it is the privilege of the self-important to debate trivia

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2009)

My friend Dmitry thinks that Mary Harron is prejudiced against the male characters. Also Dmitry hates "it was all a dream" stories, of which he considers "American Psycho" one. He thinks the movie fails as tragedy and comedy, because there are no consequences for Patrick Bateman.
Here's part of his letter to me regarding this film:
"what's the point of the story? is it about a shark among sharks who has a touch of humanity which makes him hate himself and disagree with the world he lives in - then what's the sacrifice? or the tragedy? he leaves his fiancé and makes the false confession but it's not enough, dramatically. ed norton confesses to the police. then shoots himself in the mouth. that's sacrifice. the point of "American Psycho", i guess, is that he has no way to redeem himself and that's the tragedy. that would be fine if not for all the murders. and again, if they are in his head and he thinks they are real then he is not merely having a nervous breakdown (which he never really has) but he is psychotic and that's never dealt with. "
Following is a response I wrote him in 2007:
Bateman is psychotic, which is all that is dealt with, in my opinion. Start with the title. And the fact that everything he does is nuts. Even his friends kind of think he's weird, and they're barely awake enough to recognize him. He is Tantalus, staring at his own reflection and failing to grasp it until he goes mad with coveting himself.
The joke of this story, I think, is a man trying desperately to have a tragedy, or a comedy, or any kind of a dramatic life, but he's just a doofus who happens to be very rich. He's Bruce Wayne without a good idea in his head. He's unable to really have, for instance, a sense of accomplishment, or a need unfulfilled, or a sense of loss, or values, really - since he's at the very, very top of Olympus, having achieved the top 2% of the planet in terms of resources (women and $100 plates and blow and limousines), he should be able to be happy. BUT THERE IS NO DRAMA IN HAVING EVERYTHING. So that's the comic premise: he can't have a tragedy, and he is driven mad by the attempt. The tragedy would be "A Clockwork Orange", a man so blasé and jaded that he follows the baser impulses of popular culture because it really doesn't matter what he does since society's such wreckage anyway, and whose real tragedy is that he actually can fulfill himself and be happy by doing evil, a more cynical sensibility than I think is found in "American Psycho".
At this point, I think there are two valid ways to look at what constitutes the story.
One is that he hasn't really committed these murders which should be horrific but aren't, and that he's having a nervous breakdown from trying so hard to transgress and being so impotent that his sex fantasies have become indistinguishable in his retarded mind from his real life. His fantasies, also, are not enough to make his life interesting; fantasies never are; and he is just an empty Lord & Taylor bag that a homeless man is using for a pillow. His friends see this, aren't interested enough to pity him, or, worse, think his confession is just a joke that they don't really get, so they kind of laugh along until their feelings are hurt. In trying to suffer punishment he only receives minor scorn. He is such a failure, a cipher, that even his crimes don't really exist. This is an okay interpretation, but less interesting than:
The other way you could look at it, which is that he's so desperate for passion and fulfillment that, like Hercules, he really did commit these crimes, but that AGAIN THERE ARE ZERO CONSEQUENCES. When he confesses and nobody believes him, and even when his friends offer evidence to the contrary, that's just because they're as stupid as he is, and that they mistook him for someone else and also mistook his victim for someone else and they're all interchangeable anyway, and that it's just too much trouble for these people even to help the detective find the murderer, since nobody really liked Paul Allen in the first place. Anyway they're all self-absorbed and inattentive to really important details, not like "which restaurant shall we go to," which is a minor detail that's very important to them, but big details like "who am I talking to?" I think this is the funnier interpretation, and I think that the movie ends on enough of an ambiguous note to allow for it.
It is an imperfect film. It has great performances, many great scenes, a few very nice recurring themes, and many flaws. The disappearing detective is as you point out a problem. There is contempt in the lens, which I agree is to no one's advantage. I think we should see the guys hanging out more, see more of what pathetic losers they are, or more of how he's more or less screwed up than they. There is too much time spent with the character alone. To really get Travis Bickle's alienation, we don't only show him alone in his apartment playing G. Gordon and writing cryptic messages to himself. We show him at the movies.
But man, Christian Bale on the phone, talking to that answering machine. So beautiful. We are capable of so much, we humans. Now if we would only stop playing Batman so often.