The Problematics: Does ‘American Psycho’ Still Retain Its Power To Shock After Having Been Fully Fetishized By Wall Street Bros?

American Psycho was the third novel by Bret Easton Ellis, an author whose prior books Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction were sensationalist accounts — buttressed by autobiographical bildungsroman elements and bitter, perhaps score-settling, social observations — of hedonistic, alienated ’80s kids. 1991’s Psycho, which Ellis said he wrote while attempting, and getting fed up with, what he called a “GQ lifestyle,” brought the alienation into the professional world of New York’s young financial wheeler-dealers — “Yuppies,” we used to call them — and added hard doses of woman-hating and gore. The book’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, likes to torture women in elaborate, disgusting ways (one of them involves a Habitrail) in between lecturing the reader on the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News and post-Peter-Gabriel-Genesis.

As satire it was both muddled and on the nose. As postmodern grand guignol, it was clearly influenced by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (whose 1970 Project For A Revolution In New York, for instance, has scenes of depredation and sadism that make Psycho look like Treasure Island), except Ellis did not have the chops to pull that pastiche off. As a publishing scandal it was a masterpiece. Every literary fainting couch in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago was fully occupied for several months.

Which is part of the reason why it wasn’t made into a movie for nine years. And when American Psycho was made into a movie, it wasn’t a studio picture, as the largely disastrous Less than Zero was. (The 1987 movie did have a pretty great soundtrack though.) Instead, it was an indie, adapted by two women and directed by one of them. Bateman’s brutality would be shown not via a male gaze, but the lens of director Mary Harron, who wrote the script with Guinevere Turner, who also has a role in the movie. Turner would become a regular collaborator with Harron, who was a journalist and documentarian before making 1996’s I Shot Andy Warhol, a portrait of Valerie Solanas that proved Harron had no fear of provocative themes and narratives.

There’s another reason besides controversy that the novel took so long to come to the screen: Christian Bale‘s commitment to playing Patrick Bateman. Harron went through various phases of development hell, during which Leonardo DiCaprio was at one point poised to take the role, before she and Bale could get together as the gods intended. It’s his weirdly antic performance that makes the film of American Psycho rather less on-the-surface toxic than the book.

What both the book and the movie have in common is something a lot of the aforementioned fainting-couch occupiers seem to have missed: that the knife-wielding, chainsaw massacring nights of Patrick Bateman are probably figments of his imagination, murderous manifestations of Ellis’ heavy-handed metaphoric condemnations of money-worship and consumerism. These are way less heavy-handed in the film version, because they’re treated farcically, with Bale’s virtuoso performance setting the tone. With his rubbery lower jaw and bright eyes, his too-too swaggering gait, and his inevitable melodramatic meltdowns, he’s almost a live-action Wile E. Coyote. Especially when he’s being turned down for dinner reservations at New York’s hottest dining spots. It’s a wonder he never winds up killing, or “killing,” a maître d’.

The movie sets its tone perfectly with the opening credits sequence. A perfect white background is soon dotted with what look like blood drops. And soon look like…eww…chunky blood drops. But they’re not. Soon we see: it’s some kind of raspberry drizzle poured on a plate, to provide a bed for an ever-so-slightly gnarly looking slice pork roast. The audience’s expectations are at first met, then subverted.

Harron is particularly deft at using editing and staging to depict Patrick’s wish-fulfillment scenarios. At a New-York’s-Hottest-Club-Circa-1991 bar (the movie retains the novel’s time frame) Patrick orders with forced politeness; when the bartender’s back is turned, he says “You’re fucking ugly bitch” and the clarity with which she doesn’t react tells the audience not that she didn’t hear Patrick, but that Patrick didn’t really say it.

His penchant for blurting out things like “I like to dissect girls. Did you know I’m utterly insane?” or “Did you know that Ted Bundy’ first dog, a Collie, was named Lassie? Can you believe it?” does actually begin to impinge on his real life. But the movie has a lot of tells that delineate a line between fantasy and reality before dropping Bateman into a whirlpool where neither he nor the viewer know what’s real.

For instance, when Patrick kills a prostitute by dropping a chainsaw down a stairwell and nailing her with its blade, the chainsaw keeps going even after Patrick has let go of its throttle. Chainsaws don’t work that way, but a dazzling urbanite like Bateman doesn’t know that. And so, in his murderous fantasy, he accomplishes the impossible.

Do Bateman’s cliched but nevertheless squalid sexual maneuverings benefit from the elimination of the male gaze behind the camera? You could say so. Patrick never engages in the act with his ostensible fiancée, played with no small Witherspoon-esque élan by Reese Witherspoon himself. He has an exquisitely bored clinch with a side interest played by Samantha Mathis. But the big scenes are the threesomes Patrick arranges with prostitutes, which he choreographs the better to look at himself in the mirror and flex his bicep while he thrusts. It’s a hilarious depiction of his — overused word coming up, alas — narcissism. And the female nudity, which is slight, is not offered up for ogling but depicted matter-of-factly.

The financial crash of 2008 and the withering of certain branches of New York City nightlife have driven the Patrick Batemans of Manhattan …well, where have they been driven to? Inasmuch as they still exist — and of course they do, only finance types can really afford to live in Manhattan nowadays anyway — they manifest not as American Psychos but as variants on Sex and the City‘s Mr. Big. Smoothed out, slicked down, quieter in their arrogance and their appetites, interested in maybe looking like semi-useful participants in society. Bateman’s insecurity about getting into the right restaurants, having the perfect business card, getting up to a thousand ab crunches a day —all the neuroses that make him, in his own words, “an entity” rather than a human being —are permanently subsumed in such types. Or maybe they’re not. Watching American Psycho today, the satire has no small durability, in spite of the ways the movie has dated. And yes, it does contain a scene in which Bateman thinks he sees a Trump.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream American Psycho