American Psycho (2000)

Author: iysmall@aol.com (Ron Small)

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000)

Grade: B

Director: Mary Harron

Screenplay: Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner

Starring: Christian Bale, William Dafoe, Jared Leto, Chloe Sevigny, William Sage, Cara Seymour, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Guinevere Turner, Justin Theraux

At one point during AMERICAN PSYCHO a naked, bloodied Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) pursues a very unlucky hooker through his posh, modernist apartment all while brandishing a chainsaw at about crotch level. (Note: This is the second time I can recall seeing a chainsaw being employed as a phallic symbol in a film, the first being SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE, which was also directed by a woman. Draw your own conclusions). The poor prostitute stumbles into various rooms and closets, running into Bateman's other victims some of which lay dormant in transparent, sealed bags, while others pop out of hiding places as if to shout "Boo!" It's a true "mad slasher" moment--insane, frenzied, and absurdly funny, containing all the giddy sleaze that eluded recent antiseptic slasher films like URBAN LEGEND and DISTURBING BEHAVIOR. And AMERICAN PSYCHO isn't even a slasher film. At heart it's yet another in a long line of recent bitter satires of American culture, although its "slasher" elements will probably keep many from seeing it as that. The book had a similar problem.

AMERICAN PSYCHO is based on Bret Easton Ellis' much debated novel of the same name. As of now it's Ellis' penultimate novel, a vicious satire of the Me Decade featuring a yuppie serial killer as a metaphor for 80's culture and values. Bateman is that killer, a competitive narcissist (not to mention, psycho) whom we first encounter, in the film, adorning himself like a Christmas tree with various male beauty products (lest anyone forget that the 80's was the decade when it became cool for a man to care what he looked like). Like many psychotics, his life has some kind of order, a routine: he performs countless abdominal crunches while THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE plays in the foreground, heads off to work where he snidely interacts with his equally snide colleagues, parties in nightclubs (the cheery 80's music is the ultimate anti-theses of Bateman's debauched machismo…think PSYCHO set to the WEDDING SINGER soundtrack), then caps off the night with frenzied sex and exaggerated murder all while providing his commentary of popular 80's tunes to his bewildered victims.

Though the movie contains much uncomfortable violence (but is really just about as graphic as your average SCREAM flick), it's not nearly as detailed as its source material was. In the film we see all this unfold in bits, never privy to all of Bateman's acts, while the book is told entirely within Bateman's head. We see everything through his subjectivity, and Bateman thrives on minutia. He provides us with the various details of applying facial cream, choosing the right suit, and so on. This is rather comical at first, till we soon realize that he will use this technique to describe everything, even the heinous murders he commits (some descriptions rattling on for five pages) going into every thing he does to his victims, and every reaction he gets from doing so. The result is vivid, but depressingly so.

Nonetheless, Ellis found a fresh way to comment on 80's greed and narcissism by revealing the decade through the eyes of an upper echelon killer tweaked on a culture that tells its young executives to destroy their opposition.

Bateman is a literal product of the 80's, caring only for his own gratification. Throughout the novel we stay in his cluttered head, and marvel at his contempt for everything except bland 80's music ("It's hip to be Square!"). And we realize that the only thing that separates him from his co-workers (all narcissistic and self-absorbed) is that he takes the wolfish kill or be killed message quite literally.

It's to the film's credit that Bateman remains intact, expertly played by Christian Bale as a man so far gone he's hardly a man anymore. Bale speaks in a discombobulated growl, like an overly false parody of a how a "real man" should talk. The affection isn't all that dissimilar from the ones his colleagues put on. And on the outside Bateman doesn't seem terribly different from all the self-absorbed brats who surround him. It's more than a joke that these guys can hardly recognize each other; they're like drones with personalities that bleed into one and other, and what a perfect place for a killer to get away with murder ("Bateman? No he couldn't have done it, I had dinner with him last night…I think"). Problem with the novel is that it gets bogged down with the excess of drugs, sex, and murder. Harron focuses her film more tightly on the satire and absurdity of Patrick.

Still it's interesting that much of Ellis does get up on the screen up on the screen (as opposed to the film adaptation of LESS THAN ZERO, which featured nothing of the author). This feels like a Bret Easton Ellis movie yet it works to a greater extent than his novels because it contains all that makes him a wily social commentator and little of what makes him a vacuous provocateur.

Harron's film gets at things that may have been obscured by the novel's extreme vehemence. She shows us the casual disgust that men have for women while around each other in scenes that play a lot like IN THE COMPANY OF MEN. Only Harron takes it further, driving the message into us. It's as if the violence committed by Bateman (the angry male) on his mostly female victims is an extension of all the disgust and anger that males harbor towards women. The novel's graphic rhythms have been reconfigured slightly, and transplanted to the screen as the ultimate horror movie for women. A horror movie in which all the men are predators, but only one truly indulges in his vicious predatory urges.

http://www.geocities.com/incongruity98 Reeling (Ron Small)