American Psycho
Christian Bale makes an excellent psychopath. I really think that this film uses him as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. He seems so safe and sexy. The society that he was appart of engaged freely in sex and drugs. They thought it was ok to do these things and that there would be no consequences. But, Patrick Bateman was the hidden danger in their midst. Maybe I'm reading too much into this.
Another thing that I like about this movie is that it is such a dark comedy. It's told from the point of view of a crazy person so you never know what is real or what is just in his head. He's really quite amusing, especially his terror that other men will have more impressive business cards than he does. Plus, he's hot!
posted by Ivory @ 1:18 PM
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First of all, I guess I don't see the AIDS thing you talked about, I think it's an interesting idea, but I think it's far too specific. I'm pretty sure the movie's meant to be about the immasculinized male and is a rather close cousin of the films of Neil LaBute, such as Your Friends and Neighbors and The Company of Men.
I think the movie made a big mistake with having the main character delusional. I think this just should have been what the character was thinking about; like the guy who's wife sued him when she found that for their entire marriage he'd been intricately planning her murder. I think this would help to make the movie more immediate. As it is a character this insane bears more similarity to one from a '60s psychological thriller, than he does to any real person we might meet. Also, it hurts the satire angle. If it were not his delusion, but his imagination, it could more easily be compared to what the average beta male thinks about and doesn't admit. The audience, then, would have been like Chloe Sevigny reading his date book at the movie's close. And Patrick Bateman would have been our boss.
The whole delusional bit really just contributes to what I pointed out already about the movie lacking an entry point for the viewer. In some ways the movie's style most reminds me of The Piano Teacher. both characters are craven, despicable, anti-sexual, lacking in humanity and empathy. But what really made The Piano Teacher so much more effecting to me, and why I wouldn't have even finished the movie had I been watching alone, was that as wretched and malformed as Isabel Huppert was there was still, and I say this with as much disgust as I can manage, there was still some amount of sympathy I could feel for her. There's no sympathy for Patrick Bateman, he's a non-human, he may as well be an automaton, if an unhappy automaton is a possibility. As he cycled further and further into madness the unreality of it all spun me further away from him, so that rather than feeling that I must leave the movie and shield myself from it, I simply didn't care. The victims too, were not sympathetic, but I don't blame the movie for that as they shouldn't have been, we saw them as Patrick did, which meant we didn't at all. But I think Patrick should have been nearer.
What I did enjoy this time through was knowing the twist ending. It was fun to find the seams between reality and the delusion. Really, had I been more astute in watching the film the first time and not simply expectant of an everyday slasher film, I think I would have realized a lot sooner what was going on. Right away at the beginning he yells obscenities at people of which the people take no notice. I suppose the first time through I must have thought it was a comment on how jaded people are. I guess I don't really remember what I made of it, though. Other particularly fun moments included the first meeting with the detective. When Chloe Sevigny entered to tell Patrick of his arrival, Patrick had been listening to his walkman, daydreaming and therefore the detective was merely an extension of that daydream. Later on, the scene where Patrick and detective go out to lunch is immediately preceded by Chloe Sevigny reminding Patrick of his lunch meeting... with other people! I think my favorite scenes, though, had to be the two scenes which took place twice. The best being the reprise with the prostitute. Patrick's car drives up next to the prostitute and he asks her to get in. She tells him no and that he beat her up very badly the last time. He offers her money and she gets in the car. Then she threatens him with a lawyer and he pays her off. The prostitute gets out of Patrick's car and Patrick drives off. The camera, however, stays on the prostitute and soon we see Patrick driving up again. Our brain interprets this as Patrick having not driven off as we'd first assumed, but instead that he's followed her. Patrick approaches and offers her money again. They next have an eerily similar conversation to the first run through and the prostitute gets in the car. This time, however, Patrick drives off with her! The amazing thing about this is that if we don't know that the second time is Patrick's delusion, we assume, however illogical, that it's happening in sequence. It's a level of surrealism that Brunel and Dali would have drooled over. The rest of the movie takes place in Patrick's delusion until the second repeated scene where Patrick enters his office building twice. First he kills the doorman because he's still in the delusion and the second time, now out of the delusion, he simply signs in. This, to me, is significant, because given the order, real to delusion, with the prostitute and then delusion to real, with the office, I take it to assume that everything in between is part of the delusion. This includes the scene where Patrick breaks up with his fiance, which is neat because breaking up with his fiance is something the cowardly Patrick who cares so much about appearances could never do. And that's something I didn't notice the first time through the movie.
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