Directed by Mary Harron, Lions Gate Films, on general release worldwide
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Rating: ★★★
Adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho stars Christian Bale as the notorious Wall Street financier Patrick Bateman. It follows his apparent decline from a cynical misanthrope, idly spinning out his time between appointments to dine, pose, and philander, to a bloodied psychopath, unable to control a compulsion to dismember his victims while they are still breathing. The film has the gloss of pornography and the glamour of fashion photography. Perhaps this is appropriate, as psychopathy and pornography have much in common. They treat the “Other” as an object, a means to an end. Psychopathy is to empathy as pornography is to love.
Given that Bateman lives in the best parts of Manhattan, it seems hard to believe that his loud activities go unnoticed. The film suggests that his money and privilege elevate him beyond scrutiny or suspicion. Indeed, the world in which he lives is so cynical and devoid of authentic communication that even when he confesses to his murderous acts, his confessions are not heard. His interlocutors are as mask-like as he is, all preoccupied by their urge for acceptance at exclusive restaurants, the design features of their business cards, their ties, their suits, their trophy girlfriends. Indeed, they recurrently mis-identify each other on the basis of their clothing, such is the superficiality of their relatedness.
Why is this film nauseating? Probably not for the violence it contains, which is mostly indirect and implied. Indeed, it is possible that the story might prove nauseating even without knives, hatchets, chainsaws, or blood. I think it is the unremitting cynicism of its characters that leaves the work without any hope of resolution or reparation. Bateman cannot “fail,” though he might want to, because no one will listen to him. He cannot be punished, though he might provoke nemesis, because no one is prepared to accept the truth in his words. The camera work plays with perspective as it jumps between objective and subjective views of the world, as Bateman realises, toward the denouement, that his world is as sick as he is.
But Bateman differs from other film psychopaths. He lacks any moral framework, so does not see his own fall from grace. And he does not enjoy his villainy in the manner of Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, or Malcolm McDowell's Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Bateman does for the music of Huey Lewis what Alex did for Beethoven, in appropriating it for carnage. The lightest moment in American Psycho is Bateman's monologue attributing meaning, significance, and musicological development to the work of Phil Collins. Surely a case for treatment.
Figure.
Bateman's “mask of insanity”