Recent viewings

American Psycho (2000). One of the most fundamentally repellent and unrewarding movies I’ve ever sat through.

Patrick Bateman, as he informs us in portentous voiceover narration at the beginning of the film, feels nothing. No emotions, no sympathy for others. He’s nothing but an expertly presented, studiously maintained, well buffed façade. So he informs us as we watch him go through his morning routine of exercises and fetishistic application of skin and hair care products.

We are then introduced to Mr. Bateman’s world. He’s a vice president of something or other at a company full of other aspiring cookie-cutter yuppie-droids with personalities about as deep as the makeup on their faces. They obsess over each other’s tailor made suits and, comically, over the preciously-designed business cards that they whisk in each others faces and compare as if they were comparing penises.

Up to this point, the movie had some promise as a deadpan satire on the slick but shallow yuppie pretensions of young would-be alpha males in the corporate world. But, of course, that’s not what American Psycho is notorious for.

It turns out that our boy Bateman gets his jollies by picking up hookers, drunk co-workers, and an occasional actual date, taking them back to his gleamingly sterile apartment, and massacring them in various ways, many of which are displayed in full, blood-spurting color.

Or…. DOES HE??? (More on this later.)

There are some amusingly black-humored bits, as when Our AntiHero brings a couple of hookers to his apartment for a threesome and then spends most of the time narcissistically grinning at his own reflection in the mirror while reciting inanely pretentious reviews of – so help us – Phil Collins albums. Or when he repeatedly blurts out revealing Freudian slips, such as quoting notorious serial killers or saying that his job is in “murders and executions”. It becomes a mildly amusing running gag that no matter how many times he says things like this, his co-workers and dates blithely ignore them or misinterpret them. “Oh, mergers and acquisitions….”

But the movie goes down hill from this point. Some of the methods by which Bateman dispatches his victims are simply not credible. (Trust me, no one can throw chainsaws that accurately.)

Now if the movie had gone full throttle all the way with its depiction of a completely soulless creature who fit in perfectly to the corporate world – murders and all! – I might have accepted the utter blackness of the satire on its own terms. But the filmmaker evidently backed off from this possibility, and the end of the movie simply falls apart as Bateman starts seeing things that are plainly nonsensical, such as an ATM machine that demands “Feed Me a Stray Cat!”, and gets involved in one of those ludicrously improbable movie gunfights in which an amateur shooter not only bests multiple trained, professional police officers, but ALSO causes their patrol cars to explode in gigantic mushroom clouds of flame for good measure. Then he tries to confess his crimes again, wanders into a party of some kind, tries to confess yet again. Once again, no one believes him. And the audience, having seen both Bateman’s alleged horrific acts in full color and equally convincing evidence that he is having schizophrenic hallucinations, is left with no clue whether they have watched the story of a soulless killer or the violent fantasies of a deranged madman. “My confession means nothing”, he informs us portentiously.

And for once, he’s right.