American Psycho at 20: a vicious satire that remains as sharp as ever
Three years after the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho finally got made into a movie, after a production odyssey nearly as tortured and calamitous as its publication as a book, a documentary called The Corporation caused a mild stir among arthouse viewers and political thinkers. Inspired by a 14th amendment detail that allowed companies to be seen as individuals, the film asked a simple question: if a corporation were a person, what type would he be? In a little under three hours, the film concludes that he would be a psychopath.
It’s common to think about Patrick Bateman, the narrator and brandconscious mass murderer of American Psycho, as representing certain 1980s themes: the greed and rapaciousness of
Wall Street, the emptiness of consumer culture, and a Reagan era where old-fashioned values covered the whole Darwinian bloodbath in the sharp, piney scent of Polo cologne. But both book and film, craftily adapted by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner, are not thinking about him as a symbol per se. They’re thinking of him like the maker of The Corporation: what if the era manifested itself as a person? How would he feel? How would he behave? The conclusion is more or less the same, right there in the title.
“There is the idea of a Patrick Bateman,” he says in the early in the narration, “some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory.” In Ellis’s book, Bateman has a fraught relationship to his brother and senile mother, but Harron and Turner wisely excise those characters from the film, to where he seems like someone who has no family and no past, as if he simply appeared in the world in a pinstriped Valentino Couture suit. It’s impossible to imagine anything like the organic process of childbirth creating a monster like Patrick Bateman, which may explain why he likes to splash around in human viscera. He’s like an alien, only with a knife instead of a probe.
For the screen version of American Psycho to come from two women helped short-circuit the charges of misogyny that dogged the book so persistently, though producer Edward R Pressman wasn’t concerned enough to settle quickly on Harron and her star, Christian Bale. The film went through multiple iterations that had
Johnny Depp, Edward Norton, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ewan McGregor in the lead, paired with directors like Stuart Gordon, David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone; Harron and Bale spent four years attached to the project like barnacles before Lionsgate acquiesced, albeit on a less-than-generous budget. One of the funnier footnotes of the film is that Gloria Steinem, the most prominent of the novel’s critics, happens to be Bale’s stepmother.
It would not be accurate to consider Harron and Turner’s American Psycho a feminist critique of Ellis’s novel so much as a clever and shrewd articulation of it, with less potential for being misunderstood. (Ellis himself has expressed mixed feelings about the film, but seems grateful to it for clarifying his satirical intent.) Where the book’s deranged first-person style juxtaposed graphic scenes of violence with equally long and pornographic descriptions of high-end consumer items, the film’s voiceover narration integrates them more smoothly, as blood-streaked black comedy. Some of the intended ambiguity may be lost, especially in a finale that’s chaotic and confusing, but the film still feels like an adaptation problem Harron and Turner have solved. They sharpened the implement.
Twenty years later, American Psycho hasn’t left the culture, because the culture hasn’t left American Psycho. The only difference is that Bateman seems more electable now than he might have been then. Not that he’d be interested in politics: when he goes off on an enlightened disquisition to his Wall Street buddies on apartheid, the nuclear arms race, the fight against world hunger, equal rights for women and the return of traditional values, Bateman echoes whatever popular sentiments he’s pulled from the ether. It’s no different later when he and a Valium-addled second girlfriend work catchphrases from Saturday Night Live characters like Fernando Lamas and The Church Lady into casual conversation. He’s crudely approximating what a human might say.
What Bateman truly cares about are beauty, order and conformity – being the perfect consumer. Before slaughtering his guests, he expresses admiration for the professionalism of Huey Lewis and the News, the late-period Genesis record Invisible Touch, and the string of No 1 hits on Whitney Houston’s debut. He wants to go to the most exclusive restaurants, and quotes from reviews (“a playful but mysterious little dish”). He wants to have the nicest suits, the best apartment, the most refined font and coloring on his business cards. He has moments when he’s soothed by optimal restaurant seating or the aesthetic marvels of his own body – he arranges a threesome to get off on himself – but he can’t sustain the feeling for long. His obsessions are hollow and the world too flawed to satisfy them.
The ugliest violence in American Psycho usually chases the pettiest itch, like Bateman getting the worst of an Old West-style business-card quickdraw and taking it out on a homeless man, or his rage over a rival’s access to an impossible-to-book restaurant leading to an ax attack set to Hip to Be Square. Harron and Turner’s script makes a running joke of Bateman’s fussiness, like the spoon from a sorbet pint nearly touching his living-room table or blind panic that grips him when he walks into a more expensive apartment overlooking Central Park. The only instinct stronger than his narcissism is his sense of entitlement, and the impossibility of Bateman ever finding satisfaction on either front is a route to madness.
As Bateman, Bale exudes just the right kind of anti-charisma. It’s hard to play a character without a soul, so
Bale focuses on giving a face to the void within. He disappears into the role in all but the most literal sense, and when his eyes aren’t completely vacant, they’re filled with a panic and fury that Bateman only knows how to extinguish through violence. Bale doesn’t want the audience to pity his Bateman, but as he becomes completely unmoored from reality, his misery comes through as strongly as his sociopathy. Bateman wants so badly to be the prototypical capitalist douchebag, but he’s getting worse and worse at faking the human part.
Watching Bateman try anyway makes American Psycho endure as a straight-up comedy more than a macabre provocation or a serial-killer thriller. Here’s a man who tries to slip the inquiries of a private detective by ducking out for lunch with Cliff Huxtable, and says on three different occasions that he was out returning videotapes. He thinks it’s normal guy talk to quote Ed Gein on women, or entertain a date with a fun fact about the name of Ted Bundy’s dog. The final joke of American Psycho is that nobody seems to notice that anything is all that wrong about him. They weren’t really listening anyway.