Italian psycho

This article is published in number 1 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until January 5, 2021

43-year-old entrepreneur Alberto Genovese, in jail for rape, kidnapping and very serious injuries to a girl, was only 13 when he left American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, a book that he and his fellow cocaine addicts will certainly not have browsed. We are in New York, in the late 1980s. Yuppie Patrick Bateman has an attractive girlfriend, equally hot lovers and a circle of friends who are identical to him.

He is full of money because the “best” universities have taught him to be like that, he does long gymnastics sessions, spends nights on alcohol and cocaine drawn up on American paper
Express. Between the nihilist and the testosteronic, he seeks an identity by transforming himself into a serial killer who gets annoyed if, devouring the heart and other of its victims, dirty with blood his Armani suit. A Doctor Jekyll-Mister Hyde of a dehumanizing cynicism, unable as he is to separate good and evil, the madness and reasoning. So he turns into the devil: “I’m the devil, if ever there was such a thing / The results of too many drugs, what you see / I’m a fucking, completely disgusting / I’m what? / A human mutt, fuck a being, I’m a dog / Fuck the lambs, I’m silencing them all / »(American Psycho text).
He didn’t skin them like Patrick Bateman, the schizoid, sadistic yuppie out of Harvard, a resident of the thousand lights of Manhattan, turned wizard of Wall Street and Harlequin of a horrible carnival of abused, sold and killed bodies, but Alberto Genovese, the schizoid , a sadistic yuppie who came out of Bocconi, living on a terrace overlooking the Duomo, became a manager at McKinsey, then a wizard of start-ups and Harlequin of a horrible carnival of abused, sold and, fortunately, not killed bodies was already there thirty years ago. There it was, in a novel. “I had all the characteristics of a human being, flesh, bone, blood, skin, hair, but my depersonalization was so intense, it had penetrated so deeply that it no longer existed in me the normal ability to feel compassion. Here it is: it tears apart its soft bodies in the artificial lights of an “amazing” world. Severe bodies with nails or saws, Patrick; with the torturer’s kit, Genovese. “Terrace Sentimento” was equipped with every tool for sodomy and torture. The 19 cameras record meetings, embraces, orgies, tortures and harassment. What is compassion, suffering for others, in Patrick’s society in Genovese?
“Compassion had been eradicated, completely erased. I was simply imitating reality ». “Innocence ends”, writes Joan Didion, “when we are deprived of the illusion that we like ourselves.” Yes, Patrick would like to be loved in Genovese, that’s why he hates. The society that surrounds him is that of the newspaper news: “Strangled models”. In 1960 Ed Gein, with his murders, had already inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. With American Psycho, reality has also been updated: Terry Broome has arrived, who he remembered, and now the image girls “who do not remember” (but remember having taken “drugs voluntarily”) from the terrace of Genovese. But it is a reality that escapes reality, it is confused: “Another champagne, s’il vous plaît”, and then downstairs, in the bedroom, in the slaughterhouse, but with the bouncer in livery. In a world where even bourgeois culture is degraded and futile and the woman’s body is but an object of to use, violence is often the only way it can help Bateman / Genovese demonstrate to the world
to exist. The best way to find relief in an existence of everything and nothing.

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