'My confession has meant nothing'

Rating: 8/10 (30 July 2011)

A lot of the reviews have focused on the plot on a straightforward basis, but American Psycho is not just a dark comedy or a B movie slasher, but rather an allegory for the negativities of capitalism. Patrick Bateman struggles to convince his own lawyer he had committed the killings the audience had seen him commit earlier in the film. There are various reasons why this is and neither Bret Easton Ellis in the novel or Mary Harron in the film rules decisively on which.
One is that in this convincingly believable 80s NYC yuppie world, people have become so interchangeable that Bateman can kill countless numbers of people without anybody realising, because everyone is so generic. Hence why one of his victims mistake him for a co-worker, and why everyone Bateman knows seems to be Vice-President at Pierce & Pierce, and why the detective and his lawyer thinks his victim, Paul Allen, is alive and in London.
Another possible reason is that people know he has killed people and they simply don't care, because the lives of others don't matter. As Bateman says while he is analysing Whitney Houston,'in this world where it's hard to empathise with others, we can above all empathise with ourselves'. Taken from this viewpoint, the story is an allegory for how the actions of American governments and corporations cause famine and war around the world that result in real world deaths, but we brush them off because it means we in the West can have cheap clothes, food and petrol.
A final interpretation I will offer is that Bateman has fantasised all these killings. In this interpretation Bateman is the victim. His life has become so boring and formulaic, with endless dinners at overpriced, gaudy restaurants, endless discussions about style and beauty tips, that the only way he can feel human is to fantasise about the most brutal and sadistic acts possible. This interpretation is given credence by the cartoonish violence in his final rampage and of course the ending.