A bit disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (17 April 2000)

The creed of American yuppies in the 80s can be basically summed up as "egoism" -- the formalism of selfishness, an ethic whose only constraint is punishment. In the absence of punishment anything goes, and, if you play your cards right, risking punishment can be just as innocuous as, say, risking your life each time you get into an automobile. If all there is is the self, why should there be any constraint on action except punishment of the self? A smart, careful business plan seeks to minimize risk, of course, but risk must be the price paid for getting what you want. No pain, no gain, as we used to say in the 80s.
It is a fact that the majority of murders go unsolved. It is compelling to imagine a yuppie egoist, therefore, on Wall St in the 80s, who accepts the risk of punishment as an acceptable price to pay for the reward of indulging in pleasure killings. The "logic" of this decision is as compelling as the logic of laying off thousands to raise your stock price or trashing the environment so your comapny can be a 2 billion dollar company instead of just a billion dollar one. Why let compassion get in the way of gettin' what you want?
This script seems to miss this tantalizing allegorical angle in favor of becoming yet another Hitchcock-esque thriller. Patrick Bateman isn't a coldly calculating yuppie weekend murderer, he's an out-of-control psycho, who scrawls grotesque scenes of torture in his appointment book and who thinks the ATM machine is telling him to feed it cats. This is a comforting view of serial killers, one that makes them so different from you and me that we can comfortably and conveniently avoid asking the hard questions about what turns a human being into a murderer. Eh, they're just nuts! My, how illuminating.
What if serial killers weren't just nuts? What if they were rational, even, after a fashion, "normal" people who had intelligently rationalized themselves into turning off their consciences? There are a lot of screen killers who approach this sort of character, but the film makers must usually find something in them which makes them seem weird or alien or otherwise deeply disturbed. In American Psycho, I rather hoped that our killer would be a true mirror of ourselves, not just another psycho freak, easily dismissed as an aberration. A real villain is one who can smile while doing evil, someone who is almost likeable. A ranting madman is just a ranting madman.