I like to dissect films. Did you know I'm utterly mundane?

Rating: Null/10 (22 May 2013)

When Bret Easton Ellis's novel 'American Psycho' was released in 1991, many accused him and his work of misogyny. It isn't hard to see why: female characters are depicted as either vacuous or stupid and are usually mutilated or killed by Wall Street banker Patrick Bateman, an undoubtedly misogynistic protagonist. Which is why noted feminist Mary Harron fought tooth and nail to direct Guinevere Turner's film adaptation with Christian Bale as her leading man, after creative pairings such as Oliver Stone and Leonardo Dicaprio and David Cronenberg and Brad Pitt fell through. And how inspired her vision is! While a male director may have been impressed by the Nietzchean aspect of Bateman, Harron regards him as a hopelessly vain and emotionally underdeveloped young man, weak for being unable to control his violent impulses. One suspects a male director would not have let his camera linger on our antihero in the shower for quite so long as well.
Christian Bale veers from smarm to plain evil in every scene. A vapid grin will flash upon his face just as quickly as the light will glint off the side of the axe he ploughs into a colleague's face. As the late critic Roger Ebert said of his performance (couldn't have put it better myself), "there is no instinct for self-preservation here". A far cry from the pretentious 'Dark Knight' films of late, then. With an emotional range of, as the character expresses it, 'greed and disgust', he doesn't provide us with much to relate to as a human being but as the actor himself has said, "he's certainly a guy you'd like to eavesdrop on". More so than the countless other vapid shells of inhumanity surrounding him, who often have no lines to read but serve to remind us that Patrick Bateman is, in his own words "an abstraction... something illusory..."
In a movie about endemic consumerism, everyone has been made-up to look indistinct within their scene, with nearly identical glasses, haircuts and suits. Hair and make-up also deserve particular credit for creating the monster's face. A glimmering sheen of sweat on his otherwise perfectly composed visage tells us when he's 'on the verge of frenzy' and a single tremor in his herb-mint facial mask of sanity reminds us it is always about to slip. His fanatical devotion to a rigorous exercise routine, balanced diet and daily beautification regimen borders on the religious. Never has the lipstick and rouge been applied so subtly yet significantly as here.
To aurally demonstrate to us how much men have 'evolved', in the scene where our WASPs compare business cards, SFX designer Benjamin Cheah employs the sound of a sword being removed from it's sheath to draw parallels with the equivalent practice of their knight ancestors of Britain and the Netherlands in Medieval times. It reveals, terrifyingly, how little man has really evolved since. A soundtrack that wouldn't seem out of place in any piece of Hollywood fluff of it's era serves only to heighten our protagonist's psychopathy here.
Whether it's Phil Collins' epic meditation on intangibility 'Invisible Touch' or Whitney Houston's ode to monogamy and commitment 'The Greatest Love of All', Bateman clearly likes the product they're selling him: life, security and happiness (without the pursuit –an AmEx credit card will do). He would value a wife and son much in the same way as he would a new Louis Vuitton watch or Giorgio Armani suit. An item is an item to him: something he has to have. When he gives his dinner guests the sanctimonious lecture on world hunger, he's merely imitating something he's heard on TV. Content means nothing, form is everything ("...inside doesn't matter...").
After implausibly shooting it out in the street with the cops, Bateman crashes in his office where he tearfully confesses his many crimes, mostly ones unseen by us, to his lawyer over the answering machine (the detachment of the 80s now seems relatively intimate). The next day, however, a prescription-drug mood-controlled Bateman confronts him in a downtown bar only to find that his guilty voicemail has been mistaken for a joke. Meanwhile his secretary Jean, the only sympathetic character of the story, peruses his business diary of gory doodlings in the film's only scene removed from the perspective of our own 'psycho'. So, which is it short for? Have we all been witness to the inner-ravellings of a psychotic? –that particular strain of unreliable narrator being a popular theme at the time, e.g. 'Fight Club', 'Memento'. It would seem unlikely that Harron, or Ellis for that matter, would want to waste ninety minutes of our time studying a character who, by his own admission, is 'simply not there'. Not that it isn't a character study.
Rather, it is one of a nation. A singularly American psychopath. There is great significance in Ronald Reagan delivering his address to the nation regarding the Iran-Contra scandal on the TV moments before Bateman confesses to camera. In the speech, Reagan denied having knowledge of the unlawful dealings while refusing to apologise for his ignorance. When Nixon announced his resignation apropos the Watergate scandal, the American people were outraged. Fast-forward thirteen years and they were too sedated by psychotropic drugs and MTV to give a sh*t that a shadow government had been selling arms to Islamic militants in Iran with the proceeds funding anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua, all in their name. Much the same can be said of the yuppies depicted herein; who claim to have dined with Paul Allen after Bateman killed him, fail to hear his sinister homicidal remarks over drinks or misinterpret his deadly advances. They mistake each other for different people throughout, which would seem to uphold his psychopathy. The film is best viewed as an allegory for the all-consuming male vanity and self-absorption of the time period. The beginning of the end of patriarchy.
This review has meant something.