The dark side of vain masculinity, unveiled by Mary Harron ...

Rating: 8/10 (9 March 2020)

I was 27 with high enough a salary to be a chain-dater, taking girls to the same expensive restaurants, especially one with the best panoramic view on Casablanca. My face became familiar to the waiters and they did a good job pretending it was my first "visit". I could bring girls regardless of any intentions to build a relationship; what mattered was the status. Two evenings could cost me a tenth of my salary but it was worth it. And that's the degree of vanity to which I could relate to Patrick Bateman, 26, embodying that point of a man's life where the more he eats, the hungrier he gets.
"American Psycho" is set in the 80s but things haven't changed much; in the 2010s, we could all have a nice girlfriend and yet keep on lusting on that sexy profile on Facebook. Maybe the late twenties is an age where the manly ego roars too loudly to listen to reason, maybe there are so many possibilities that we're more likely to make decisions lingering on fantasies rather than reality, moreover in a time where sex is trivialized by porn and violence by pop-culture, which "American Psycho" shows (as opposite of "tells").
The film, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis's novel and directed by Mary Harron, is about that state of vanity driven to its more extreme and disturbing form. Here is Bateman's existential dilemma: should he surrender to the comfort of conformism at the risk of becoming a mediocrity (in his own terms) or acting free in the name of a supra-individuality that puts him above everyone else? The film is set during the Reagan-era and centers on arrogant yuppies who measure success by their capability to get the best tables, the most exotic meals and fulfill any kind of sexual fantasy. And Patrick Bateman is the most troubled of them: he's attractive, articulate but his moments of social adequacy are punctuated with anxiety driven by jealous rage.
But the weirdest aspect is less in his behavior than the way it keeps getting unnoticed. It's very telling that the final line of the film is "That confession meant nothing". Many movies tend to use violence to make a specific comment against society, channeling "Taxi Driver" or "A Clockwork Orange" (there's even a scene that echoes Kubrick's film where Bateman confronts a homeless man) but in "American Psycho", violence says more about the perpetrator and the environment that can't perceive him as the degenerate man he is. It's not about the vanity of men who reached the top but the way they are seen as perfectly compatible with civilization although they're acting below animals, it's like a more cynical version of "Being There" with Peter Sellers.
"American Psycho" can also be regarded as an alternative to "Fight Club". In Fincher's film, men compensated the vacuity of their lives by uniting and draining their energy from their survival instinct, with a collective voice, and rejecting capitalism because it rejected humans in the first place. Harron's perspective shows men who exist individually, but whose existence are lead at the expenses of a social conscience, or any conception of love or family. It's all about consumption, competition, buying, eating, trading, a world where even women are treated like products whether prostitutes or strippers or disposable fiancées. These men didn't fight the system but embraced it, men being wolves to men.
Patrick Bateman took it a bit too literally: anyone above him is a dead man, anyone who admires or loves his Alpha aura might get away, someone with no goal whatsoever, no philosophy of life, deserves to be killed. Destruction is what connects both "Fight Club" and "American Psycho" but if in the former, the mayhem was supposed to build a new order, the message was still contradicted by its homoerotic undertones and its constant gaze on Brad Pitt's beautiful abs. The film was tantalizing our voyeuristic tendencies. We get the same gaze on Bale, when he's taking a shower and narrates his cosmetic morning routine, but it's devoid of passion, it's cold and soulless and his naked body is often associated to scenes of horror that connects between the two worlds of fantasy: violence and nudity. It's just as if the real motive of the 'Fight Club' was to create a sense of belonging, to build a collective male body instead of restoring justice.
Mary Harron deconstructs the myth of masculinity through the portrayal of many metrosexual men as self-important and gossipy as the Beverly Hills housewives. Bateman has everything: a steady and gratifying job, a huge apartment in New York, a beautiful fiancée (Reese Witherspoon) and yet he's devoured by a constant urge to destroy whatever can spoil this feeling of perfection, even someone whose business card looks better. The film blends toward horror and comedy with rather gruesome episodes, but there's never any attenuating circumstance, Bateman has no moral alibi. He was raised by pop-culture, Reagan, and considers killing something as casual as ordering a hamburger.
It might be the extreme point from which we understand the inconceivable: why would someone who'd accept that thousands of people die from a transaction accept to be ethical? Why would someone who's at the top of the human pyramid, decides to have casual sex with an average Jane or accepts marital commitment? Why would he indulge to normal behavior? That's the point, the higher climb as a man and the looser will be your sense of moral, (look at the Weinstein or Epstein scandals) and maybe Bateman, whether he commits the actual crimes or dream of them, is the embodiment of both masculinity and capitalism dark side.
And Bale's extraordinary performance is crucial because he never tries to make his character sympathetic when he confronts us to our potential for degeneracy and hypocrisy. "American Psycho" is an underrated 2000s film, oddly prophetic, revealing new depths at each viewing.