American Psycho director Mary Harron: “We’ve never really left” the era of Patrick Bateman
Image: Graphic: Allison CorrPhoto: Roy RochlinScreenshot: American Psycho Film Features Film
Although the phrase “I have to return some videotapes” has since passed into digital-age incoherence, everything else about American Psycho is just as fresh 20 years on. After being passed on by everyone from Oliver Stone to Stuart Gordon, the task of adapting Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous 1991 novel eventually fell to Mary Harron, a longtime writer for Punk magazine who broke into filmmaking with 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol, and Guinevere Turner, an actress and screenwriter of the 1994 lesbian romantic comedy Go Fish. Together, they reframed the ultraviolent story of Wall Street psychopath Patrick Bateman as an absurdist comedy of manners, deftly underlining the both the ridiculousness and the cruelty of ’80s “greed is good” culture—and indeed, of masculinity itself.
In the decades since its release in theaters on April 14, 2000, American Psycho has become a cult classic, both misinterpreted as a glorification of its deranged protagonist and better understood as a feminist critique of the interwoven nature of misogyny, entitlement, and violence. The actor who played Patrick Bateman, Christian Bale, went on to lose the “e” as Christopher Nolan’s Batman before winning an Oscar for his role as real-life villain Dick Cheney in 2018’s Vice. Harron and Turner have continued to work together, collaborating on the biopic The Notorious Bettie Page (2005) and the Manson Family drama Charlie Says (2019). And the ’80s’ worst excesses have been eclipsed by a new, avaricious era of political piracy that even Patrick Bateman might have found just a tad excessive.
On the eve of the film’s anniversary, we asked Harron what American Psycho can tell us about the Trump era, as well as the controversy surrounding the novel, her approach to filming nudity and violence, and how much she enjoys memes based on the film.
The A.V. Club: Rewatching the film, I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump’s comment that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and not lose any voters.
Mary Harron: Yes, absolutely.
AVC: It does seem that we are living in a similar era to the ’80s in terms of sociopathic Wall Street greed.
MH: At the time [it came out], people who didn’t like the film or were dismissive of it were saying, “Oh, well, we knew all that about the ’80s.” But to me, it was never just about the ’80s. It was about American vulture capitalism—and not just American, really. Bateman is the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with [this system], all the worst and craziest forces—obsession with surfaces, obsession with status, obsession with acquisition. And then the frustration and violence—all of those things.
So it might’ve seemed like that was a past era, but we’ve never really left that era. I think the only thing that happened is people got better at covering it up, paying lip service to feminism or whatever. My older daughter’s 22, and when she watched the movie, her favorite scene was when they’re all at dinner in the sushi restaurant and Bateman’s just blathering these liberal platitudes about what we have to do in society. She was like, “yes, that’s what people do. It means nothing.” Now, with people like Bateman, it’s more likely that you’ll get them paying lip service to ideas about gender equality or racial equality, but they won’t mean it. People cover things more now. It’s not as naked. The ’80s was a very naked time in terms of greed and exploitation.
And then I think the last two years have been even worse in a lot of ways. It’s a real gilded age, the stock market’s boomed so much and then politically things have shifted to the right. It’s been quite astonishing.
AVC: That’s something that I think has really come to light in the past few years—how many men say they’re feminists, but their personal behavior doesn’t reflect that at all.
MH: In the film and the book—in the style of the book—it’s part of his mask. It’s a part of the fact that he doesn’t have a core set of beliefs, really. He has impulses or desires, but he doesn’t have an ideology of what he wants. So he’s happy to adopt whatever as camouflage.
AVC: Did you read the book before you took on the project?
MH: Yes, I read the book whenever it came out in London, because I was working in London then—I believe it was 1991. And then in ’96, after [I Shot Andy Warhol] came out at Sundance, I got asked to do [the film]. They had a couple of scripts, but I said, “I can only do this if I write my own script.” I wanted to write with someone, and Guinevere [Turner] and I were already working on a couple of scripts, so I asked her to come join me.
AVC: What was your reaction to the book when you first read it? I know a lot of people were violently opposed to it.
MH: When I first started reading it, I thought, “Oh, this is funny. I mean, this is really funny. This is very dark satire.” And no one, in all the attacks or any of the coverage of it, said it was funny. That’s the best thing about it, the dark social stuff. The violence—I had to stop reading it for a month when it got to the terrible scene with Bethany, the really bad torture scene. I just thought, “I can’t read this.” And then after a month it was still there on my bedside table, so I went back to it, and then there was nothing as bad as that [in the rest of the book].
It’s very interesting, because it’s very existential. It’s such a lost, bleak character that reflects New York in a lot of ways. And it’s almost an experimental work of fiction, because it changes from first person to third person. It’s very abstract. Sometimes it’s a comedy. I mean, it’s just a strange book. The violence was not my favorite aspect of it at all. That wasn’t what I thought was interesting about it.
And when we went to adapt it, [Guinevere and I] saw the book in the same way in that we found a lot of funny. It was considered this terrible misogynist work, but I thought that Bret [Easton Ellis] had a gay man’s analysis of straight male behavior. He saw the absurdity of these straight male Wall Street rituals, and that was very much a kind of subversion to me and Guinevere.
AVC: You referenced Bret Easton Ellis having a gay man’s perspective on the material—did you think was important to have your perspective on it? Is that why you wanted to write your own script?
MH: I mean, the scripts they had were funny, and kind of interesting, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with it. The tone is so important, and I wanted to be in control of that. And I didn’t think that anybody else had really gotten the comedy right. That was so important to me. It had to be very subtle. In fact, it’s so subtle that I think the first time around, a lot of people didn’t realize it was supposed to be funny. I often have this problem. I’m like, “I think it’s funny,” and everyone else is like “Ehhhh…” [Laughs.]
And it had to be kind of delicate, you know? That is, except for the more obviously funny things, like the Paul Allen murder scene that’s always on the internet. Those are more clearly absurdist set pieces.
AVC: How do you feel when you see those kinds of things online?
MH: It’s a great compliment. Some of them are really good. There was just one about toilet paper that’s was really fun, since it’s at such a premium with the Corona virus. That one’s extremely well done, I don’t know how they did Christian’s voice so well. And there was a wonderful Dutch jeans commercial that was all about denim and coffee. It was hipster, it was hilarious. So I say, great! Thank you. You’ve made the world a better place.
AVC: You have asserted, and I agree, that this is a feminist film. Was that something that you were actively trying to do in the adaptation, or did it flow naturally from your point of view?
MH: I think it just flowed from our point of view. I don’t think in Guinevere’s or my work, we don’t ever try to teach moral lessons, or even political ones, particularly—at least, not in an overt way. I think it’s more just the attitude you take. If you’re a woman, you have certain attitudes. And if you just do what you find interesting and don’t bow to anyone else’s view of how you should do it, [your work] will probably have a feminist character. But in this case, I knew that I was taking on something very difficult, very controversial.
I had just come off of I Shot Andy Warhol, which is about a radical feminist, and Guinevere had just done Go Fish, the lesbian romantic comedy. So we were like, “No one can tell us what’s feminist and not feminist. We’ll make up our own minds.” We didn’t feel like we had to worry or be timid about it, because our position was strong. I think that if a guy had done it, he would’ve been in a much more difficult position that way.
The other thing that Guinevere and I brought that isn’t always noticed is that we didn’t think Bateman was cool, and we didn’t think the sex scenes were sexy. They weren’t erotic in any way. They were, to us, ridiculous, and that was something that Christian shared. He also found Bateman ridiculous, and he brought this third aspect to the character, a dorky aspect that all three of us were working towards. Bateman isn’t someone that you would want to be—don’t ask me why the movie is so popular among Wall Street guys. It’s like, “Really? Okay…”
AVC: Lack of self-awareness, maybe.
MH: Yeah, or maybe they have a sense of humor. My brother-in-law was working on Wall Street [at one point], and he loved it, because he said, “Oh, I know so many of those guys. I recognize those guys.” Maybe they think it’s funny, because they’re close to that world.
One thing I loved was that these [Wall Street executives] have this competitiveness. In the SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas has a whole section on how a lot of the qualities that men negatively associate with women—vanity, competitiveness, gossip—are really male. [Laughs.] And these men are behaving like a stereotype of teenage girls. They’re so competitive, and they’re obsessed with their appearance and status.
AVC: You mentioned the sex scenes in the movie, and we talked earlier about the violence in the book. The film is very judicious about when it shows nudity or violence, and when it doesn’t. How did you decide what to show and when?
MH: Some of that you just decide on set. But I decided early on that there should actually be quite little overt violence, that it should be suggested—until the very end, when there should be a big explosion of violence. That’s when Bateman murders Christy the society girl, the character played by Guinevere. I felt like you can’t keep teasing. You can’t keep pulling punches all the time. You have to have an explosion of violence at the end, because that’s what it’s all leading up to.
I know you’re not supposed to mention him [positively] anymore, but I was very influenced by Roman Polanski. Polanski’s the master of suggested violence and the buildup of tension. And Alfred Hitchcock—another person with unfortunate attitudes towards women and personal behavior. But as a kid, I was very, very taken with Hitchcock and the way he pulled back. I have no objection to horror at all, but I’m not really a horror person. Psychological thrillers are more what I go for, and I’ve always loved films where things were frightening because they were suggested. Peeping Tom, that’s another great one.
At the same time, because it is [a movie] about violence and it is about a mass murderer, you have certain expectations. But even in that final scene, it doesn’t show that much.
AVC: There are lots of movies, particularly horror movies, where the gore is the centerpiece. Not to put a value judgement on it, but this movie isn’t really like that.
MH: No. I’ve done a bit more of that in my more recent stuff, and it’s fine, but it’s a lot of prosthetics and special effects. We didn’t have much of that on this film. There was almost nothing in terms of creating wounds, or anything like that.
The biggest fight I had—people thought this was a crazy idea—was that I said, “I want [Cara Seymour’s character] at the bottom of the staircase, and the chainsaw to spin down and pierce her body.” And everyone said, “well, it wouldn’t happen like that. That’s not realistic.” The DP said it would look terrible, and I said, “no, that’s what we should do.” Even though it wasn’t realistic, even though it wouldn’t have happened like that in real life, sometimes that doesn’t matter if it’s the right image.
AVC: Well, there’s a lot open to interpretation. I’ve heard some people argue that there’s ambiguity as to whether the murders even happen. Do you agree with that?
MH: We never thought that none of the murders happened. I don’t think that everything happened, but that’s for people to decide for themselves.
I didn’t write the book, so I feel like I was interpreting it as much as anyone else. If somebody says that it’s all in his head, and that makes the movie for them, that’s fine. And I don’t think Bret would ever say one way or the other.
AVC: When this film came out, it was was unusual for a male actor to do the kind of nude scenes Christian Bale does in American Psycho. How do you feel about the concept of equalizing nudity, so it’s both men and women?
MH: I thought that was important. And I liked the idea that that Bateman would be nude, and the girls would not be in their underwear. I thought that was a nice reversal. And also it’s really funny, because in the big climax, you say Christian’s nude, but he’s wearing sneakers. [Laughs.]
AVC: Yeah, that’s true!
MH: So is that entirely nude, then? We all thought that was hilarious. And Christian was very casually hanging around the monitor, looking at it wearing just his sock, covered in blood. I have a photograph somewhere, a Polaroid somebody took. But we were all pretty relaxed about that stuff [on set].
AVC: You mentioned the Paul Allen murder scene—the way that it’s staged is so fun. Is there anything in particular you remember about shooting it?
MH: When we were rehearsing that scene, I remember Christian saying to me, “I think I want to moonwalk.” And then when he did it, I just fell off my chair laughing, I thought it was so funny and absurd. So that was something he came up with, to walk out like that.
Visually, there were a couple of things that really came together. One is that the script had a screen direction to cover the floor with newspaper, and when I got there, the art department had set down this unbelievably elaborate, fetishistic sort of jigsaw puzzle made out of newspaper. I thought it was perfect, because Bateman was very OCD and he would do this to be excessively neat.
I remember shooting certain things from Jared Leto’s [who played Paul Allen] point of view, shooting from where he’s sitting and you look back. There are some shots Jared can’t see, because he’s got his back to Christian. But you see from his point of view Christian walking through the kitchen with this axe and the crazy see-through raincoat that the costume designer had come up with at the very last minute. That apartment was very good to shoot in, it had great angles. It felt good. It just came together.
AVC: You talked about shooting the murders from the victims’ point of view. That reminds me of your film Charlie Says, which reframes an infamous real-life crime, the Manson murders, from the point of view of the women involved. Would you say that’s a theme in your work?
MH: With American Psycho in particular, it was very important to look at it from the victims’ point of view, because I didn’t want the murders to be exciting or thrilling in a traditional kind of way, which is very easy to do. Because if the camera is from the murderer’s point of view, then in a way you want them to be killed, you can’t help it. You’re taking on the mindset of the pursuer, and I wanted to take on the mindset of the hunted, the victim. We’re trying to get away from him. That was very important.
In Charlie Says, I was going back and back and forth, because, again, that is also a movie where it just has a climactic explosion of violence at the very end. And then with the LaBicana murder, I wanted very much to be in Leslie Van Houten’s head, and go step by step with her to see what happened for her to commit this [crime]. She’s the observer of this violence, and then she tbecomes a perpetrator. But I wanted to make the victims real. So we added a little scene where you see Mr. and Mrs. LaBianca just hanging out, just nice people in their house. I wanted to give them a reality.
I want the victims to have some reality, even when, as in Charlie Says, you’re mainly staying with the perpetrator. You don’t want them to be faceless, or to have no impact.
American Psycho is currently streaming on Cinemax, and is available as a digital rental from major online retailers.
110 Comments
I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn’t understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group’s undisputed masterpiece. It’s an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism.Take the lyrics to Land of Confusion. In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I’ve heard in rock. Phil Collins’ solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like In the Air Tonight and Against All Odds. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is Sussudio, a great, great song, a personal favorite.
I’ve been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, Duke. Before that, I really didn’t understand any of their work. Too artsy, too intellectual. It was on Duke where Phil Collins’ presence became more apparent. I think Invisible Touch was the group’s undisputed masterpiece. It’s an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford. You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument. In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism.Take the lyrics to Land of Confusion. In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority. In Too Deep is the most moving pop song of the 1980s, about monogamy and commitment. The song is extremely uplifting. Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as anything I’ve heard in rock. Phil Collins’ solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way. Especially songs like In the Air Tonight and Against All Odds. But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist. This is Sussudio, a great, great song, a personal favorite.
Honestly, people like Don Trump Jr. and Pete Buttigieg are the modern day Patrick Batemans.
I don’t think that the movie definitively says the murders were just in Bateman’s head, but there is that possibility. The book is very clear that the murders are real and goes into gory details about them (which is why I and many people found the book off-putting). I find the movie a much more pleasant experience and have seen it several times, while I doubt I will ever read the book more than once.
There is no reason to read the book more than once, and with Bret Easton Ellis antics within the last few years, not sure you should read any of his books.I say that as a former fan of them.Movie is great though, just extremely funny.
With the exception of the actual murders, the book is actually pretty hysterical. The constant grind of Patrick’s empty life becomes comical very fast, particularly how the revolving door of friends eventually gets so blurred that Patrick can’t tell all the yuppies apart. Plus you have the fairly bleak black comedy that the murders themselves get absurdly graphic, and are often followed immediately by nonsensical chapters of Patrick rambling about Whitney Houston or Phil Collins. The book also has a lot of sad comedy with Patrick repeatedly outright telling his friends he’s a remorseless serial killer but gets literally no reaction.
It always makes me happy to hear Mary Harron completely understood the comedy, because showing Patrick as an actual serial killer without the bleak comedy would be terrible.(I haven’t read anything else by Ellis, but yes, he is often pretty awful in real life)
I never once got the feeling that any of it was in Bateman’s head. The film’s conclusion, it seemed to me, suggested that the people on the fringes of Bateman’s world (real estate agents, etc), were basically colluding to allow this kind of horror to continue in the interests of a misogynist plutocracy. But that was only my take – shrug.
My read on the real estate agent was that she had this great apartment she wanted to market, and wasn’t going to allow a few corpses in the closet to stop her. She was a female version of Bateman. That’s a hell of a lot funnier than assuming he was just crazy.
Lol, Good point! I kept wondering she did with the bodies.
She’s a pro in Manhattan. Probably breaks then down in the tub, or has a Mike Ehrmantrout type on speed-dial.
Yeah, a “fixer” (for the ambitious ‘fixer-upper’?)I have been reading a reddit thread about the novel and came across this: “Also kind of funny that Bateman mentions Trump a bunch of times in the book and how he wants so badly to be like him.” Boom. There it is 🙁
You really thought an atm asked Bateman to feed it a cat?
In earlier interviews Harron was quite clear the murders were not in his head. Part of the reason everyone thinks Paul Allen is still alive is because they’re just bullshitting for status reasons. Everyone’s personal lies end up being Bateman’s cover.
I assumed from the movie the real estate agent had everything cleaned up in order to sell the apartment for the highest value. It was a nice place and you don’t necessarily want it to get out that there was a ton of dead murdered bodies in there.
Indeed. However, with the value of NYC real estate what it is today, I don’t think having been a murder scene is nearly as off-putting as one might think.
I’m in a 100+ year old building I assume someone has died in my apt at some point and someone has probably been murdered in the building. It wouldn’t be a big deal to me, unless there’s still blood everywhere, but if there was I’d hope I’d get a deal.
Really!“So how much of a discount are you going to give me for the bloodstains in the carpet?”
Ewww I’d want a discount if there were carpets first and foremost.
Yeah, I’m kind of a hardwood floor kind of guy myself. Carpet attracts more than just bloodstains.
But as Ellis himself pointed out in Rant, if the blood gets bewteen the floorboards you’ll never get the gore entirely out.
Dammit, Palahniuk.
That’s why they make rugs.
“Damn shame what the did to that dog.”
Oh shit, I forgot about that. Certainly NOT a funny moment. Also, I just finished reading how it went down in the book. Ellis certainly had a vivid and very tactile imagination :/
You can even look it up yourself by going to the NYPD’s compustat data for your neighborhood and street. About twenty years ago someone was shot dead in the building next over to me. Not to talk about before one hundred years ago when hundreds of people were killed and died for all kinds of things in your block/street/neighborhood.
Damn shame what they did to that dog.
But what about the call to the lawyer who said he had lunch with Allen in London?
Everyone lied so much to cover for themselves I assumed another person used a missing person as an easy alibi.
These people are so self-centered that I doubt he really remembered exactly who he had lunch with.
This is also my take. They all confused each others names all the time.
That’s the tricky one, but the lawyer doesn’t even realize he’s talking to Bateman while badmouthing him. It’s possible he’s so venal he doesn’t even really pay attention to who’s around him.
“The book is very clear that the murders are real”How do you know? They could just as easily not be real. The ridiculousness of the descriptions, and just the outright over-the-top insanity of it all, could certainly lead one to conclude that this nonsense couldn’t possibly be happening. In any event, I think whether the murders actually happen is beside the point. The book is a caricature of our capitalist society. Capitalism begets this attitude that nothing, not even someone’s identity, matters in pursuit of the dollar.
Its weird because I get the opposite feeling from the book. The book makes me feel like its in his head – where as the movie makes me feel like some of the murders were real and some were mental.
I haven’t seen this movie in years, but wasn’t it explicitly revealed that one of his supposed victims, who’d been gone for a few days, was actually coming back from a vacation, upending his whole killing spree fantasy?
Yes, although it had also been established that Bateman sometimes mixed up the names of his accquantances. So either the killing was a fantasy or he killed a person thinking they were somebody else.
It states there is conflicting information about Paul Allen’s whereabouts. There are people saying they had seen him “recently” in time for the murder, but nobody positively corroborates each other’s statements and we never see Allen again.The movie pulls a big trick at the end: you see Patrick’s psychosis up close throughout the film. The movie even supplies voiceover so you know what’s in his head the whole time. Then right at the climax, it pulls back and throws in all the side characters, and makes the entire narrative perspective unreliable.
I think the movie’s ending showed how the banality of evil covers up gruesome, violent evil. Tons of people had evidence, clues and even a confession – nobody put it all together, took it seriously or cared that much to begin with. That was, to me, the film’s final takeaway.
The sad statistical truth is that most murders don’t get solved.
The film felt pretty conclusive that it was in his head. He runs into the same building and kills the same security guard twice, and he’s asked to feed an atm a kitten
There’s that glorious moment where he fires one bullet into a cop car and it explodes, sparking this look of total confusion on his face as he looks at the gun.
Every time I see a picture of Gavin Newsom, I think of Patrick Bateman!
Same
Why you wanna make Jared Kushner sad?
Kush is just a little too on the nose, y’know?
Not my fault choads like him took Ellis’ book as an instruction manual.
Yo, Bale won his Oscar for The Fighter, he unfortunately lost to a set of fake teeth playing a neutered straight-washed version of Freddie Mercury in 2018.
God, that is such a great episode.
Best Actor last year had some real shit nominations ugh
I just see Rami Malek’s win as actually being an award for his work on Mr Robot. Seriously, that final season of Mr Robot as the best acting of Malek’s amazing career. Bohemian Rhapsody was an annoying film, but giving Rami Malek awards is never a bad move.
There was no way Malek was going to lose. Welcome to Hollywood.
Uhhh I haven’t gotten past the first paragraph but Katie I can tell you that Christian Bale did not win an Oscar for Vice. He won his Oscar for The Fighter.
I mean, actors rarely actually win their oscar for the movie they win their oscar for. Michael Caine, Jeff Bridges, Pacino, the list goes on and on and it’s not only old white men I’d put Denzel in that.
I really don’t think that’s what Katie was going for. I think she just got it wrong. Also I don’t think his Vice role was worthy of an Oscar anyway. If anything, he should’ve won for American Psycho.
oh yeah it was a mistake in the article.For somebody Bale’s age giving him the oscar (and it was supporting actor) is a “you do the things we reward, adding and losing weight, etc., and we think you won’t embarrass us.” It’s a reward for working productively in the system and is rarely given out for the person’s actual best performance (which I do think is American Psycho). And it definitely seems like bad acts are taken into account (Eddie Murphy getting stiffed on Dreamgirls, Tom Cruise getting stiffed on Magnolia). The ways of the Oscars are the subject of endless speculation and sorrow 🙂
Golden Globes love to reward an ingenue; Oscars usually love to reward someone for a body of work once they’ve ~paid their dues~ it’s all very weird. It’s more fun when the weird random ingenue/upstart slips into the oscars
omg the MRA shit Marisa Tomei had to deal with for YEARS after winning for My Cousin Vinny. Even more fucked up when you realize she was already involved with a very important NYC theater group at that time (Naked Angels) and she’s gone on to continue to be fantastic in everything (and insanely hot).
Plus she was flat amazing in My Cousin Vinny. Yes it was a mainstream comedy but she was the best part by a mile.
It’s been hard to watch Katie try to transmission to movie critic. She really has nothing to say. I mean, thank God she left all the click-bait garbage to that neckbeard Hughes, but I’d rather she just left the site.
Yep. He got a Golden Globe for Vice. In the comedy or musical category.
Christian Bale’s Oscar wasn’t for Vice; it was for The Fighter.
It’s interesting that Bret Easton Ellis thinks “American Psycho” is flawed because it conflicts with the nature of his novel, believing the visual medium tips the scale of whether the story is real or imagined. Ellis has also been a bit sexist with his opinion about female directors. Ellis has stated that he believes Harron lacked a proper “male gaze” and “male sensibility,” since women are not aroused visually in the same way as men.
Really enjoyed this interview (and love the film). This particular thread is interesting: It’s
such a lost, bleak character… and that was something that Christian
shared. He also found Bateman ridiculous… [not] someone
that you would want to be…We
never thought that none of the murders happened. I don’t think that
everything happened, but that’s for people to decide for
themselves… If somebody says that it’s all in his head, and
that makes the movie for them, that’s fine.I’ve seen/heard lots of different reactions and readings to the film (and the book) but one thing which stood out to me, more in the film than the novel (though in that too, to an extent) is how, by the end, Bateman has been revealed to be such a desperate, pathetic individual that I kind of want the murders to have happened… at least then he’ll have achieved something in his life.
I looked at it from the unreliable narrator/ true crime POV’s. Patrick is right there with you through the movie, until it yanks back and reveals that actually, even if he did do some or all the murders, the society around him cares more about ignoring or covering it up then exposing the truth. The other characters are either oblivious, uncaring or too self-involved to connect the dots. It then tosses Patrick back into the mix and says well, even he isn’t sure if he killed that specific person, or just thought it was them.
The book plays a lot with his perception of reality being untrustworthy. Entire chapters are long panic attacks (told as several pages of pure text without punctuation) or through depersonalization attacks (where the narrative goes from first to third and back to first person).
At the same time, the book repeatedly has gags of the side characters being mixed up, so the idea at the climax that a lawyer met with one of Patrick’s supposed victims long after the murder was meant to happen can be equally read as Patrick imagining the killing OR that it did happen and no one noticed or cared.
Seemed very clear to me in the movie that he didn’t commit any murders. In that final scene it seem pretty explicit and then you go back and think about how ridiculous the murders were…. I’m going to have to watch it again!
I was very salty when this came out that it implied the murders were all in his head. I believe the movie is pretty clear about that and I think the co-writer admitted that on a commentary track (possibly as having happened by mistake, I forget). I love “I Shot Andy Warhol” and re-watch it every few years so I may go back to this just apart from the great standalone scenes on YouTube. I totally agree, the book is incredibly funny, especially the parts going through the products and routines (the movie gets this a times, just think about how Bale says about crunches “I can do a thousand now.” that line and the delivery still makes me laugh). I also totally agree that even among those douches, Bateman is not the one you want to be. Other people have disdain for him, confuse him with other people (not just in a The National’s “Mistaken for Strangers” way) and it’s implied that he only has the job because his father is a VP or something, he’s terrified of slipping towards Luis’s outsider-status when the business card scene implies he’s already beneath Luis’s outsider status…not to mention terrified of Luis’s homosexuality both as a marker of outsider status and because Luis’s desire scares him as much as anything in the movie.Actually, the broad comedy version of Patrick Bateman as portrayed from a gay man’s perspective? Barney Stinson. HIMYM didn’t age very well, Barney is just raping women all over the place.I gotta go, I have to return some videotapes.
I think Bateman’s insecurity is what a lot of people miss. He behaves in a way meant to convey alpha confidence but is obviously looked down on among his peers.
I love how the book repeatedly says Patrick is on the brink of tears over something petty like a co-worker having a better business card or reservations at a restaurant not being made. It just makes his wealth and power feel so empty and pathetic.
The business card scene is my favorite part of the movie. He gets physically ill upon seeing a friend has a better-designed card (they’re actually sitting in a bar having a competition over whose is the best). It even had a watermark!
And much like their suits, the cards look functionally identical. It’s a pretty perfect parody of “first world problems”.
That’s why the scene is so great. He’s judging the empirical superiority of different shades of off-white based upon nothing but his personal opinion.
Some genius made a parody of the business card scene but with Pokemon cards and it’s even more hysterical with how emotional Patrick gets.
It’s also all so obviously performative as to be distasteful. You can smell the sweat. He’s playing the person he wants to be, the veneer is so thin everyone can see something is off.HIMYM was a show I loved when it was on, and that I later realized was a bunch of people of varying degrees of awful inflicting their terrible personalities on each other (except Robin, who while still awful, was also mostly honest about it, and felt like the least harmful in it. Of course that could be my affection for Cobie Smulders colouring my memory.). Barney was a monster, and even his growth over the series never really reckoned with the things he’d done over the years.
If Pat Bateman is still alive then he’s a “Trumper for the economy”
Oh god. And someone’s probably interviewing him even though he does nothing, has no expertise, and speaks solely in catch-phrases.
I’ll have to circle back to you on that
Ha. I had no idea Harron was influenced by Roman Polanski. Now I understand why after seeing American Psycho I couldn’t stop thinking about Rosemary’s Baby. And Michael Powell – yes absolutely.
This seems like a good place to share the best remix of the business cards scene, by Demi Adejuyigbe:
You need look no further than the First Family to see that the Patrick Bateman aesthetic is still alive and well, skin cream, hair gel and all.
Yeah, I can see Donnie Jr. loving this film unironically.
I’m pretty sure the Trump boys compare business cards every chance they get. And I’m pretty sure there’s a reason the Trumps don’t have a pet cat.
Yeah, there are definitely people who didn’t get the point of this film and especially Wall Street
This, this, this, so painfully much. We’re being controlled by a conservative death cult that wants grandma to die for the dow, parishioners to die coming to church, and homeless and unemployed people to just die anyway. America is a brilliant white smile with hideous tooth decay beneath the gum line.
What’s up with all of the fragments of “this” these days?
It’s a modern written colloquialism indicating emphatic agreement.
Absolutely. I’ve pointed to this movie a bunch of times as a perfect insight into the political hellworld we are currently living in.The childish narcissism, toxic masculinity, worship of capital, and personal sadism at the core of Patrick Bateman also tells us everything we need to know about Donald Trump: he has no inner life beyond his want for gratification and need to be adored, and the outward appearance of success is the only “virtue” he values. “But inside doesn’t matter.”The book was merely ok to me, but Harron’s version is Strangelove levels of good as a satire and as a film.
The violence in the book gets tedious, I think. The movie is definitely superior.
Hell is being in a bar or a facebook group when someone puts on/mentions Huey Lewis.
The musical adaptation by Duncan Sheik is very very good and I think the Broadway production would have done much better and run longer if it had come out just a year later (2017 instead of 2016) because I think it would have resonated more for, well, obvious reasons. Obligatory post of bootleg video of the “Hip To Be A Square” scene that ends Act One.
Worthwhile take on the 2000 film scene in general:https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5e90d975c5b68baf0b54d8e0
Bale never won the Oscar for Vice. They need to fix that error. His last Oscar win was 2011 for supporting actor for The Fighter
What will probably throw most fans of the movie for a loop from this interview is how the director had to walk away from the book for a month after the part where Bateman tortures Bethany. Honestly, that’s the sort of person you want directing an adaptation, someone who responds that strongly to the source material but never descends into the distorted depths of “fandom”.
Bale didn’t win for Vice, he won for The Fighter.
I didn’t like the movie for the same reason I didn’t like the book- it’s one fucking idea repeated over and over and over again until you have enough footage for a movie. Or enough pages for a book.
MH: don’t ask me why the movie is so popular among Wall Street guys. It’s like, “Really? Okay…”AVC: Lack of self-awareness, maybe.MH: Yeah, or maybe they have a sense of humor. Savage! Totally deserved though.
I do believe there’s a missed opportunity here, although I may not be eloquent enough to articulate it. But you know the old saying about going back in time to kill Hitler? The ‘Hip to Be Square’ scene seems to show a young Bruce Wayne preemptively killing Jared Leto’s abominable Joker.
Fantastic interview, thank you so much for this.American Psycho is one of my favourite movies and it’s such a blast to see people rediscover it every few years beyond the most famous clips. It’s incredibly funny.
My favorite story about filming American Psycho was Mary Harron shooting three versions of each scene with Willem DaFoe’s detective character…
Version 1, he’d play it like he thinks Patrick Bateman did it.
Version 2, he’d play it like he didn’t think Bateman did it.
Version 3, he’d play it like he wasn’t sure or not if Bateman did it.
Then Harron and her editing team would mix and match from the takes, so Bateman and the audience wouldn’t be sure what the detective thought or not.
I can’t believe that I never realized until just now that we saw Batman kill the Joker.
I view this movie and Fight Club a lot differently today than I did as the 15-year-old who first saw them.
I agree with Ms. Harron; and why would it change in the past 35 years? None of the consequences or values have changed, really, so why expect different results? We as human beings are disappointingly predictable–really, we shouldn’t be expecting the people to have changed that much.
This is a little complicated, I’d better wait for recognitions to come tell me the right opinion to have.
This is actually one of my favorite movies but I never tell anyone. It’s incredibly clever, subversive, and funny, but it is also intense and doesn’t pull it’s punches; this is probably why Trainspotting is another favorite. I know it isn’t for everyone and it’s not particularly easy to explain as a Saturday night movie recommendation, but damn if it isn’t worth at least one watch. I sometimes wish there was a longer cut with just another half-hour of his banality, those were the best parts of the book and it felt like the movie skipped a bit to much for pacing.
Today I learned that this movie was not, in fact, filmed in the 80’s. *blushing*
How old did you think Christian Bale was?
Always have to watch this if I catch it on TV. I can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the Jared Leto kill, the kill itself and Bateman’s rationale. While he brazenly describes some excellent albums while putting on the raincoat just gets me everytime. His anger that his peers have better business cards and that unbelievably stupid opportunist prostitute who actually survived a night with him only to go back. Also was the first film I saw the excellent Chloe sevigny. A more reserved role but an important one.
Ever see KIDS ?