Bret Easton Ellis explains the problems with the ‘American Psycho’ movie adaptation
The 1991 novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis is one of the most revered and berated works of literature of the last 40 years. It told of the barbaric lifestyle of investment banker Patrick Bateman, whose deeds, and the way Ellis described them, drew heavy criticism from across the literary and pop cultural realms.
The novel was made into a famous film adaptation by Mary Harron, released in 2000, starring Christian Bale in the lead role. The movie drew widespread critical praise, especially for Bale, who gave his all in one of his typically obsessive, all-encompassing performances.
However, Ellis seems to have some critical problems with Harron’s adaptation. He once told Film School Rejects (via IndieWire), “I don’t think it really works as a film. The movie is fine, but I think that book is unadaptable because it’s about consciousness, and you can’t really shoot that sensibility.”
Indeed it’s fair to say that Ellis’ novel features a first-person narrative, which any film adaptation would find difficult to portray. Ellis then added: “You have to make a decision whether Patrick Bateman kills people or doesn’t. Regardless of how Mary Harron wants to shoot that ending, we’ve already seen him kill people; it doesn’t matter if he has some crisis of memory at the end.”
The crucial problem for Ellis is that American Psycho was written as a novel, and therefore its themes can only be properly explored as a novel. “How do you adapt The Iliad?” he continued. “How do you have that experience be the same as an experience that was conceived as a book? You’re getting a watered-down, second-hand version of it, in a way. If you’ve written a novel, you’ve written a novel because it is a novel.”
Much of American Psycho is ambiguous, particularly its final act in which Patrick Bateman loses his mind, making readers question whether he has indeed killed all his victims or whether he has just hallucinated the entire novel. “If you’re going to take that material from one medium to another, you’re just going to have to make some decisions about it,” Ellis suggested.
“The book itself doesn’t really answer a lot of the questions it poses, but by the very nature of the medium of a movie, you kind of have to answer those questions,” he added. “And a movie automatically says, ‘It’s real.’ Then, at the end, it tries to have it both ways by suggesting that it wasn’t. Which you could argue is interesting, but I think it basically confused a lot of people, and I think even Mary would admit that.”
Ellis also suggested that the movie adaptation was so popular because of the advent of “woke” culture. “I think that could be the flourishing of woke-ness in the culture—me being the dark prince of literature, and I write this book that upsets so many people, I need to be put in my place,” he said. “And what better narrative is there than that two women did it? That’s very appealing.”
