American Psycho... American Society.

Rating: 8/10 (26 May 2011)

American Psycho is a movie that digs psychologically in order to hit socially. The story is certainly brilliant and mind-spinning, thanks to Bret Easton's book.
American Psycho is about an apathetic successful rich young man, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) who suffers from grave psychological disturbances that make him go into killing frenzies. One of the first lines that Bateman says in the movie goes as follows: "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there." These words apparently set the stage for the events to follow in the film. This idea of being an abstraction resurfaces at the end, making things clearer. American Psycho does not criticize Bateman as an individual. Being and abstraction, he stands for all the 1980s yuppies; this class of young gentlemen who nearly had everything: fame, money and success, yet were vain, stupid, materialistic and superficial from the inside, and who also lost touch with their society and humanity. Sharing the same characteristics is beautifully represented in the movie more than once as everybody gets mistaken for somebody else. Thus, since the idiosyncrasies disappear, the whole society manifests itself in one facade-like individual: Patrick Bateman.
Bateman is extremely self-conscious; he is obsessed with cleanness, health, looks and fancy clothes, which almost applies to everyone else. Bateman starts having this killing fits in which he murders prostitutes, strangers and even his colleagues in cold blood. However, unlike the common analysis, I tend to believe that these murders are real, but since Bateman is not an individual as I mentioned before, they are committed by the whole society. How he gets away with all his murders and insults people without them responding show that he is a recurrent case... a collective human condition with no material existence.
Christian Bale has certainly excelled himself with this hauntingly beautiful performance. To be able to capture the anxiety, rage, vanity and insanity of an entire society and represent them in one character is sheer brilliance and exquisite talent.