AMERICAN PSYCHO: revisited, reviewed, and (mostly) explained
Mary Harron’s turn-of-the-century adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel hits Wall Street reputations with a satirical axe… and a chainsaw… and a knife… and a nail gun.
Nearly twenty-five years after its release, American Psycho refuses to slip quietly away. And why should it? Not least because its foundation in the scrutiny of corporate greed remains timelessly relevant – and to no lesser extent, because Harron’s inadvertent creation of a highly meme-able protagonist (long before TikTok, Instagram reels, and any of us having a clue what a ‘meme’ actually was), means that the idea of a Patrick Bateman is never far away from the collective mind’s forefront in the internet age.
For 27-year-old Wall Streeter Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), his world can be broadly and neatly divided into two categories: those people that he likes (himself), and those for which his disdain ranges from moderate loathing to insidious detestation (pretty much everyone else). In this circle of vanity, jealousy and greed, the only sort of release that really satisfies for Bateman is the sort that sees Jared Leto having an axe neatly wedged into the centre of his face. You see, for Bateman is the American Psycho. He’s the materialisation of corporate ambition, cut-throat business, the American Dream, and ‘80s consumerism, compacted into a single entity. Packed within the confines of a human consciousness, this manifestation is overwhelming, with deadly consequences. The result is Jack the Ripper by Valentino. Valentino Couture, to be precise.
Throughout the film’s 100 minutes of runtime, Bateman acts out his murderous compulsions in increasingly brazen fashion, all the while managing to arouse not even the faintest hint of suspicion from his colleagues. His assimilation into the anonymous male pinstripe-clad corporate entity is so successful in fact, that half of his peers wouldn’t be able to pick him out in a line up if their annual bonusses depended on it. If there is one overarching theme to Harron’s adaptation, it’s that one brainless narcissistic yuppie looks very much like the next. Bateman is repeatedly mistaken for other people, just as other people are also mistaken for other people – the chief offender being Leto’s character, Paul Allen. Much like Bateman, here we have yet another tiresome, egotistical pretty boy, who plays the role of the yuppie Allen superbly (apologies Jared, just joking). As Patrick tells us himself: ‘Allen has mistaken me for this dickhead Marcus Halberstram’ and then goes on to note a selection of their similarities: ‘Marcus and I even go to the same barber, although I have a slightly better haircut’. Over dinner, an increasingly drunken Allen then references ‘that loser Patrick Bateman’, and later in the evening receives a somewhat fatal lobotomy from said Bateman. In fairness though, he had warning…
‘I like to dissect girls…
Did you know I’m utterly insane?’ remarked Bateman
‘Great tan Marcus’ replies Allen
As time goes on, Bateman’s insatiable tendency to dispatch those around him is played out by increasingly outlandish means. As I spend my Saturday evening observing a psychopathic (and nude) Patrick Bateman chase a prostitute with a chainsaw, I can’t help but wonder if this is the sort of thing that all members of the banking industry get up to. Perhaps behind the walls of NatWest Stoke-on-Trent there’s a threesome going on as we speak which is all going to end in a bloody mess. One thing’s for sure, I’ll never be able to look at Howard from the old Halifax ads in quite the same way again.
All the same, for reasons inexplicable, I find myself compelled to watch on…
In one of American Psycho’s final scenes, in which the line between reality and delusional fantasy becomes ever more distorted, an ATM instructs Patrick to FEED ME A STRAY CAT, and a further killing spree duly ensues. A frantic Bateman hurries to his office, but finds himself in the wrong building. Not that the security guard on duty notices, greeting him as Mr Smith, before promptly getting a bullet put in his head. A few moments and one smoked janitor later, Patrick arrives at his own, identical, office building where everything finally appears to catch up with him and he breaks down to his lawyer on the phone, confessing to his crimes.
It’s these final scenes which cause the most confusion among viewers – following a shootout with police officers in which Patrick appears to surprise even himself with the ease of blowing up cars with a couple of shots from his pistol. Was this intended as something which actually happened or was it a creation of Bateman’s irrational mind, grown weary under the weight of his own consciousness? Were any of his killings real even? When he returns to Paul Allen’s flat, shown earlier to be rammed with a number of corpses in various states of dismemberment, it is spotlessly clean, with not so much as a hint of decapitated sex worker to be seen. A property agent is even conducting viewings. In the end, no matter what Bateman does, no matter how vehemently he attempts to come clean, nothing sticks – there are simply no repercussions. And this is where American Psycho reaches its full, brilliant, satirical stride. Everything we saw was indeed real, it’s just that the system around him was set up to allow him to get away with it. Not one of them wanted to face up to an inconvenient truth that would have had the potential to disrupt their jobs or lifestyles. And at any rate, none of them were going to realise what Bateman was up to – the majority didn’t even know who he was anyway – including his lawyer in fact, who believed that the phone call confession was a joke about the ‘boring spineless lightweight’ Bateman, as he referred to him.
If this film can be summarised within a single phrase, it’s ‘getting away with murder’. Metaphorically, there are hundreds of real-life Batemans doing this as we speak, the world over. The unscrupulous and the selfish engorging themselves on obscene profits at the expense of everyone else. Patrick Bateman was merely the very literal vessel in which to convey this message in terms that could not be ignored. The irony is that since the advent of TikTok, a section of modern society has apparently decided that Bateman is in fact the perfect role model. Either reassuringly or disconcertingly, this is however no new phenomenon – when Bale visited Wall Street in preparation for the role, the traders present couldn’t help but inform him of their unironic admiration for Patrick Bateman.
Perhaps American Psycho may be viewed much like Bateman himself – observable on the surface as a superficial shell, designed to give an immediate but shallow impression – and then there are the deeper underlayers, thick with allusion to a much more intricate meaning. Embellished with a career-affirming performance from Bale, and a generous helping of humorous violence, American Psycho continues to provide a compelling watch, nearly twenty-five years after its release.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to return some video tapes.
