Jose Saca – American Psycho (Tenth Post)

Dear reader(s),

I decided to take a break from obscure films and analyze something more recognizable.

This post will be slightly personal than past entries. Both the book and film I will be discussing are personal favorites.

That said, let’s get started.

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American Psycho is a film directed by Mary Harron and released in 2000. It is adapted from the novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis.

This post will analyze similarities and differences between the book and the film.

The book and film take place sometime in the late 1980s.

Both book and film have the same protagonist. His name is Patrick Bateman, a yuppie in his late twenties living in New York City and working in Wall Street. By day he leads a typical yuppie lifestyle, populated by power lunches in the fanciest restaurants and deals with people of important status. Indeed, Ellis wanted to capture the decadent luxury of his protagonist and made this possible by even referencing to Pierce and Pierce as the company that Bateman works for. A not too subtle reference to the company that Sherman McCoy, protagonist in Tom Wolfe’s massive bestseller Bonfire of the Vanities, works for.

In the movie, Bateman is played by Christian Bale. His fiancée is played by Reese Witherspoon. The character of Donald Kimball, a minor character in the book but a supporting and important character in the film, is played by Willem Dafoe.

The Bateman presented in Ellis’ novel is an emotionless person who can only let out his frustrations through heightened acts of violence and sex. Countless people, mostly female escorts, are murdered in the most gruesome of fashions. An example I can mention in this blog is the murder of Paul Owen (named Paul Allen in the movie). Bateman gets Owen, who, as in the movie, also gets hold of the mysterious Fisher Account, drunk and lures him into his apartment. He then slices most of his face off with an ax.

The film takes the abovementioned scene and makes it satirical rather than violent. In the film, Bateman kills Allen with an ax while dancing to Huey Lewis and the News’ “It’s Hip to be Square.” The violence is played down tremendously, with the only gruesome bit in the scene is a shot of blood hitting the Style section of the New York Times to form what looks like a Jackson Pollack-like painting.

The violence is downplayed in the film version. Bateman does do his share of killing in the film, but it does not rival the cavalcade of decapitations and gruesome murders found in Ellis’ book. Harron, always the clever film maker, finds a way to make the murders she doesn’t show known to the audience in a scene where Bale’s Bateman breaks down and confesses to all his past murders via phone to his lawyer. So yes, the girlfriend Bateman admits to killing and eating her brains… yes, that is shown in full detail in Ellis’ novel. There are many more I can mention, but I will leave the reader to decide by checking out the novel on their own. Harron knows the power of leaving certain scenarios to the viewer’s imagination, and when Bateman mentions the things he’s done in his confession, the effect is far more powerful than if it were shown in all its gratuitous glory.

In a DVD featurette on the film, Mary Harron said she wanted to rescue Ellis’ novel from its controversial reputation. The decision to have her take on this project is brave and effective. Her distance as a feminist director gave her the proper satirical and intellectual companion to Ellis’ vile yet misunderstood vision. The Bateman presented here, quite similar to the one in the novel, is much clearer for the audience to understand. The audience can get a full grasp of this vision from the start, by viewing Bale’s Bateman in his apartment, carefully made to fit the brightest executive, and the decision to utilize Bateman’s voice over narration with scenes of Bale leading his usual life. We see him tanning, getting manicured, schmoozing with his yuppie friends, among many other activities. We get a clearer glimpse of Bateman’s empty life because we are presented with a clear, confidant vision of this reality. Ellis’ vision was clouded by the violence and scandalous remarks made by Bateman (Ellis writes in the first person, so the audience is given a dirty glimpse of Bateman’s interior monologue as he openly blurts out homophobic and racist statements).

In Harron’s film, Bateman is more identifiable, for she shows him as a test subject of sorts. We are given the subject, Bateman, in a clinical, cold approach similar to David Cronenberg. Examples are the latter scene with Bateman murdering Allen while Huey Lewis plays in the background and a sex scene where Bateman has a threesome with two escorts and, as nondiagetic music blasts from the soundtrack, Bateman stares at himself in the mirror and starts flexes his muscles… all while still having sex with one of the escorts. In a bizarre, yet understandable scene like this one, the audience receives a disgusting, vile protagonist, yet it also, in a sense, sympathizes with why he does what he does. He has no choice in the materialist world he lives in, and something as stupid and pathetic as flexing one’s muscles while having sex with a woman soon become understandable to the audience. The book had extreme acts of violence and sexuality clouding over this message. The satirical aspects are therefore clearer and more effective in Harron’s vision.

Ellis’ message is downplayed and weakened by his extensive use of violence and sex. The book presents many trysts between Bateman and female escorts and/or friends having hardcore sex. The scenarios are presented in the first person, so we get a heightened reality that borders on pornographic. Every nook and cranny is mentioned when Bateman narrates his sexual trysts. Many of these trysts end with Bateman murdering the female in question, with the narration’s explicitness never toning itself down. The shocking images and scenes Ellis depicts in the book cloud over his message against materialism and leading a decadent lifestyle for the sake of fitting in.

Harron’s film manages to respect the source material while still creating an entity that holds up on its own.