A film by a female director!! I’m pretty sure this is the third film I’ve reviewed that is solely directed by a woman, after The Bling Ring (Sofia Coppola) and Sassy Pants (Coley Sohn). Out of 84 reviews!
That’s me being sarcastic.
So American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis, tells the story of a Wall Street businessman, Patrick Bateman, who is also a serial killer. His douchey self-obsessed world of investment banking clashes with his murderous tendencies, and soon his world begins to fall apart as his taste for blood grows stronger.
His first murder, a homeless man, is a manifestation of his belief that he is superior to people who aren’t as wealthy as he is, and those who don’t contribute to society deserve to die. It’s sick and nasty and very un-Batman.
He dates Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), despite the fact that they both cheat on each other with their other rich friends.
His interactions with his coworkers are always very strange, I felt like I was being forced to watch an overplayed pissing contest repeatedly. The characters obsess over each other’s business cards, despite the fact that they are essentially indistinguishable (even with the same title, Vice President).
Bateman also keeps to his rigorous skin care and workout regimens, emphasizing the connection between physical superiority and supposed worth as a human being. The more Bateman sees himself as a brilliant albeit sociopathic individual, the easier his killings become.
Also Bateman’s bizarre relationship with music is interesting, because the early murder scenes are preceded by long, drawn out explanations of artists that he enjoys. He regularly prefers famous musician’s later albums to their previous ones (both Phil Collins and Whitney Houston are used as examples), which could possibly be a reference to how famous serial killers usually take a few tries to really find their own… style?
Bateman casually quotes serial killers, once with his friends when he talks about how Ed Guin viewed women in both a romantic and in a future victim sense, and then later he references Ted Bundy in front of his secretary, played by Chloë Sevigny.
I’m sorry I just keep jumping off on tangents, but I also think it’s important to talk about the way the film relates sex, violence, and vanity. Bateman is self-obsessed, and here we see him preferring to look at himself having sex rather than at the woman. He’s pretty much incapable of viewing her as a human (she’s an escort), and later he… well we don’t know exactly what he does. He is violent in some way, but he pays her and she leaves, so we’re unsure. Although he does make a porn with her and a prostitute, because Bateman loves porn. He’s always returning videotapes.
Anyway now that I’ve briefly touched on some of the subtext I noticed, I can address the ending. The violence escalates until Bateman reaches some sort of psychological breaking point, and then things get a little… crazy. His desire to kill becomes uncontrollable, and it seems almost certain that he will be punished. But the film has other ideas. You have to watch it to see what I mean.
Or read the book, I don’t know. It’s only been about half a day since I watched it, so I don’t really know how I feel just yet. My gut reaction was “What the what?” and my brain was kind of like, “Let it sink in and try not to overanalyze.” Basically, if you want Wolf of Wall Street meets Dexter, this is for you. Everything Christian Bale says is cringeworthy but also dripping with irony, satirizing capitalism and materialism and everything about Wall Street. So that part is good.
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