Who is Patrick Bateman?

Rating: 10/10 (3 June 2007)

There is an interesting moment during an early part of Mary Harron's controversial black horror comedy American PSYCHO that truly defines who Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is, even when hints are dropped here and there that not even Bateman himself knows who he is. As he goes through his ritual of self-pampering in the name of 'taking care of himself' much in the way cosmetic ads tells us to do, he removes an exfoliating mask from his face in a surprisingly slow way, pausing midway, as he looks at his reflection in the mirror. The camera does not flinch. What we get, for a good five to ten seconds, is the reptilian glare of a monster, a man so repulsive, so unwatchable, that he would make an excellent place as a Stephen King villain -- the Dark Man himself.
However, there is nothing 'dark' about Bateman. He lives in an ultra-swanky New York apartment, all white, an ode of minimalism at its finest. He dresses himself in the finest of fabrics (the book goes to extreme detail of describing just how much of a cult of the fashion-conscious Bateman and his peers are; indeed, all of them seem to dress and look the same and are often confused for one another), he works out obsessively, he admires how he looks, and he covets. Boy, he covets! It's only implied at first, but once the mention of getting that plum reservation at Dorsia -- the Newest Place to Dine At According to the Dining Bible That is Zagat Survey -- falls on the lap of a fellow co-worker, Paul Allen (Owen in the book), Batemen goes bonkers. Literally. (And that's not even going into how he reacts when he loses in the competition of who would have the best business card.) So. Paul Allen comes to his apartment to hang out and he winds out in the wrong end of Patrick Bateman's impossibly pristine, silver axe. The scene in itself is one of the most surreal, wickedly funny, and stomach churning I've ever seen. How Mary Harron constructs it: by having Bateman doing the moonwalk over a Huey Lewis song from 1987, "Hip to be Square" as he recited the importance about this song in pop culture while wearing a raincoat of sorts covering the length of his suit. It's disengaging, it's completely out of whack, but it's there, and it's neatly made movie history with its balls-out temerity and I love it. More so because a woman has directed it, and women aren't always given this chance to be this dark, this perverse.
American PSYCHO is visceral, though it tones it down a tad from the book -- in Bret Easton Ellis' outrageous story Patrick does even more unspeakable things to ex-girlfriend Bethany and late in the novel, to a boy and even then it's still squeamishly funny, while impossibly de Sadean. Guinevere Turner maintains the novel's essence to its core, and by also adhering to the novel's ambiguity -- since we never truly know what exactly happened, what did not, and there is the question of who Patrick Bateman really is -- she creates a wicked examination of reality versus the surreal, integrity versus collapse, the American values versus complete decadence. Oscar Wilde would probably love this story, would he be alive now: this is his own "Picture of Dorian Grey" taken to its furthest limits.