A Bale Fulla Psychotics

American Psycho Starring: Christian Bale, Reese Witherspoon, Justin Theroux, Chloë Sevigny Director: Mary Harron Rating: !!! Similar to: A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club Where you Can Find It: Anywhere comedy/splatter films are sold/rented. Also, your grocer’s freezer. American Psycho is the story of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a wall-street wunderkind awash in the coke-fueled vanity of the late 1980’s. Although Bateman spends his days slashing costs and making life-or-death deals, the nights are his time to shine. With razor sharp wit, he seduces hookers and co-workers to his apartment…where he then brutally murders them with whatever weapons are on-hand. Although he seems to prefer women victims at first, by the end of the film any warm body will do (even animals work). As his murders increase, so does the rift between reality and fantasy. When American Psycho was released in 2000, it was immediately shelved in many people’s minds under “gory splatter film.” And while this is (to some extent) true, it might be time to take another look at the film through post 9-11 eyeballs. Maybe society has been too harsh on poor Patrick Bateman. Maybe it has been a bit unfair to describe the film as exploitative of women, and über-violent. Maybe this is a film for the masses. Then again, maybe not… “I think ‘American Psycho’ is very feminist…It ends up being an indictment of machismo and misogyny.” -screen-writer Guinevere Turner Turner’s words, when taken out of context, could be about any number of movies that have nothing to do with adult content. I can think of five films off-hand that ‘end up being an indictment of machismo and misogyny’, and none of them rate higher than PG-13. This is not the case with American Psycho. With several scenes depicting bloody murders, and a few containing depraved sexuality (which were edited to reduce the rating in theaters to merely ‘R’), the social commentary that Turner and director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) aimed for tends to be lost among the chaos. And any hopes that these two women might have had for ennobling the masses and squelching the gender-gap die quite rapidly after the first 15 minutes. This movie is an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name, and those who have read the book (I have not…) seem to find it an accurate representation. In fact, there are still--four years later--discussions on numerous message boards whether or not the film/book is the description of a serial killer, or a satire about 1980’s power-vanity. And while that debate may continue for years to come, Ellis has entered the discussion via his new book “Lunar Park.”. "I thought the idea was laughable - that there was no one as insane and vicious as this fictional character out there in the real world. Besides, Patrick Bateman was a notoriously unreliable narrator, and if you actually read the book you could come away doubting that these crimes had even occurred. There were large hints that they existed only in Bateman's mind. The murders and torture were in fact fantasies fueled by his rage and fury about how life in America was structured and how this had - no matter the size of his wealth - trapped him. The fantasies were an escape. This was the book's thesis. It was about society and manners and mores, and not about cutting up women. How could anyone who read the book not see this? Yet because of the severity of the outcry over the novel the fear that maybe it wasn't such a laughable idea was never far away; always lurking was the worry about what might happen if the book fell into the wrong hands." –Excerpt from Lunar Park Regardless of what Ellis had intended, it is obvious that Turner and Harron wanted to create a satire as brutal as Fight Club, and twice as cutting. They achieve this by keeping the violence unrealistic. Those who have read the book talk incessantly about how little of the violent/sexual imagery is included in the movie. Rather the attention seems, at first, to be focused on the disgusting behavior of Bateman’s yuppie friends. As the men sit around cigar bars sharing misogynist views of women, Bateman can’t handle their smug self-congratulations. His first murder is only alluded to, his second is shown violently, and after that the blood spirals comically out of control. Because there is very little realistic gore, the viewer is allowed (almost totally) to disconnect from the negative imagery. And, actually, that lack of connection works against what could otherwise have been an even more poignant statement about ‘machismo and misogyny.’