Some Kind of Abstraction: American Psycho at 20
American Psycho is one of my favorite movies of all time. Like a lot of movies I loved as a teenager, my relationship with it has evolved over time. I appreciate director Mary Harron’s take on the film now for what seems like the complete opposite reasons why I loved it over a decade ago. Back then, I thought Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman was cool. His catchphrases, his glib murderousness, his style, and his control over his bizarre sexual fetishes just made him an iconic figure in my eyes. I didn’t want to be him; of course in the back of my mind I knew he was a monster. But I got a kick out of enjoying such a glamorous villain with the distance of him being a fictional character.
Over the last few years, I’ve matured in a few ways and my interpretation of the movie has changed too. Now I can admire the biting satire and the tantalizing ambiguity of the film. Harron and her screenwriter Guinevere Turner craft a scathing look at toxic masculinity and present it as what it is: a joke. A desperate, potentially harmful joke. Patrick Bateman is a fool, anxious to fit in. He adorns himself with hallmarks of Reagan-era success and he’s painfully obvious about it. And the people in Patrick’s life that he wants to impress don’t care about him, especially not enough to listen when he rattles off his heinous crimes. Patrick is just one in an endless crowd of interchangeable finance guys in Manhattan, and no one is paying attention to anything.
American Psycho is probably one of the best book-to-film adaptations because its filmmakers give the source novel the lens it was lacking. Full disclosure: I have tried reading Brett Easton Ellis’ novel, but it is too grisly even for me. I can’t get past the infamous “Bethany” section, which is referenced but thankfully not shown in the film. In an interview with Dazed, Turner claims that Ellis believed he was writing a feminist book and was disappointed that feminists spoke out so strongly against it. And after many years of hearing that the film is better, he turned against it. Turner also says she, Ellis, and Harron were friends and that he was excited for the film until its reputation superseded the novel. I can believe that Ellis intended to make the satire that the film became. Perhaps it took the female gaze to flesh out the ludicrous vanity and elevate the murder scenes into comic, operatic, and delirious set pieces.
The horror in American Psycho isn’t just that Bateman is viciously killing people, but that no one seems to miss them. The excessiveness of the 1980s yuppie culture turns men into drones, rambling on about nothing, looking for the next high. And the women—his fiancée Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), his secretary Jean (Chloe Sevigny), his mistress Courtney (Samantha Mathis), and the prostitute Christie (Cara Seymour)—all represent different faces he puts on. They represent Patrick as the yuppie, the good man he could be, the lost boy, and the cannibalistic killer. They are just decorations to the perfect life Patrick craves, just as throwaway as a business card with a dorky font. These women may be props to Patrick, but they each mean something to the film. They are all victims of the endless cycle of male vanity, some more literally than others. Turner and Harron take the time to make the female voices heard as the different personas in 1980s New York City.
American Psycho can seem illogical and feverish, and audiences have debated whether Patrick’s murders are real or fantasy. Personally whether or not they really happened is not all that important to me. The malaise of wealth and the monotony of extravagance are such that these crimes could have happened, or could not have happened, but what’s the difference? Nobody misses the victims, who are either disposable or might have been seen somewhere else the night they were supposedly killed. Crime scenes are either hastily covered up or not even crime scenes at all. Everyone is self-absorbed, and everything means nothing. Patrick feels distanced from his own personhood, having received no punishment or gained any insight from committing his crimes. The film is ultimately nihilistic, as Patrick realizes that his “confession has meant nothing.”
There have been other films that attempt to dissect and satirize toxic masculinity like Fight Club or Joker. Some might be better than others, but none could match Mary Harron’s American Psycho. Her vision of the film—part pitch black comedy, part gothic horror, part fantastical slasher—deepens the tongue-in-cheek elements in the book and provides its feminist angle a clearer focus. The film is expressively and beautifully directed; the cinematography, the soundtrack and score, the costume and production design, and the editing are magnificent. Over the last 20 years, American Psycho has become more relevant than ever, both as an iconic horror/satire and as a study of white male privilege through the female gaze.
