This image was lost some time after publication.

The Today show got genuinely compelling for a moment this morning, as Lunar Park author and creepy-fantastic contemporary lit legend Bret Easton Ellis sat down with Katie Couric's legs for a brief interview. Couric, being a concerned, motherly type, naturally asked Ellis about the graphic violence and exaggerated bloodshed of his harrowing American Psycho. A paraphrased transcript:

BEE: Reading [American Psycho] again, at my age now, I was shocked by it. At the time, I thought all that [violence] had to be in there. Reading it recently, I don't know. I had to steel myself at times.

KC: So are you a different person?

BEE: I hope I am, yeah. [...] Pain means something more to you than it did when you were 21 or 22.

[Cut to commercial. When we return, Katie Couric is singing a Hilary Duff song.]