Hear Me Out : ‘American Psycho’ is the most unpleasant movie of the 2000s
My favourite conspiracy theory is that The Simpsons predicts the future. It’s a reminder that there is media that aims to bottle the zeitgeist like a time capsule, and then there is media that lands before its time: film, music and literature that stand on their tiptoes, gazing into the near-distant future and inscribing what it sees.
If American Psycho is unpleasant, it’s because it’s the latter. With Bret Easton Ellis’ polarising source material as an anchor, director Mary Harron managed to foreshadow a crisis of modern masculinity through her turn-of-the-century film. Sure, the stacked-up female bodies and violence prove an unsettling watch. More so, the unflappable narcissism, misogyny, cruelty, greed and apathy, which in Harron’s hands is dialled up to hellish proportions. It’s no wonder critics had no idea how to place the film upon its premiere. Some reviled it. Others, like the audience at the film’s Sundance screening, “sat there in stunned silence”.
In fact, Rolex refused to let the film’s costume designers put Bale in one of their watches despite other cast members sporting the brand. Comme des Garçons also barred the fashion team from using one of their bags to carry a dead body, so the wardrobe department opted for Jean Paul Gaultier instead. Meanwhile, Calvin Klein expressed concern at being affiliated with a psychopath and pulled their tighty-whities at the last minute. American Psycho clearly put people on edge, giving way to much pearl-clutching and a near moral panic. But what’s missing from this perspective is the message Harron meant to convey about the culture we exist in and the attitudes it breeds.
Harron narrows her lens on downtown Manhattan, the festering epicentre of capitalism. Wall Street is overrun with morally corrupt, look-alike investment bankers and the era-defining egocentrism of the 1980s is found whirring in the chilling and well-drawn villain Patrick Bateman. Bateman is itching to confess his brutal acts of murder, but he fails to find a willing audience. Everyone is too self-involved to hear the truth, too ready to turn his confession into a joke. By the time credits roll, it’s too late.
Christian Bale may have been channelling Tom Cruise in his infamously method-led portrayal of Patrick Bateman, but it’s his character’s heroes in the novel that are most revealing: Ed Gein, Ted Bundy, Donald Trump. Can you think of a list of guys any worse? I think it’s a testament to the fidelity of Bale’s performance that Ivanka Trump, the daughter of Donald, once called Patrick Bateman her “ideal man”. You can imagine the sort of masculinity she’d be brought up to admire, and not just her.
There’s a trace of Bateman in the online performances of Andrew Tate and Elon Musk. They’re exactly the kind of money-worshipping men who would admire their biceps in a mirror mid-coitus or be enraged in a business card measuring competition with their colleagues. What’s genuinely scary is that Tate is viewed favourably by one in six boys aged between six and 15, according to YouGov data released in September 2023. Not everyone is viewing the Patrick Bateman archetype with a heavy dose of irony.
American Psycho is the most unpleasant film to emerge from the 2000s because it sounds the alarm bells at the current moment. Patrick Bateman is a sketch that’s too close for comfort.
