders: Where, we might ask, is the feminist value in thus immortalizing a sadistic cannibal? Moreover, where is the feminist value in featuring a central female figure when she must depend upon, bond with and achieve self-awareness through her interactions with the centennial version of Jack the Ripper? (1993: 103) In my opinion, it is not fair to blame The Silence of the Lambs for being politically incorrect. Compared to earlier slasher movies, it portrays women as victims, but not as passive ones. Catherine Martin tries to save herself by luring the killer's dog into the well where she is entrapped. In the same way, Clarice is depicted as a very competent female detective. For Caputi, she is patronised by Lecter and Crawford but the story is presented as if Clarice, as a woman, were the only person capable of really understanding the victims. She does not hesitate to tell Crawford: I'm as good as anyone you've got at the cop stuff, better at some things. The victims are all women and there aren't any women working this. I can walk in a woman's room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that's a fact. (1988: 286) Clarice is the one that joins the pieces in the puzzle, arrives at the serial killer's house on her own, rescues Catherine Martin and kills Gumb. Her competence cannot be denied. As regards the portrayal of transsexuals, Richard Jennings, a well-known gay rights advocate, found the film: "an atrocity against women and one more instance of an industry that can't seem to create a positive gay character" (in Donald 1992: 347). In Demme's words this was not the intention of the film: Also, obviously, we knew that it was important to not have Gumb misinterpreted by the audience as being homosexual. That would be a complete betrayal of the themes of the movie. And a disservice to gay people ... we didn't want people to think he's transvestite. (Smith 1991:

Hannibal Lecter himself affirms that Gumb is not reducible to a transsexual (1988: 158). Indeed, Gumb is furious because he cannot pass the test to be given

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing 15 and tasteful, after all he used to eat his victims with aromatic herbs. In the book readers learn that in 1975 Lecter killed one of his patients from his psychiatric practice. From the corpse he took only the sweetbreads: part of the heart, thymus and pancreas. These items appeared on the menu of a dinner Lecter gave for the president and conductor of the Baltimore Philharmonic, a man who claimed that Lecter was known for his excellent dinners and his articles in gourmet magazines (1988: 26). Thus, Lecter is not presented as a savage bloodthirsty man but a selective high-class gourmet. The reader may even like him at the end when he writes to Clarice to tell her that the world is much more interesting with her in it (1988: 351), isn't he cute? He is obviously going to kill the warden of the institution where he was imprisoned but, after all, this man had been cruel to Lecter (doesn't he deserve it a little bit?). If readers go through these conclusions when reading the book, The Silence of the Lambs accomplishes a final inversion of morality. It is easier to fall into the trap of aesthetic pleasures in the face of a serial killer who is cultivated, polished and a gentleman. Jane Caputi underlines how Lecter benefits from 100 years of a mythmaking process in which serial killers have been endlessly romanticised. Besides, he is palatable for women because even though he murders men and women, the murders described are those of men (1991: 103). This is De Quincey's theory, which might have sounded so nonsensical at the beginning of this paper, made true. The Silence of the Lambs then becomes out-and-out pleasure, pure aesthetics, both in the way people enjoy the film/book by forgetting about the victims as people and simply discerning patterns, and also by the way Lecter subtly lures us to his side. For Steffen Hantke a double attitude towards serial killers can be found in fiction. On the one hand, we glorify the serial killer as a defender of private space, glory in the autonomy he derives from silence, exile, and cunning. Yet we are to fear the consequences of the sleep of reason, the radical social irresponsibility that perfect isolation from the discipline of the public sphere encourages in the individual. (1998: 188) In the book both tendencies are represented in the two serial killers: Lecter and Gumb. Gumb's death provides a certain social security, whereas Lecter's freedom may fulfil in Hantke's words the admiration of "silence, exile and cunning". As a source of pleasure and entertainment, The Silence of the Lambs does not aim at challenging people's complacency, as Demme puts it: You don't want to cross the line with people, make people physically ill. You don't want to compromise them to that extent. You want to give them the good old-fashioned kind of shock they paid their money for without mortifying them. (Smith 1991: 33) By the end of the novel and film people are not mortified since no social criticism has been posed: the enactment of the conventions of the genre, plus the attempt to turn the genre into something a bit more politically correct arouses a feeling of security and removes all threat.

16 Sonia Baelo Allué Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho also portrays the life of a serial killer, Patrick Bateman. He is a rich white heterosexual yuppie that hides a sexist, racist, xenophobic personality. His victims are mainly women, black people, beggars, children and homosexuals. The novel is narrated by Bateman himself, and this allows us to witness his daily routine, his work, his friends, his love affairs, the television talk show he watches, the magazines he reads, the films he rents or the cosmetic products he uses. The general mood of the book is different from that of The Silence of the Lambs. In the latter, the acts of violence are not directly described. As a proof of their existence, the audience only has the corpses of the victims, but the corpses turn into clues in the investigation and not women who were tortured and suffered. In American Psycho tortures and killings are narrated in all detail. Whereas Demme offered only a "safe shock", Ellis offers gruesome descriptions of horrible acts that do not leave the reader indifferent. I agree with Linda Kauffman who observes that all Ellis has done is translate what viewers see on the screen in horror films into prose, transcribing the thousands of discrete sights, sounds, and sensations the brain records in each frame of any horror film. The effect is emetic, not arousing (1998: 249). The book had problems even getting published but finally Ellis's manuscript was accepted for publication and the author was given an advance by Simon and Schuster. Negative pre-publication reviews in Time and Spy magazines prompted Simon and Schuster to withdraw its offer. Random House bought the publishing rights and the next year the novel appeared in Random House's Vintage series.^8 The critics reacted against the book in very well-known magazines and newspapers such as Time , The New York Times , The Washington Post and The Nation. Roger Rosenblatt wrote for the Sunday New York Times Book Review an article titled "Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?" where he said: "American Psycho" is the journal Dorian Gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore. But that is unfair to sophomores. So pointless, so themeless, so everythingless is this novel, except in stupefying details about expensive clothing, food and bath products, that were it not the most loathsome offering of the season, it certainly would be the funniest. (1990: 3) If Rosenblatt considers the book pointless or themeless is because American Psycho is not a book that follows the conventions of the serial killer narrative. The book takes those conventions and plays with them, uncovering their status as conventions. All to be cherished in books like Harris's The Silence of the Lambs , James Patterson's Along Came a Spider (1992) or Caleb Carr's The Alienist (1994) and in films like The Silence of the Lambs (1995), Seven (1995), Copycat (1997) or The Bone Collector (1999) was aesthetics. American Psycho , with its exaggerated usage of some conventions and its complete ignorance of others, causes disturbance and underlines the violence behind the serial killer phenomenon. (^8) For a further account of the story of the publication of American Psycho and its analysis as a case of censorship see Freccero (1997) and Zaller (1993).

18 Sonia Baelo Allué denounces that game and shows what a "sophisticated" cannibal looks like. He may be wearing a Joseph Abboud suit but he is still eating a girl's brain. Ellis's use of violence is highly self-conscious. This use of excessive violence disrupts the whole mechanism of the serial killer narrative. For the narrative to be enjoyable, it cannot be overflowed with horror or superficiality; in this sense, in contrast to American Psycho , narratives such as The Silence of the Lambs , Seven or The Bone Collector are precisely a "proper" combination of horror and superficiality in a tasteful manner, making an art of murder. Ellis takes all the violence that appears in the background of these narratives and discloses it, which prevents any possible concentration on the murders in objective, game-like terms. It is highly significant that in 1991 the film version of The Silence of the Lambs received five academy awards, while American Psycho was condemned for its violence. As Demme said in an interview quoted above, he wanted a "safe shock" when filming The Silence of the Lambs. Ellis forgets about safety and prefers denunciation: I thought about juxtaposing this absurd triviality with extreme violence ... If people are disgusted or bored, then they're finding out something about their own limits as readers. I want to challenge their complacency, to provoke them ... American Psycho is partly about excess —just when readers think they can't take any more violence, or another description of superficial behavior, more is presented— and their response toward this is what intrigues me. (in Hoban 1990: 36) The use of excess may becomes necessary when challenging the complacency of those readers saturated with violence coming from films, songs, TV programs, newspapers or even the daily news. Violence is presented in an over-fictionalised narration and works as a denunciation of its use by part of the mass media. This denunciation is made through Ellis's use of metafictional comments. American Psycho is a book whose first Dantesque words are "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE, scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank..." (1991: 3) and finishes with "...and above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT" (1991: 399), both being graffiti painted in "blood red" that the narrator sees in the city. The opening letters become a metafictional device that announces, in a very self-conscious manner, that a spiral of violence and death is to follow, while the closing letters imply that no easy escapist ending can be offered. FEAR is another of the words that announces what is to follow. Price's proud words about his value in society are followed by the FEAR graffiti: "I'm resourceful", Price is saying. "I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society can not afford to lose me. I'm an asset ". Price calms down, continues to stare out the cab's dirty window, probably at the word FEAR sprayed in red graffiti on the side of a McDonald's on Fourth and Seventh. (1991: 3)

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing 19 The red graffiti seems to indicate that it is Price's attitude that people should fear. Price's belief in his superiority is also shared by Bateman, who feels entitled to kill "less valuable" people in society. This technique is repeated on other occasions. In another episode Bateman is looking for a prostitute, her description is commented on by another graffiti (also in red) behind her: She's blond and slim and young, trashy but not an escort bimbo, and most important, she's white, which is a rarity in these parts ... Behind her, in four-foot-tall red block letters painted on the side of an abandoned brick warehouse, is the word M E A T and the way the letters are spaced awakens something in me and above the building like a backdrop is a moonless sky, which earlier, in the afternoon, was hung with clouds but tonight isn't. (1991: 168) The word MEAT in red works is a comment on the way women are treated as objects of desire or commodities to be bought and sold. In this way, Ellis does not only show women as objects but comments upon it in an indirect way. Besides, for the whole narration the degrading treatment of homeless people is also commented on by a repeatedly announced musical on buses and hoardings: Les misérables. Victor Hugo's "misérables" contrasts with the contemporary "misérables" that fill the book: beggars, the homeless, the insane... If the self-conscious comments on the violence of the book are taken into account, it becomes difficult to dismiss them as mere excess. This excess is used with a social aim in mind. As Linda Williams puts it, talking about the genres that feature bodily excess (such as pornography, horror or melodrama), to simply dismiss these genres as "bad excess" (masochism or sadism) is not to address their function as cultural problem solving (1995: 156). The use of excess brings forth questions that would not have been addressed otherwise. John Fiske underlines how "norms that are exceeded lose their invisibility, lose their status as natural common sense, and are brought out into the open agenda" (1989: 114). This excess meaning escapes ideological control and can be used to resist or evade it. Unlike in The Silence of the Lambs , where violence is hidden behind the intellectual game between Clarice and Lecter, in American Psycho violence is underlined, making readers aware of its implications. In the book, mass culture seems to be the cause of all this excess. Patrick Bateman has watched Body Double (Brian De Palma's 1984 semi-pornographic film) thirty-seven times (1991: 112). He has read true crime biographies of famous serial killers like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Ed Gein (92). He is hooked on the TV program The Patty Winters Show , which treats subjects like toddler-murders (138), Nazis (156), shark-attack victims (143), or a man who set his daughter on fire while she was giving birth (347). These very serious subjects are opposed to completely banal ones also treated in the program, such as tips on how your pet can become a movie star (291), a machine that lets people talk to the dead (326), salad bars (225), or aerobic exercise (200) among others. This insistence on

The Aesthetics of Serial Killing 21 The ending of American Psycho also prompted heated debates. For critics like Norman Mailer, the failure of American Psycho is that by the end readers know no more about Bateman's need to dismember others than they know about the inner workings in the mind of an inexpressive actor in an exploitation film. By the end of the novel nothing is known about Bateman's motivations or about extreme acts of violence (1998: 1076). Mailer seems to long for the conventional ending when the killer explains an infancy trauma that has made him "misbehave" (see Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)), or when the detective explains what the link between the different killings was (see The Silence of the Lambs ). These endings are in a way consoling fantasies. For Philip Simpson, the critical anger directed towards Ellis and films like John McNaughton's 1986 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer may be explained by the spread of blame among the society that helps create the serial killer (2000: 136). Instead of blaming one isolated person Bateman becomes the reflection of the selfish eighties US society, a decade that saw the increase of the gap between social classes due to the cuttings in the federal budget. For critics like James Lincoln Collier, in the eighties the government adopted as its basic philosophy the ethic of the self, "making selfishness the official policy of the United States" (1991: 239). Bateman is presented as the logical consequence of that society and following that same logic the narrator does not judge him, Ellis simply presents things as Bateman sees them. Carla Freccero shares this view: the negative reaction of the critics was due to Ellis's "failing" to provide a "moral framework" for his tale of the twenty-six- year-old Harvard graduate, and serial killer, Patrick Bateman (1997: 51). However, the "moral framework" is the narration itself. Ellis refuses to present murder as something attractive or game-like. He presents it in all its cruelty, turning American Psycho into a perpetual chain of serial killing, where the figure of the serial killer is completely deglamorised. Although both The Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho tell the story of a serial killer, their way of doing it is entirely different. The former prefers to use serial killer genre conventions, presenting a reassuring narration that allows readers the pleasure of seeing a detective who, by analysing the bodies of the victims and the circumstances of the crimes, will infer a pattern leading to the killer. It is a "clean" process of analysis and interpretation of clues in which readers enjoy the posing of questions such as why should the killer do this? Will the last victim be killed? Will Lecter say something relevant about the killer? How can his words be related to the clues obtained from the analysis of the bodies? All the questions find an answer through the narrative and especially at the end when all lines are closed. Gumb is dead and order is restored. Lecter may be free and alive, a guarantee that a second part will follow. The Silence of the Lambs is in the line of the serial killer books and films that glamorise serial killers, at the same time showing that with enough information and a high degree of competence on the part of the detective, signs can be read and murderers discovered and stopped. The pattern behind the serial murders emerges and leads to its author. American Psycho represents other way of dealing with serial killers. The aesthetic sources of pleasure are diminished. There are no clues, no pattern, no

22 Sonia Baelo Allué strong detective and no arrest of the criminal. Ellis plays with the predictability that generic fiction provides so as to undermine it and create in the reader the opposite effect intended by generic fiction. There will be no restoration of the social order. This kind of ending, apart from being a formal break characteristic of postmodernism, also constitutes an ideological break with more traditional narrations like The Silence of the Lambs. The chaotic world that Bateman creates with his killings will continue endlessly because the society depicted in the novel has become an accomplice of his crimes. The aesthetics of the serial killer narration are denounced as simple conventions, while ethical implications arouse with each new killing. Horrific and despicable as the narration may seem, it does not leave the reader indifferent and does certainly work against the glamorising and mythologising portrayals of serial killers and their actions. WORKS CITED Annesley, James 1998: Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. New York: St. Martin's Press. Badley, Linda 1995: "Looking for the Mother in The Silence of the Lambs ". Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic. Westport: Greenwood Press. 137-150. Black, Joel 1991: The Aesthetics of Murder: a Study in Romantic Literature and Contemporary Culture. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Burrough, Bryan 2000: "Dalí's Deadly Shadow". Vanity Fair 474: 86-99. Caputi, Jane 1993: "American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction". Journal of American Culture 16: 101-12. Clover, Carol J. 1992: Men , Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. London: BFI Publishing. Collier, James Lincoln 1991: The Rise of Selfishness in America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. "Dark Victory" 1992: The Nation (20 April): 507-508. De Quincey, Thomas 2001 (1827): "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts". TheWorks of Thomas De Quincey. Vol. 6. Eds. David Groves and Grevel Lindop. London: Pickering and Chatto. Donald, Adrienne 1992: "Working for Oneself: Labor and Love in The Silence of the Lambs ". Michigan Quarterly Review 31: 346-60. Dyer, Richard 1997: "Kill and Kill Again". Sight and Sound 7.9: 14-17. Ellis, Bret Easton 1991: American Psycho. London: Picador. Fiske, John 1989: Understanding Popular Culture. London: Routledge.

24 Sonia Baelo Allué Wood, Robin 1986: "The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s". Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press. 70- Zaller, Robert 1993: " American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case". Revue Francaise d'etudes Americaines 16.57: 317-25.