UNIVERSIDAD DISTRITAL FRANCISCO JOSÉ DE CALDAS

L.E.B.E.I

IX SEMESTER

ENGLISH LITERATURE

TEACHER: SOFÍA CASTAÑEDA

STUDENT: LUISA FERNANDA PERILLA

AMERICAN PSYCHO: A REFLECT OF THE MADNESS IN THE EIGTHIES

DECADES

A CONTRAST BETWEEN THE AMERICAN AND COLOMBIAN CULTURE

Actually everybody have a “dark side” but not all people have the enough bravery

and honesty to recognize it. The film American Psycho is a good example of this

situation; We found ourselves with a man who looks as a normal and a successful

man with all the traits that be in this way requires: well educated, young and

handsome, a man who really have not found a total pleasure in his life, but he is

somebody who defines and lives the pleasure in the fact, that he only have got

pleasure killing somebody else to increase him narcissism and anxiety of power.
Analyzing this situation it is necessary to ask to ourselves if this kind of psychos

just exist in American culture, but from my own point of view I must say that the

answer is not, because of “the psycho- culture” have become a part of the core of

the modernity transitions, where the madness impose its deeper desires over the

rationality. So we can infer that the two last decades Colombia have been the

scenery where many psychos have been created or built.

In eighties the abuse of drugs alcohol and took and took much more strength.

Nevertheless the society have perceived the drugs with some taboos and

prejudices but some people wanted experiment with them, looking for the alteration

of the senses, effect that many times could produce a chaotic effect: The freedom

of the monster that everybody have inside, “The Mr. Hyde of Dr. Jekylls” – “ The

Lucifer of God”.; The coward becomes brave and living a “perfect reality” created

by hallucinations did not perceive between the goodness and the evilness.

Incredibly, Colombia have living in this same atmosphere from the eighties to

nowadays, obviously not with the same number of psychos that united states has

but with some serial murderers that have become a tangible evidence of our

insane civilization that day by day is trying to hide us the truth, the cruel truth about

the perversity and the terrible things that one human can cause to another, under

the effects of drugs or conducted by his/her own deepest instincts. The political

system always is managing a discourse which projects that everything is all right
and nobody have is able to hurt you, it have created the illusion that you are going

to be safe and still with alive but you know that it is not true.

Moreover, we cannot negate that the fastness of this modern times, the new

fashions, subcultures, devaluation of the moral principals have permitted and

giving birth to these criminal creatures in the twentieth century, changing

completely the paradigms about the rules that have established the history and

ancient civilizations about what really make us humans: the respect for other life or

how we avoid this life for our own pleasure and purposes.

American and Colombian madness coincide remarkably in a specific

characteristic which is defined Erich Fromm like “biophily” ( A conduct that should

be the most login between the human beings), but that psychos contributes to

create an atmosphere invaded by exactly for the opposite: “ necrophily”:

“While life is characterized by growth in a structured, functional manner, the

necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The

necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into

inorganic,to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things…

Memory, rather than experience; having, rather than being, is what counts.
The necrophilous person can relate to an object – a flower or a person- only if he

posses it; hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses

possession he loses contact with the world… He loves control, and in the act of

controlling he kills life”

Perhaps American culture has being avoiding their moral principles and nowadays

they are not shy or scare about reveal what kind of Machiavellian ideas they have

in their head to feed their “Eros side”, “the purpose justify the means” as Nicholas

Machiavello said, and Colombia is in a similar awaken, where each day the human

beings are becoming in foreigners, but not talking in terms of the place where they

come from, but talking in terms about how they are quitting to his human nature to

surrender themselves to unknown sensations that challenge the logic of a society

hidden under the robe of a “false Jewish-Christian moral”, such as is purposed y

Albert Camus in his book: The Foreigner.

References: