Revisionist Movie Review : American Psycho (2000)
America was not ready for Bret Easton Ellis. In the late eighties, early nineties, it still wallowed in rigid values, superficial morality and a whole lot of cocaine and Ellis' gleeful pointed fingers made people feel uncomfortable. When his magnum opus American Psycho came out in 1991, he was labeled a shit disturber, an agent provocateur and a visionary. The film adaptation turned him into a superstar at the turn of the millennium. An “A Grade” satirist. The next great American writer. A couple years later, the same culture would Christen Marilyn Manson as its Great Boogeyman, only to swallow him away a couple years later.
What is up with this? Is American Psycho as good as we remember? Is it still what it was created to be? I rewatched the Mary Harron adaptation to find out.
In case you were living under a rock for the last two decades: American Psycho tells the story of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale’s breakout role), an uptight banking executive on Wall Street in the eighties. He wants nothing more than to look good, fit in and quench his murderous thirst on as many plebeians as possible. The more Patrick kills, the more he feels the need to kill and his desire threaten to spin out of control. When a business rival (who’s also his coworker and looks exactly like him) invites him for dinner, Patrick graduates from killing plebeians to murdering pretty fucking important people.
The unbearable lightness of taking Patrick Bateman seriously
Who am I kidding? This film aged extremely well. It’s perhaps more obviously satirical today than it was twenty years ago, both consciously and unconsciously. Take the infamous business card scene: what is great about it is that all these characters are exactly the same. They buy their suits in the same place (which Bateman underlines in his soliloquy), they have slicked back hair and when they start comparing business cards you start noticing that they all have the same title too. Vice-president mergers & acquisition. All they have to differentiate themselves is font, color and texture. They’re powerful men reduced to their most basic insecurities.
Watching American Psycho twenty years after the fact, you realize how idiotic the incel fascination for Patrick Bateman is. He’s not an alpha male at all. He’s insecure and conformist and his violent impulses are just extreme expressions of his feeling of inadequacy. Seriously, what is cool about him? The fact that he earns a lot of money doing a boring-ass job he obviously despises? His hyperviolent sexuality, which he exerts on sex workers like every other serial killer? The crippling loneliness of his condo? If anything, two decades made Bret Easton Ellis’ satire clearer.
How he ever became a countercultural icon is beyond me. I believe the image of Patrick Bateman is more popular and important than the character is. The swaggy, confident business executives willing to fuck and murder everything standing in his way. But it’s not exactly it. Bateman only wants to feel fulfilled by the world around him and that’s the constant heartbreak that comes from following the rules that drives him nuts.He does not have a psychotic master plan of destroying society or whatever. He’s appealing to incels and weirdos because he’s basically a better looking version of them.
The unbearable lightness of NOT taking Patrick Bateman seriously
There’s another side to this coin. Of course, Patrick Bateman is unappealing. He should be unappealing, but he’s not beneath our concern. It should feel slightly uncomfortable to watch him squirm through social situations because he’s constantly worrying about the wrong things. Shit that is designed to stop being appealing once you own it like apartments and club membership cards. The only ones you ever want are those you don’t already have. It might seem like a crude anticapitalist statement, but the fact that it defines the very interiority of a character makes it deeper than it seems.
See, what makes Patrick Bateman such an enduring character even for non-incels is that he’s barely even a human. He’s the sum of his choices and most of his choices consist in luxuries he can offer himself. He’s the perfect consumer and he’s perfectly unhappy. You see where I’m getting there, don’t you? You might feel like Patrick Bateman is a crude anticapitalist statement after all, but I believe what differentiates him from others is that he is almost at the top of the food chain. He can almost offer himself everything. Except he’s sadder and emptier than most of us. He's proof that our way of life doesn’t work. That’s it’s bound to end in disaster one way or another.
Our consumerist instincts have evolved tremendously over the last twenty years. Brands are targeting values rather than our needs and consumerism has become a way to express oneself. Whether you choose to buy PC or Mac, iPhone or Android, Drake or Kanye West is supposed to tell the world who you are as a person except not really. It just puts you in a broad category that will expose you to another barrage of choices you’ll be asked to make. It’s endless, meaningless and unfulfilling. American Psycho illustrates this brilliantly, but I think audiences got way too lost in the serial killing plot.
*
Is American Psycho still satire? Yes and no. Patrick Bateman is very much a parody himself, but reality caught up to the broader point Bret Easton Ellis was trying to make: we live in a way that will lead to our doom. That succeeding at the rat’s race is perhaps even worse than failing. American Psycho both funnier and bleaker movie than I remembered. Both are not mutually exclusive. It’s also much better and sharp-witted than my recollection of it. It’s worth a rewatch in 2022 much more than it did five or ten years ago. Treat yourselves folks. This one has most definitely stood the test of time
