Review: American Psycho (2000)

Tell me if this sounds familiar to you. An individual with no discernable personality or interior life approximates individuality by championing bland elements of pop culture and regurgitating analysis found in the likes of New York-based magazines. Whenever this individual expresses their opinions publicly, they do so with unbridled rage that seems out of all proportion to what it is they’re talking about. The exclamations are so passionate that you suspect that their emphatic nature is meant to mask a deep-seated insecurity about being found out to be a fool. Above all, this individual has no real interest in listening to others, but merely in making sure they’re forever a part of an inner group, shifting seamlessly between incompatible positions in order to remain so. They view everyone outside of that group as less-than-human, which justifies their single-minded purpose to remain inside the group. Now tell me, is this your average Twitter user or Patrick Bateman from American Psycho?

I’m being deliberately provocative, but Mary Harron’s American Psycho is a film that is every bit as perceptive about American narcissism as it was when it came out 20 years ago. The age of social media and the ubiquity of a never-ending stream of people’s personal thoughts (that sound conspicuously identical to the thoughts of everyone else who shares their social milieu) simply shows how this uniquely-American narcissism is even more obvious nowadays than in the late-1980s setting of the film. But it’s a straight line from then to now, which makes this deliriously funny, criminally misunderstood masterpiece so insightful to the present day.

Adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial bestseller, American Psycho takes place in the late 1980s and follows the 27-year-old Wall Street executive, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), who moonlights as a psychopathic killer. At the beginning of the film, we learn about his manicured life. He’s a VP at a stock broker firm, but never does any work, lives in a spotless, white-washed modernist apartment, and eats out at lauded restaurants with his similarly rich friends and beautiful girlfriends. He also randomly kills people in order to feed his bloodlust. In an early scene, he stabs a homeless man (played by the late House of Cards actor, Reg E. Cathey) to death on a whim. His classist indifference is perfectly captured by his line to the homeless man: “I have nothing in common in you.” And in his mind, this lack of common humanity justifies his murderous action.

His murderous rage is sometimes motivated by such boredom and indifference, but usually, it’s jealousy and insecurity that drives him to kill others. He’s a man whose calm demeanor is always hanging by a thread. He’s seemingly ready to burst into anxious tears at any moment (which finally happens in the film’s frenzied, climactic phone call). In an early scene when he meets friends for dinner at a fancy restaurant, he narrates: “I’m on the verge of tears by the time we arrive at Espace, since I’m positive we won’t have a decent table. But we do, and relief washes over me in an awesome wave.” The slightest of inconveniences is ready to push him over the edge.

It’s hard to overstate how good Christian Bale is in the role. It’s perhaps the performance of the 2000s, or certainly in the conversation for one of the best. Not only does Bale inhabit Patrick to perfection—it’s impossible not to notice how physically beautiful he is—but he also manages to convey emptiness both physically and vocally. He often lets his eyes glaze over when talking or allows the pure affectation of his voice to convey how he’s merely parroting the thoughts of others and not saying anything he fundamentally believes in. In some moments, such as during a shot of him on a street corner, he’s astoundingly blank, as if his spirit has departed his body momentarily and allowed us to witness a husk. 

Bale also allows the insecurities to bubble to the surface throughout, showing just how truly weak Patrick is as an individual. This is key to his several breakdowns over the course of the film, most famously his murder of Paul Allen (Jared Leto in one of his best roles). After the smarmy Paul Allen continually mistakes Patrick for someone else and upstages him in front of his friends, Patrick decides to murder him. He takes him out to dinner, gets him blackout drunk, and then hacks him to death with an axe in his apartment.

The murder scene is one of the most famous scenes of the 2000s. As Paul sits drunkenly on a couch covered in painter’s plastic, Patrick turns on the album Fore! by Huey Lewis and The News and discusses the significance of the song “Hip to be Square” while putting on a plastic raincoat and grabbing a fire axe. Patrick talks about the song like he’s reciting a magazine review, describing it as being “about the pleasures of conformity, and the importance of trends” and “a personal statement about the band itself,” right before he swings his axe into Allen’s face, killing him. (It’s important to note that although there is plenty of blood, we never see the axe actually strike Paul. Throughout the film, Harron implies more than she shows.)

The combination of vapid pop-culture musing and bloody violence provides a tonal clash that makes the scene both hilarious and provocative. In many ways, it provides a similar tonal clash as the infamous ear-cutting scene does in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, which set the template for so many ironic uses of pop music to follow. But the film is also leaning into an ironic approach to violence as pioneered by filmmakers like Mario Bava, especially in his 1970 giallo, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, which Harron describes as a key influence on American Psycho. The ironic approach is specifically brilliant in the context of this film as it shows how Patrick Bateman’s petty insecurities fuel his homicidal rage and his empty consumerism. It’s also an approach that is present throughout the film and essential to its success.

The violent content and satirical look at consumerist culture is present in the novel, but Bret Easton Ellis rarely overlaps the violence and the cultural satire in his prose. Each element gets ample but separate space for exploration in the novel. Mary Harron and her co-writer Guinevere Turner brilliantly decide to syncretize the two aspects of the novel, exploring Patrick Bateman’s empty consumerism at the same time they depict his horrifying acts of violence. The scene where Patrick kills Paul captures this blend in the most perfect manner, as it also verbalizes Patrick’s own motivations. His speech about “Hip to be Square” lays bare his own obsession with conformity. In essence, Patrick wants to blend into the wallpaper and he’s willing to kill people to do so.

Much of American Psycho is a screed against consumerism, which is evident in Patrick’s florid narration of his hygiene routines, restaurants, and business cards. It’s also evident in the vain, idiotic characters that show up throughout the film. In fact, there are only three characters that resemble sympathetic human beings. 

One is Willem Dafoe’s private investigator, Kimball, who is looking into Paul Allen’s disappearance after Patrick kills him. Because Dafoe plays Kimball, we assume mysterious, perhaps sinister, intent—Dafoe is just too mischievous an actor to think otherwise. When he meets Patrick for dinner to discuss his alibi the night of Paul’s disappearance, Patrick is sweating buckets and giving incoherent answers as to his whereabouts. We think Kimball has caught him, but it turns out Kimball has no interest in catching anyone. He thinks he’s tracked down Paul Allen in Europe and has no interest in Patrick or any of these people; he’s well-meaning, easily persuaded, and simply wants to put Paul’s disappearance to bed so everyone can get on with their normal lives.

The other seemingly-normal characters are both women, and both victims of Patrick in different ways. One is Patrick’s assistant, Jean (Chloe Sevigny), who puts up with his chauvinistic statements at work, likely because she nurses a crush on him and envies his materially-rich lifestyle. In Patrick’s sole act resembling human compassion, he urges Jean to leave after he invites her to his apartment with the intention of killing her. 

The other character is “Christie,” (Cara Seymour) a prostitute that Patrick lures to his apartment on multiple occasions to physically abuse and engage in group sex with. There’s a moment of genuine terror and pathos when Patrick approaches her a second time to purchase her sexual services. Christie doesn’t want to go with him due to their disastrous first encounter, in which he left her with injuries that required her to go to the emergency room, but she’s too desperate to turn down the large stack of money that Patrick offers her. She’s too poor to refuse him. His wealth overrides all other considerations.

It’s hard to watch the film and not notice how misogynistic Patrick is. He uses, abuses, and murders women throughout. His carnal appetites reduce women to nothing more than flesh. He keeps a lock of one victim’s hair in his pocket, fiddling with it at work, keeps another’s head in his refrigerator, and even hangs their corpses in his closet. It’s disgusting and Harron leans into the provocation of such imagery on screen, highlighting the nightmarish qualities of Patrick’s crimes. But it would be a mistake to assume this provocative nature means the film shares Patrick’s misogyny. 

American Psycho finds Patrick too pathetic at every turn to share any of his hatred. But the film also shows how his misogyny is borne out of his vanity and his absolute adherence to the shallowest, cruelest aspects of American culture. Patrick pursues pleasure at all costs and that forces him to turn other people, especially women, into nothing but objects of his pleasure. In fact, the only thing that is greater than Patrick’s misogyny is his overwhelming vanity. His skincare routine, which is painstakingly depicted in the opening minutes, is a great example of how much he favours appearance above all else.

Harron does a lot with the camera to frame Christian Bale, who got into exceptional shape for the role, as something of a male model in certain scenes. For instance, the early shot of him in the shower looks like it’d belong in an advertisement for bath soap. Visually, Harron objectifies Patrick in the way he objectifies women, turning him into nothing but erotic, empty flesh in certain scenes.

In other moments, she shows how his vanity leads him to espouse the blandest, most appallingly false version of American progressive politics. Just as he feels he must look perfect to fit in, he feels he has to embody the “correct” values. At Espace, he lectures his friends about political priorities:

Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.

This is perhaps the most brilliant speech in an abundantly witty script. It is pure hypocrisy through and through, but every core element of what Patrick says draws directly on real political priorities in America, both in the late 1980s and in the present day. It is the kind of speech that you would not be shocked to hear uttered by Pete Buttigieg (or Barack Obama, as one hilarious online meme posits), or to read in a Democratic Party platform. And therein lies its brilliance.

This is why American Psycho speaks so accurately to our present age of social media and narcissism. It demonstrates that when you get to hear the thoughts of a person who buys wholeheartedly into the lie of American consumerism, they sound a lot like the thoughts of a psychopath. As Patrick says during an early voiceover, he has “all the characteristics of a human being…but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.” These two emotions drive our modern world, in forms both presented as progressive and toxic. In essence, Patrick embodies the abstract manner of the modern person, something that is “only an entity, something illusory.”

He is a ghost of American predatory manhood, wealth, and vanity that haunts those people at the bottom of America’s class pyramid. He’s also unceasingly pathetic, which is key to the entire film’s effect.

The film’s tonal imbalance combining violent and sexist imagery with funny jabs at vapid materialism throws you off balance as a viewer, sickening you as you laugh, making you feel a rush of complicity as you consider how you have lusted over similar things to Patrick, perhaps even a kind of guilty empathy as the narrative gets you caught up in his crimes and makes you want him to get away with them. 

American Psycho ultimately leaves you staring into Patrick’s empty eyes—literally, as the final shot is an extreme close-up of Patrick’s face—and pondering whether you share something in common with this monstrous human. The sick joke is that of course you do. You live in America’s world. You have no choice.

10 out of 10

American Psycho (2000, Canada/USA)

Directed by Mary Harron; written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis; starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Bill Sage, Chloë Sevigny, Cara Seymour, Justin Theroux, Guinevere Turner, Reg E. Cathey, Reese Witherspoon.

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