'American Psycho,' Going So Far That Many Say It's Too Far

The few people who have actually read Bret Easton Ellis's novel "American Psycho," which has yet to be published, agree on one thing at least: there are descriptions of murder and sadism so gruesome and grisly that Simon & Schuster's decision not to publish the book on the grounds of taste is understandable.

Signs of public anger over the book are appearing as well. The Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women called last week for a boycott of the novel, which Random House, the parent company of Vintage, says it will bring out in a Vintage paperback.

In such a manner has a storm brewed in the culture, and it raises some deep questions about the capacity of a cultural product to shock and disturb. The main questions are these: Has a certain inconsistency, even a degree of hypocrisy, entered the picture? Is a double standard being applied to books and the recent spate of violent movies? Or is "American Psycho" so different from anything that has preceded it that it, and only it, deserves the censure it seems fated to get? Movie Violence Escalates

The controversy over "American Psycho," after all, comes at a time of ever-higher levels of ever more realistic violence, particularly in the movies. This year has yielded films such as"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," "Goodfellas," "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," and several others with soaring body counts, scenes of people blown to bits, bludgeoned, crushed into oblivion, with none of them withdrawn from circulation on the grounds of taste.

Moreover, the company that owns Simon & Schuster is Paramount Communications , whose movie division, Paramount Pictures, has brought out the "Godfather" and "Friday the 13th" series, among others in which people are routinely riddled with bullets, beheaded or hammered to death. What standard of taste allows the same company to release a "Friday the 13th," but to deem "American Psycho" too violent?

The answer is not easy, but it has, it seems, to do with a number of factors. Among the less dramatic are the economic considerations that go into the marketing of a book or a movie. But the question also has to do with the particular powers of each medium, the sensory impact of film versus the special power that literature holds over the imagination, its particular ability to manipulate our fantasies.

Historically, it has been the producers of mass entertainment, like the movies, that have been more cautious. Book publishers, aiming generally at a smaller, more select and, presumably, more sophisticated audience, have, by contrast, been more willing -- indeed they have often been eager -- to produce works that upset conventions of morality -- whether the Marquis de Sade's "Philosophy of the Bedroom" or D. H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," or some presumably much lesser work like "American Psycho." But this time it was a book publisher that seemed as cautious as the standard movie-maker. Smaller Risks of the Risky

In film, "the first obstacle is not taste, it's economics," said Harlan Jacobson, a former editor of Film Comment magazine. "A publisher can afford to produce a riskier work of art, one that might offend a certain part of the population, because so much less money is at stake."

Simon & Schuster's editor in chief, Richard E. Snyder, has denied that his company's parent organization, Paramount, had anything to do with the decision to cancel publication of "American Psycho," arguing that he made his choice without consulting with higher executives. Still, it is possible that Simon & Schuster -- which is not only attached to a movie-making company but also is a large textbook manufacturer -- might have submitted itself to a kind of movie maker's caution when it scratched "American Psycho" from its list.

Mr. Snyder also argues, defending his decision to cancel publication of Mr. Ellis's novel, that, strange as it may seem, a book makes a deeper impression than a movie, and thus, in a sense, a different standard legitimately applies to the different media.

"There's a lot of gratuitous violence in movies, and you also read about a lot of gruesome events in the newspapers," he said. "Unfortunately, perhaps, you get sort of inured to it. But, when you really have to sit down and in the privacy of your own mind read a book word by word, it's a more powerful experience. The violence has greater impact. You become the person you are reading about." The Psychology of Evil

Is there, in fact, an inherent greater power in books to involve the mind and the emotions? It could certainly be argued that however violent and even stomach-churning some movies are these days, they lack one essential ingredient of horror. None of the large studio productions contain any real exploration of the mind, of the psychological interiors of the characters carrying out murders. Moviegoers may be inundated with gore, but they are not led to make an identification between their own unconscious and those of the character on the screen.

Certainly, the experiences of viewing a movie and reading a book inspire diifferent emotional reactions. Movies, with their power to combine word, sound and image have an immediate capacity to startle, to terrify, unequaled by any other form. It is possible that nothing can compare with the moving image for the abruptness and the suddenness of its impact.

Reading involves a steady, patient accumulation of detail and effect. It has the power and, sometimes, the beauty of language and the utility of explanations.

Watching a movie, moreover, is a largely public experience, something that is done in a large room in the presence of other people. If it involves fright, horror, disgust, it involves those things in company. Reading is by its very nature private and intimate. The effect may be less immediate, less spectacular, but it is, perhaps, deeper and more enduring. Better a Film Than a Book

Does that mean that "American Psycho" would be, somehow, more acceptable if it were a movie than it is as a novel? The answer is certainly no. Indeed, if anything, writing has far more tolerance for the socially unacceptable than do films. A novel can enfold violence and sexually explicit passages into a greater context of literary value, and, indeed, this was apparently Mr. Ellis's intention, perhaps following the tradition of shocking books that have preceded it. It is also, presumably, the intention of Vintage Books, which, in deciding to publish "American Psycho," perhaps somewhat altered, is saying in effect that the book has literary value.

Still, even if it does have literary value, Mr. Ellis's book apparently is going to roil the collective calm more than any other recent cultural product, and here it is the content of the book, its specific depictions, that are at issue. Nobody, in fact, is comparing "American Psycho" to "Ulysses" or "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or "Lolita," or any other such work that produced the urge toward suppression in the past and is regarded as a literary masterpiece today. Mr. Ellis apparently allowed himself to imagine what is absolutely the worst that one human being can do to another and then described it in stomach-churning detail.

This suggests what might be the most obvious possibility for why "American Psycho" disturbs the standard of taste more than "Friday the 13th" or any other recent film, even Peter Greenaway's sadistic portrayal in "The Cook, the Thief" with its opening scenes of excrement being stuffed into the mouth of a naked victim, its cannibalism, its gruesome murder of the lover. Even in a world of pretty high tolerance for grisliness and torture both in books and the movies, Mr. Ellis's new work goes further than just about anything to appear before it. Ellis's Violence for All

Women's groups like NOW have focused on violence against women in the book, possibly because that was what was in passages of the book that were leaked to the press. In fact, Patrick Bateman also murders several men in "American Psycho," including a friend whom he axes to death and a gay man he enounters on the street (and whose dog he eviscerates).

What might be the book's single most disturbing passage involves the sexual torture of one of Bateman's former girlfriends. In the scene, Bateman nails her hands to the floor, cuts out her tongue and then forces her to perform an act of oral sex, before killing her.

Certainly, it would be hard to imagine any film containing scenes remotely resembling that one ever getting financing and attracting a reputable director, producer or distributor. And, if by some chance, such a film could be made, its inevitable fate would be relegation to the back corners of the adult video stores. The fact that "American Psycho" will be published by a reputable publisher is already an indication that there is more tolerance for the deeply shocking in a novel than there is in film. Whether Mr. Ellis's book is too shocking even for a novel is something readers will have to determine once, and if, the book is published in something close to its present form.