Hip to Be Square

I’ve reviewed a number of films about unlikable people. Just a couple of months ago I looked back on Ferris Bueller's Day Off and noted that the film was focused on the wrong person. Yes, Ferris as a character is awesome if you’re in his good graces and he wants you to have a good time. But he’s also a manipulative sociopath only interested in furthering his own ends, and he doesn’t care how many people he screws over in the process to get there.. He fucks up his best friend’s life for a car, he basically destroys the career of a principal, and even his sister ends up in jail trying to prove he’s a bad person. The man has a skin of teflon and the movie rewards him for his bad actions time and time again.

It’s almost refreshing, then, to turn to a film where it knows it’s all about the monster. Released in 2000 and based on the 1991 book of the same name from Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho is a character study of a disturbed and disturbing monster. The film, like the movie, is an incisive mocking of yuppie culture of the 1980s, when all the rich boys worked on Wall Street and didn’t care about anything about being richer and better and more powerful than all their peers… which, actually that still sounds like Wall Street even now, which makes the film feel kind of timelines.

American Psycho is a period piece, set in the 1980s like the book it was based on, but it doesn’t really feel like it. Sure, the characters reference restaurants that were popular in the 1980s, and lead character Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) has long conversations about popular music of the era and is always rushing off to “return some video tapes” whenever anyone begins to suspect he might be more than just some Wall Street executive. But when you set these moments aside (or just assume he’s being facetious), American Psycho feels oddly timeless. Scary because some things, some psychos, never change.

The movie focuses on Patrick Bateman (Bale), a Wall Streeter (although we never actually learn exactly what he does, if anything, which is part of the joke of it) who spends his days comparing himself to the other men in the office (all of whom look like the same people) and his nights going to various restaurants and clubs with his fiance (who he despises), Evelyn Williams (Reese Witherspoon), or random other women who he is trying to impress. He spends every idle moment working to make himself appear like the perfect sculpted person, all because he’s completely empty inside.

And also he’s a murderer. Bateman has a penchant for finding women, sometimes one he knows and other times hooker he meets on the streets, beating them and murdering them. It’s one of the only things that actually seems to bring him alive and give him joy. That and 80s pop music like Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis and the News. He could absolutely go on and on about those groups. But he’s a killer through and through, as as the bodies start piling up, he can feel the walls closing in, especially as an investigator, Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), comes sniffing around about one of the people he’s killed. Or has he? Because, maybe it’s all just in his head.

Written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner and directed by Harron, American Psycho is a deeply strange movie. That is, in part, because the book it’s based on would seemingly be impossible to film. It’s a very oddly written book where some chapters read as deeply disturbing descriptions of the horrific things Bateman does, others are odd slice of life scenes from his actual life as a Wall Street something or other, and then there are passages that start and end in the middle of Bateman going on about this or that album from some pop star. It all mashes together in a book that shouldn’t work but kind of does.

I happened to read the book long before I saw the movie, and I have a teacher in college to thank for that. Not because he recommended the book; far from it. He actually called it one of the most offensive and awful books he’d ever read. It does have horrible scenes of Bateman doing really awful, nasty things to women. But even in the book (and this is the part I’m sure the professor missed) it’s unclear if what Bateman is talking about is even actually happening. It often reads more like delusions or fantasies than real things the character wants to do.

That’s what makes the perspective of the movie interesting. The film plays things more straight in certain respects, letting you into the creepy, unsettling life of Bateman, while at the same time, making him look like a really weird dweeb. Nothing feels right about the character in the movie, such that by the time the final act rolls around and the film begins to make you question if any of the violent things Bateman has done even happened, it feels right. Harmon, despite saying she didn’t mean for the ending of the film to be ambiguous, actually crafted the perfect ending for this story.

For his part, Bale is absolutely committed to the Bateman character. Bale saw the character as an alien dropped into Wall Street, finding the whole concept of the character humorous. He understood that Bateman isn’t cool, isn’t the most important person in the room. He’s barely even important to his own story because so much of it may not actually be happening at all. It’s not even clear half the time if he’s even Bateman. Bale gets all this and acts Bateman as this strange creature that doesn’t quite fit. It works so well.

The film does play in the style of a horror movie at times, but like with the character of Bateman, that’s there to accent the humor and parody of it all. American Psycho is meant to be a mockery of the yuppie culture of the time, and Bateman it’s central fool. When he attacks people, when he kills people, it’s all supposed to seem strange and fake. Hell, at one point near the end of the film, as he’s going truly off the deep end, an ATM tells him to feed it a kitten. Like, the horror of this film isn’t really horror. It’s self-parody in a way. Sure, that’s a reading that wasn’t in the book explicitly, but it does work within the intent of the story.

That’s what Harmon’s film really gets: the intent to send up the douche bros that work on the Street. By parodying them so hard, making them seem fake and alien and strange, with no control of their inhibitions, Harmon manages to make them seem less than, even more so than Ellis’s book ever could. It’s a great character study of this freaky person… right before it shows you it was a joke all along.