Hip to Be Square – AMERICAN PSYCHO

It’s been a month dedicated to horror directed by women, and I’m closing it out with perhaps the most unexpected, Mary Harron’s pitch perfect adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ ghastly1980's yuppie satire, AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000).    

The Capsule:

Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) has it all.  Good looks, a successful job, a beautiful girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon), a Manhattan apartment, and an insatiable bloodlust.  Not for business, for actual blood.  Because, when Patrick is not cheating on his girlfriend, taking lunches with people he despises, or struggling to find the perfect business card, his favorite pastime is murder and mutilation.  Underneath his perfectly curated shell, Patrick is hollow, desperate to feel anything.  No matter how much blood he gets under his expensively manicured nails, though, no one seems to notice.  Because in his self-obsessed Wall St. world, life and death means less than getting good dinner reservations. 

It is particularly delicious irony that the story of such a reprehensible misogynist is directed by a woman.  Mary Harron doesn’t downplay any of Bateman’s woman hating tendencies, or the culture that accepts and encourages them.  It starts off casually, like the way he belittles his girlfriend for prattling on about their future wedding when he is trying to listen to the new Robert Palmer album.  The fact that he is cheating on her with one of his colleague’s girlfriends (a very medicated Samantha Mathis) is less from desire than a kind of social obligation.  Mistresses are like clothing accessories to men in his position, you can’t have the tie without the tie clip.  He's also the type of guy who orders for his date at a restaurant and tells his secretary (a very put upon Chloë Sevigny) how to dress.  Other times, she is less subtle, like when Bateman—naked, holding a chainsaw—is chasing after one of his victims, Christie (a very dead Cara Seymour).  I’d say that was the pinnacle of misogynistic imagery. 

Forget Bruce Wayne, Patrick Bateman is Christian Bale’s masterpiece performance.  Dancing between deadpan, narcissistic sincerity and near Nick Cage levels of manic excess, Bale makes Bret Easton Ellis’ misogynist business monster come alive.  It’s hard to say which is worse, Bateman’s murderous inner life, or his intensely bland and conformist outer one.  It turns out that being an amoral sociopath devoid of human emotion is a winning trait on Wall Street. Bateman spends more time and energy modeling himself on what he views to be the pinnacle of success, the 80’s NY yuppie, than he ever does on his actual job.  In fact, you never once see Bateman doing any work at all, because his real occupation is pretending. 

The big joke is that aside from his homicidal urges, Bateman is exactly like everyone else in his social orbit.  None of his friends and associates do anything other than meet for drinks, berate servers, and do drugs in the bathroom.  Patrick fits in perfectly with these corporate backstabbers, despite literally stabbing people in the back.  The key to success, specifically in Bateman’s case, but seemingly across the board, is to be as indistinguishable as possible. 

The brilliant Business Card Duel scene says it all.  Bateman and his friends smugly lay down their business cards, preening about the font, color variant, and stock thickness, only to be crushed by the next person’s imperceptibly superior design.  Except, anyone who is not a soulless douchebag would realize that all the cards look exactly the same, just plain white (or off-white, or bone) cards.  Not even the positions are different.  Everyone is a vice president of the same company, and all equally useless. 

This exaggerated uniformity leads to a big theme in the movie, mistaken identity.  Everyone is so obsessed with themselves that they barely take the time to register who they are talking to.  Paul Allen (Jared Leto), the Alpha Schmuck of Bateman’s circle (his card even has a watermark), consistently thinks Bateman is another executive named Marcus.  Bateman never bothers to correct him because Allen would never bother to remember.  It comes in handy when he lures Allen back to his apartment to off him, leaving a fake trail pointing back to Marcus.  He covers his tracks with far more care than any of his other crimes, because he thinks that—opposed to his sex worker and homeless victims—people will care if an executive disappears. 

He needn’t have bothered.  In any other movie, the appearance of Kimball the P.I. (Willem Dafoe) would mean the noose was tightening around Bateman.  Not here.  Kimball’s calculating smile and suspicious eye gets under Bateman’s skin, but Bateman’s narcissistic colleagues have unintentionally confirmed his flimsy cover story with their faulty memories.  Marcus, Bateman’s intended fall guy, even told Kimball they had dinner together the night of the disappearance.  Alibi by indifference.  Rather than being Bateman’s dogged adversary, Kimball just shrugs and goes on his way.  As the film continues, Bateman is less concerned that he will be caught for his increasingly sloppy murders, and more that no one bothers to notice. 

Bateman understands one-sided yuppie banter so well that he tosses out casual confessions during cocktails, assured that no one is really listening.  When he announces, “I’m into murders and executions,” everyone at the club half hears it as “mergers and acquisitions.”   His girlfriend never notices him scribbling bloody corpses on the restaurant tablecloth as they have dinner.  The question “did you know I’m utterly insane?” bounces off Paul Allen’s head as if Bateman had asked him about his favorite kind of cat.  Only real people, the ones outside of the glossy, upwardly mobile lifestyle, ever pick up on what he really is.  Even the most human person in the movie, his secretary, Jean, is blinded by an extremely misguided crush, until discovering his doodle filled day planner opens her eyes.

Oh, by the way, if Patrick Bateman starts talking about pop music, get the fuck out.  His worst acts of violence are usually proceeded by a dissertation about the most soulless, commercial drivel imaginable.  He lectures a couple of prostitutes on the virtues of Phil Collins before brutalizing them (thankfully off-screen).  An ode to Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All inspires even more vicious treatment of his houseguests.  Then there is his passionate, almost frenzied defense of Huey Lewis and the News as he prepares to slaughter Paul Allen.  Apparently, their early work was a little too New Wave for his taste, but they really came into their own on Sports.  Allen is more interested on why the floor in front of his seat is covered with taped down newspaper.  Bateman does have a point, as Hip to Be Square turns out to be the perfect musical accompaniment to chopping up your business rival with an ax. 

I’ve heard a few different interpretations of the ending [Spoilers].  After Bateman’s madness culminates with a random shooting binge that claims an old woman, several cops, and security guard who thinks he’s “Mr. Smith”, he leaves a detailed confession/cry for help on his lawyer’s answering machine.  The next day, the citywide manhunt that he expected never materializes.  When he returns to Allen’s condo, which he has been using as an abattoir, he finds the hanging bodies removed, the blood-soaked walls freshly painted, and a real estate agent acting like this is just another property.  His lawyer thinks the confession was joke, because he just had lunch with Paul Allen in London a few days ago.  So, was it all just an invention of a fractured imagination?

Hell no, it wasn’t his imagination.  Not only does the film’s tone point to Bateman’s murders being real, it backs up how he unintentionally gets away with them.  Would a real estate agent in this world really let a horrific crime scene stand in the way of selling a luxury Manhattan condo with a high-rise view of Central Park?  She would haul the bodies out over her shoulder if she had to.  And Kimball already demonstrated what unreliable witnesses self-centered social climbers make.  Bateman’s lawyer only thought he had lunch with Paul Allen, because all of these impeccably groomed bastards look, sound, and act alike.  He doesn’t even recognize his own client when he’s talking to him face to face.

In Ellis’ twisted satire, this is Bateman’s ultimate punishment.  He will never be caught.  He will never be stopped.  He will never be noticed.  His most extreme acts are now just as hollow and meaningless as every other part of his existence.  Nothing changes.  He is in yuppy hell.  Not exactly the most satisfying comeuppance for an unrepentant serial killer, but absolutely the most appropriate in this case.

Mary Harron does a brilliant job translating Ellis’s notoriously uncinematic and troublesome prose while keeping, and perhaps accentuating the jet-black satire.  She doesn’t attempt to judge or moralize Bateman’s actions, because that is obvious to any sane person watching.  Her depiction of Jean is more sympathetic and less complicit than Ellis’ version, but she keeps Bateman clearly in the driver’s seat, and doesn’t flinch from making it an unpleasant and uncomfortably hilarious ride.  Even more impressively, she gave Phil Collin’s Sussudio a justifiable reason to exist.  That is true directing magic.

C Chaka