Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 book American Psycho may have been the most controversial and hotly debated novel of the past dozen years.* Its overwhelmingly dark comic tone -- one reviewer has called it "a satirical valentine to the heartless, soulless 1980's" -- has made both the novel and its author the subject of intense criticism, but the book does have its defenders. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times, for one, noted that "it's as if American Psycho had  returned us to some bygone age when books were still a matter of life and death instead of something to distract us on a flight between JFK and LAX." Lehmann-Haupt may also have zeroed in on the essence of the book in his description of its central character: "Patrick Bateman lives in a morally flat world in which clothes have more value than skin, objects are worth more than bones, and the human soul is something to be sought with knives and hatchets and drills."

    According to the official web site for the film adaptation of American Psycho, "few characters have personified an era as disturbingly as Patrick Bateman, a young and affluent Wall Street broker and psychopath, who has an exquisite taste for clothing, dining, music, body training, fornicating, maiming and killing. Just as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein gave us a monster for its time, American Psycho gives us a monster for the late twentieth century." 

The Film Adaptation
    It would take almost a decade after Ellis’s book was first published to bring American Psycho to the screen. A bevy of writers tried and failed to turn it into a screenplay. The film was eventually co-written and directed by Mary Harron, an ardent feminist who is a rock journalist turned filmmaker. (She made her directorial debut in 1996 with I Shot Andy Warhol.) Herron's film not only showcases Bateman’s vacuous universe with razor sharpness, but it is also a period piece that skewers the excesses of the waning Reagan years, the so-called Age of Greed, a.k.a., "the call waiting-answering machine culture."

    American Psycho builds its story around the psychosis of its hedonistic narrator/main character, who at one point admits, "I think my mask of sanity is about to slip." (Indeed, while Bateman wears a social mask throughout, at one point we see him in close up, pulling a dried cosmetic mask off his face, distorting his features.)  

    Bale sees Bateman as an empty vessel who has to invent "...himself in every scene. Other than a complete emotional vacancy, there isn't a core to him. He's entirely sort of a shell who plays certain roles in every situation he's in.'' Herron views him as "less a person and more a phenomenon. He is the personification of his environment."  These sentiments are reflected in the dialogue.  During the film, Bateman himself exclaims in a voiceover, "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me -- only an entity. Something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense that our lifestyles are probably comparable -- I simply am not there." 

    Consider that even in scenes that take place at the office, we never see Bateman doing any actual work; instead, his typical weekday involves making restaurant reservations, offering fashion advice to his secretary, returning videos, going to the cleaners to get bloodstains out his bed sheets, and shmoozing and doing drugs with his cookie-cutter associates.

Film vs. Novel
    In some ways, the film is a close adaptation of Ellis’s novel; for example, they both present a bleak view of the human condition leavened with humor (much like Quentin Tarantino alleviates the violence in Pulp Fiction with a dose of comedy). Where the film and the novel differ is in their depiction of sex and violence. The film does not contain the book’s explicit sex and violence;  instead, it's largely stylized and off-screen; that is, Herron concentrates more on Bateman's vacuous lifestyle than on his grisly crimes (which he may commit only in his imagination). Still, this is definitely not a PG-rated movie; there is plenty here to disturb viewers. In fact, the film’s menage à trois scene had to be trimmed in order to avoid an NC-17 rating by the MPAA. Still, it manages to forcefully illustrate the social decadence that permits, and maybe even promotes, Bateman’s perversities. This is because despite the film’s toned-down violence, its frightening imagery is underscored through the use of music, color and overall frame composition.

Hitchcockian Elements of the Film   
    While many films have been deemed heirs apparent to Hitchcock’s thrillers, American Psycho may well come the closest, especially with the musical soundtrack. The film is replete with bland FM pop hits from such eighties mainstream performers as Phil Collins, Huey Lewis and the News, and Whitney Houston. And pay attention to the opening of the film: The combination of the music and the visuals – is that blood we see against the sterile white backdrop? -- combine to elicit a heightened tension echoing that of the Master of Suspense.

    In addition, Harron’s minimalist sets – especially in the brokerage firm where Bateman "works" and his apartment -- boast cold hues, linear modern art and sparse, trendy furniture. The look of the film, especially the strong use of white, continually refracts the vapidity and the shallowness that many feel are emblematic of the Reagan-Bush years.

    The costumes (big shoulder pads and clothes designed by 80's fashion icons as Nino Cerrutti, Jean-Paul Gaultier and Gianni Versace) and props (large sunglasses, Bateman’s Walkman, bulky cell phones, a television showing then-President Reagan delivering a live speech) also play up the 80's mood. This is clearly communicated in the scene where Bateman and his associates compare business cards. Close-up shots of each partner's card accompany remarks about the kind of paper and/or lettering used for their design. While Bateman’s cards are printed on off-white paper, the other men’s cards challenge his with raised lettering and subtle patterns, covertly indicating their superior taste, or so it seems from the series of competitors’ reaction shots. Ironically, every card reveals that all characters are corporate V-Ps, thus affirming that these yuppies' similarities outweigh their almost imperceptible differences. Their "cookie-cutter" mentality and lifestyle satirize the concept of competition by suggesting the pointlessness in each character's attempt to one-up the others, who are, after all, pretty much replicas of himself. (This is buoyed by the fact that throughout the movie, a number of people confuse Bateman with one of his associates.)

    The above example also points to how the writing, too, recalls Hitchcock. As one reviewer writes, "Harron delivers a film "that spews forth out of the hollowness of the 1980's like so much Republican rhetoric. The bleak, vapid, colorless, emotionless, emptiness of the decade serves as the device by which the same void is essayed in the mind of a serial killer. It's a Hitchcockian vision of 1984."

I think American Psycho is very feminist...It's easy to believe that because the character is misogynist, the story is too. But it was obvious to me there was something going on beneath the horror. For instance, the book shows how the excesses of the 1980s were manifested in warped relations, not only between men and women but also among men. That's where a lot of the humor lies, in poking fun at these peacocks who are so strangely preoccupied with one another. It ends up being an indictment of machismo and misogyny.

Instead, the collaborators see the tale as "a valid vision of our culture," and feel the intervening years between the book’s publication and the film’s release allow for a new, sharpened perspective on the material.

The co-writers transformed Ellis’s story into a screenplay that its director describes as

a kind of fable rather than a realistic drama, because on a literal level, Bateman would never have gotten away with it. But that is precisely the point of the novel -- and the film -- that might have become lost in the controversy. The fact is, no one suspects Bateman of being a monster because his externals fit so perfectly into his social landscape... (It’s) not a "message" movie -- we're not preaching -- but I hope that the film does reveal something about our society.

In fact, when Bateman’s human but seemingly empty "shell" eventually breaks – when he loses whatever sense of reality he possessed at the beginning of the film -- it's riveting, "(l)ike watching a cat trying to claw it's way out of a plastic bag." (In fact, there is a cat scene in the movie that echoes this sentiment.)

American Psycho vs. Silence of the Lambs
There have been comparisons between this film and Silence of the Lambs. According to a reviewer from MIT’s The Tech, the only difference between the film versions of American Psycho and The Silence of The Lambs is in the point of view. Imagine if Lambs were told from Buffalo Bill's perspective, and you get the gist of American Psycho. Lambs may be more acceptable to audiences because it is told from the point of view of the female protagonist. Certainly Clarice Starling, Jodie Foster’s character in Lambs, would not be a benevolent portrait if she were shown from Buffalo Bill’s  point of view, especially given the epithets he ends up hurling at her. Bateman’s first-person narrative puts viewers into his psychopathic shoes and thus courts controversy. However, it’s not the sole reason the story has upset people. Another reason may be that Bateman gets away with his crimes, while Starling triumphs over Buffalo Bill at the end of Lambs.  (Admittingly, Lambs' Hannibal Lechter also gets away, but he's more sympathetic in his pathologies than Bateman, maybe because of his relationship with Clarice.) 

 

http://popmatters.com/film/reviews/a/american-psycho.shtml - Todd Ramlow's review delves into what why this film is a reflection of America in the 80's. (Ignore the request for a password and keep clicking)