Who is Paul Allen in ‘American Psycho’?
If we were being particularly macabre, we could say it was all Paul Allen’s fault. Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic investment banker in American Psycho, goes on his killing spree after becoming enraged by how superior Allen’s business card is to his own.
It’s a piece of satire that cuts to the heart of American capitalism with an axe. What makes it even more incisive is that Allen’s card is introduced to us in absentia. It does the talking for him. “That subtle off-white colour,” Bateman swoons. “The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my god! It even has a watermark.”
We glean from the card that Allen is one of Bateman’s fellow vice-presidents at the Wall Street investment bank where he works. It just happens to be the quality of Allen’s card that incenses him more than anyone else’s, to the extent that he murders a homeless man later that same day.
When we are introduced to Allen in person, played by Jared Leto, he slights Bateman by mistaking him for another colleague. It’s this faux pas, along with his business card and ability to reserve a table at an exclusive restaurant, that apparently seals Allen’s fate.
Bateman gets him drunk and takes him back to his apartment. In perhaps the movie’s most famous scene, he then bludgeons Allen to death with an axe to the sound of Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘Hip to Be Square’.
We then see Bateman taking the dead body to Allen’s own apartment (in a Jeal-Paul Gaultier overnight bag), which, he narrates, he gets into using the key in Allen’s pocket. At this point, the film and Brett Easton-Ellis’ American Psycho novel on which it is based diverge as to the role of Paul Allen.
In the novel, Bateman takes over the equivalent character Paul Owen’s apartment and makes it the scene of various other grisly murders. In the movie, he simply packs Allen’s suitcase and imitates him in a voicemail recording, suggesting he is out of town before leaving. We don’t even see where he gets rid of Allen’s body.
We only see Patrick Bateman only return to Paul Allen’s apartment once during his subsequent killing spree, when he his friend Elizabeth, and the prostitute he names Christie by dropping a rotating chainsaw blade onto her from above as she flees the building. We do catch glimpses of other murders Bateman appears to have commits there, when Christie opens door after door of the apartment in search of an escape route, Otherwise, the movie’s domestic scenes are set within the cold white confines of Bateman’s own apartment.
As it reaches its climax, he goes back to Allen’s apartment one last time, to clean it of evidence. In that scene, the script follows the novel to the letter, as a perplexed Bateman walks into a perfectly pristine, empty apartment, which a realtor claims doesn’t belong to any Paul Allen. There is an eerie pause after the realtor asks Bateman not to “make any trouble, please” before staring at him until he leaves. But other than that, there is no suggestion that anything untoward ever happened at the apartment.
Later, when Bateman tries to confess his murderous crimes to his attorney, Harold Carnes, Carnes claims they are impossible precisely because he had recently had dinner with Allen. The location of their dinner was London, the alibi location Bateman used when impersonating Allen on his answering machine.
The understated role Allen’s apartment in the film serves to make its open-ended conclusion ever more ambiguous. Because we don’t see much of the apartment, nor indeed any sign of Paul Allen’s body after the act of murder itself (only the overnight bag where it’s supposedly hidden), it is easier for us to believe the murders could all have been a figment of Bateman’s imagination.
Christian Bale, the actor who played Bateman, has described the plot of the film as “bloody far-fetched and ridiculous”. This quote implies that Bale himself subscribes to the theory that Bateman is a psychotic rather than a psychopathic killer.
Brett Easton-Ellis has the advantage of being able to use Bateman’s first-person narration as the partial and unreliable lens through which we read the novel. A film camera couldn’t offer writer-director Mary Herron the same angle of unfiltered subjectivity. So, she had to find other ways to sow extra doubts into the audience’s mind.
The absence of Paul Allen and his apartment at pivotal moments of the film holds more significance than his presence. It’s this less-is-more trick that makes us question a lot of what we’ve actually seen Bateman do on-screen.
