Christian Bale is American Psycho’s greatest Special Effect.
And that’s why director/co-writer Mary Harron is able to make this very complex little film work so well. To depict a person so far gone into his fantasy construct that it bleeds together into his reality requires a very deft hand, and Bale has that hand in spades. He has to sell you on both levels of the movie’s reality--the real world where he is pretty much considered a nobody or worse, a buffoon who keeps trying to impress people with his intellectual, professional ‘prowess’and this fantasy world where he is this inhuman alpha predator who kills for pleasure--and Bale manages to make it seems like he lives in both worlds while being consistently ‘Patrick Bateman’ throughout.
Make no bones about it, the film is not a slasher movie. It’s about how the culture of the 80‘s Yuppie was hollow. Bateman wants to succeed in this culture so badly he has boxed his aggression and frustration at not being successful in this alternate, evil persona. In a way, it’s relevant now as a satirical treatise on toxic masculinity. In a world where cell phones are unweildy boxes and there’s no such thing as the internet, you have to keep your hostilities close to your tailored vest. We watch Bateman do this, but Harron’s direction intentionally flips back and forth between his external and internal worlds with no indication of the passage. What this ends up doing is making both worlds valid in our point of view. In fact, for the bulk of the film’s running time, we accept these two conflicting realities as one reality and don’t realize we’re watching someone who actually prefers to live in his fantasy construct than admit he is a loser.
That the demarcation between the two realities this man lives in is not even acknowledged by Harron is what makes it brilliant--and also why I think so many people (like the goofs who made American Psycho II: All American Girl several years later) didn’t get it. I think it didn’t help that Harron chooses to shift a key scene of the novel, where Bateman visits the apartment he’s been using as a murder den to find it all cleaned up and being sold, from the middle to the end. Coming as it does after our most extensive visit to his Alpha Predator World, it serves to disconnect us. It’s too clear a transition in a film where the transitions between the two worlds were non-existant, and I wonder if just going to the conversation with his lawyer at the end would have made things clearer.
Don’t get me wrong; I do think Bateman in the film does some brutal things. When the prostitute Christine complains about having to go to the emergency room, we’re still in the real world. But the extreme violence that we see is only in his head. That’s probably why Bale looks different in those sequences, with a waxy countenance that doesn’t look quite real and a body language that seems herky-jerky in some scenes and derived from the slasher movies in others; it seems obvious that Bale is consciously mimicking the loping gate of Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which we see him watching earlier in the movie) as he chases Christine through the building naked with a chainsaw. We’re dealing with an unreliable narrator here. The trick is that, unlike other films which use an unreliable narrator to conceal something horrific, American Psycho allows us to see the flipside of the story. We’re seeing the inner life that Bateman hides in to cope with how he’s struggling in a cutthroat, callous world. And because we spends too much time in his inner life, we don’t realize--as his amazingly dunderheaded ‘essays’ on pop music bear out, riddled with factual mistakes and pretentious pronouncements--that he’s really unremarkable and shallow, drowning in his own mediocrity.
I recommend this film. It’s very nature probably prevented it from becoming a mega-hit (because it was so low budget, it made a respectable amount--enough for the sequel I referenced above to be made, which you should only watch if you have a thing for Mila Kunis or William Shatner), but I like the fact it stuck around in the public consciousness. I wouldn’t call it underrated; it’s about as rated as it should be. But it is definitely a great film, and I would maybe go so far as to say you must see it if you’re interested in psychological horror.
How YOU Can Curate The 2nd Half Of The Horrorfest!
You have five more days to help curate this year's Halloween Horrorfest
If you donate $31 to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network before October 15th and send me the receipt proving you did, you can name one movie I have to watch during the Horrorthon. Keep in mind there are some things I won’t do (so no Eli Fucking Roth movies, for example), and it has to be a movie I can find. If you’re an independent filmmaker and are willing to make the donation, by all means send me the film. I will do as many as I can before October 31st, and those I can I will view in the days after Halloween during ‘Beyond Halloween Horrorfest.'
*--Although even I will admit I would have loved to see the version David Cronenberg proposed, which apparently featured musical numbers ala’ Dennis Potter.
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