We Have Issues offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
Maybe we should stop throwing the word “unfilmable” around, because it certainly doesn’t deter filmmakers from trying to prove the term wrong. In fact, throw a complex book into a pool of directors and chances are you’d get an instant feeding frenzy as the more daring of them fall over each other to bring seemingly impossible to realise stories to the screen. There’s been some epic examples in the past, with David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, David Fincher’s Fight Club and Mike Flanagan’s Gerald’s Game being noticable stand-outs – however, surely one of the most influential of them all is Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.
While the book essentially took the form of a near continuous stream of consciousness of a wealthy young investment banker who is overwhelmingly narcissistic by day and a savage serial killer by night, turning the first-person prose into an actual story that does justice to the orginal themes was never going to be easy. However, what we got was something undeniably remarkable that’s worryingly become even more prescient as the years go by.
In 1987, we meet New York city investment banker Patrick Bateman who maintains something of a meticulous sense of style and upkeep in order to fit in with the Wall Street, “greed is good” style of the times. He’s obsessive about his looks, keeps up a merciless fitness and hygiene regime, and spends a lot of his time being staggeringly misogynistic within his circle of similarly upper class friends and workmates. However, the one thing that separates him from the shallow heard is that Patrick also appears to be hopelessly insane and frequently has to satisfy his lust for murder by slaughtering the odd homeless person or female conquest.
It’s a balance that Patrick has thus far managed to maintain between cheating on his on again/off again fiancé and doing whatever the hell it actually is he does at work. But due to a helpful inner monologue, it seems that Patrick’s control of his urges is gradually starting to slip and a fast-growing avalanche of death, murder and sadism starts to gain momentum. Set off by the murder of a colleague, Bateman not only has to hope that his animalistic lust for killing doesn’t put him in any compromising situations, but he has to deflect the questions of private detective Donald Kimball as he struggles to hold the outward appearance of a man who doesn’t regularly brutalise hookers for fun.
However, as Patrick’s thin veneer of sanity starts to evaporate, we have to ask a rather awkward question. While Bateman is undoubtedly crazy enough to to all the ghastly and repellent things that he does, could he also be crazy enough to be imagining it all? Considering how vapid and shallow his world is, could it be that he’s merely the victim of a glitching imagination and a world that seems to reward pathological behavior – or his he merely the luckiest maniac that ever lived?
Even after all these years, there’s still never quite been a film quite like American Psycho. Mercilessly roasting the male ego alive in one hand, it also still stands as a wickedly smart satire that rightfully points out how corrupt and shallow the lives of the rich asshole have become that a murdering lunatic can pass unnoticed among them. Smartly focusing on the parts of Brett Easton Ellis’ book that had his emotionless lead expunge in great detail about skin care, exfoliates and stomach crunches, there’s something of a parallel to be made with the rash of male influencers who deliver thinly veiled hate speech concerning women and who worship money and looks like they’re ancient Gods demanding a sacrifice of their very humanity. To be fair, it’s this level of insight that give American Psycho its razor sharp edge – but for all the foresight of both Ellis and Harron, the real secret to the film’s winning formula is a lead performance for the ages.
To convincingly play such a being as Patrick Bateman, you’d have to find someone that can play a psychotic prick that not only exudes an almost supernatural sense of self belief, but also has the capacity to have all of it implode to either reveal a snarling animal in human skin, or a sweating, whimpering wretch who’s barely clinging onto reality as he knows it. Thankfully, Christian Bale was on hand to inhabit Bateman in a way that’s instantly star making and to be frank, he’s never been better. At turns chilling in his acts of humanity-free cruelty, pathetic as he’s famously one-upped in the business card stakes, and surprisingly goofy as he gyrates to Huey Lewis And The News, the actor spins numerous plates in his formidable performance.
Reportedly channeling an interview with Tom Cruise for his inspiration, watching this human-shaped trust-fund, and stunningly entitled, monster vainly fill the emptiness in his life with talky, self indulgent critiques on popular music, scoring reservations at swanky hotels and indulging in the sort of sexually sadistic behavior that would get you noticed by the Cenobites, it’s a safe bet to say that the actor has never been as perfect as he is here, be it obsessed with his own flexing reflection during sex, or awkwardly trying to remove himself from a social scenario by dropping the repeated excuse that he has to return some videotapes. Yes, the rest of the cast contains a surprising amount of names who also thrived, but it’s truly Bale’s show and everyone else is used to hammer home just how material this existence is by all involved seemingly having an interchangeable personality that gets everyone confused with everyone else. Handy for the odd alibi…
But while Harron’s satirical touches are masterfully honed, she proves that she can handle the “Psycho” part of of the story too; and while we never truly discover which of the jarring, setpieces of slaughter actually occur and which take place entirely within our fracturing lead’s psyche, the director stages them with a chilling balance of absurdity and horror. When Patrick isn’t humiliating and then stabbing a vagrant to death in an alleyway, he goes full tilt boogie in a nightmarish sequence as he comes screaming after a prostitute with a chainsaw wearing nothing but a pair of white trainers. In fact, I swear that the punchline of the scene, where he drops the roaring tool on her at exactly the right moment while she flees down a stairwell was riffed in The Dark Knight when Batman drops onto the roof of an escaping van after measuring its trajectory. I don’t know, maybe I’m just as delusional as Bateman…
Pitch perfect satire blends with a coiled-spring sense of barely contained savagery as Harron wrestles an unfilmable novel into submission and Bale racks up the best performance of his career. The fact that we actually have people now on social media who seem to idolise the attitudes the film is mocking (barely stopping short at murder) means as a society, we’ve still got a long way to go – but that’s what movies like American Psycho are for. If we didn’t laugh at these people and the monstrous, greed-fueled worlds that spawn them, we’d scream.
Where to watch American Psycho: