Over the past twenty-five years, American Psycho (2000) has soared beyond cult status to become both a mainstay in online meme culture and a crude representation of how consumeristic, capitalistic, hustle-centric society can erode the human mind.
We’ve all seen the clip of a nearly-orgiastic Patrick Bateman foaming at the mouth over his colleagues’ business cards or the gif of him striding down the street listening to his Sony Walkman. We’ve all witnessed an overeager yuppie praise this movie for all the wrong reasons, director Mary Harron’s tongue-in-cheek satire flying right over their head. So at this point, what else is there to say about American Psycho? Any fresh or insightful commentary has already been exhausted. We already know Patrick Bateman likes Huey Lewis and the News.
Don’t get me wrong: the book is pure horror
Although this isn’t a groundbreaking take, I’d like to argue that—unlike the book—the movie version of American Psycho isn’t horror at all; it’s a comedy. Despite telling the same story and exploring identical themes, Bret Easton Ellis’s original 1991 novel is much darker, more gruesome, and filled with so much violence (described in meticulous detail, might I add) that it’s oftentimes hard to get through. As a longtime Ellis fan and devout 80s lover, I found the experience of reading this book akin to holding my breath underwater to see how long I could last.
On a lovely Saturday morning with birds chirping outside my window I was reading chunks of block text about Bateman burning off the nipples of his victims with acid and severing their breasts with a chainsaw. How does one simply go about their business after that?
Through the Eyes of a Psychopath
Told from a first-person perspective, reading American Psycho almost feels voyeuristic, like a violation of privacy; not only are we viewing the world through Bateman’s eyes but we get to witness how his psyche devolves through pernicious, often nonsensical stream-of-consciousness monologues. There are giant block paragraphs about how he tortures prostitutes and how much he despises the poor, and interspersed between them are intellectual musical commentaries about artists like Genesis and Whitney Houston and (famously) Huey Lewis and the News’ evolving discography from Sports to Fore!
For nearly 400 pages we’re trapped in the skull of a jaded, deranged individual, which is only compounded for those who loathe the 1980s (luckily, I am not one of them). We’re exposed to the things that happen in the dark, to the intrusive thoughts that are better left unsaid — and worst of all, we’re complicit bystanders as Bateman murders, abuses, rapes, and even cannibalizes his victims.
How the film dovetails to form its own identity
My Letterboxd bio reads “Patrick Bateman apologist,” so it’s safe to say I adore both the novel and its film adaptation. Ultimately, though, they’re two different stories, and I admire the way Mary Harron molded the already-iconic character into something all her own — so much so that I’d categorize her version of American Psycho as a different genre entirely: it’s 100% a black comedy.
I think the movie — albiet chock-full of blood and guts and gore — manages to save the viewer from feeling all types of disturbed by making Bateman less of a person and more of a caricature. He emulates the Wall-Street-yuppie stereotype so hyperbolically that nothing (even when he’s hacking up bodies) can be taken seriously, and as a result everything Bateman does is played for laughs. It chronologizes the book almost beat by beat, but suddenly the scenes we cringed at while reading are now ones we’re laughing along to. When he’s frolicking around his apartment with an ax, we’re no longer thinking about how Bateman’s mental disintegration is a commentary on corporate America and the lack of personal identity — instead, we’re saying: “Look at this crazy clown! He’s so goofy and insane!”
An Intellectual “Escape Hatch”
Something else I admire about the movie is the clever loophole Harron invents in order to circumvent the heavy weight of all that… you know …nasty stuff that Bateman does. As I’ve already discussed, what he’s doing in the book is ostensibly disgusting, sadistic, and very much illegal, but the film version of Bateman is a lot more nebulous in the sense that we, as the audience, never know for sure if he’s committing all the murders depicted on screen.
Conceptualizing Bateman as a character we’re watching rather than a real person whose head we’re living inside of provides this added layer of distance — and that is what Harron relies on to construct this secret, second storyline that’s woven throughout the film. It’s very easy to read the movie as straightforward (i.e., it’s a tale about a man driven to his breaking point), but one can easily make the case that everything that happens on screen is just in Bateman’s head.
As just another Wall Street bigwig, he’s mistaken for his coworkers so frequently (one of the more exhaustive running gags) that nobody knows where he is when the murders take place. But what if he never killed anyone at all? What if they’re all mental fantasies?
This reading of the film makes even more sense when you consider that the scene of Willem Dafoe (playing a police investigator) was filmed three different times under three different assumptions. In one take, his character knew Bateman was guilty. In another, he believed Bateman was innocent. And in the third, he wasn’t sure. In the final cut of the film, these takes were then spliced together to produce a very tonally confusing scene that makes it particularly hard to get a read on what Dafoe’s character is thinking.
And if Bateman really is innocent, then that makes the movie even more hilarious; we can laugh at the “murders” knowing they never happened in the first place, thus removing the darker aspects of the film entirely. The brilliance is that we’ll never know.