American Psycho - review


When turning to the third or fourth page of Patrick Bateman's endless description of the beauty products he uses on himself, I chucked the novel 'American Psycho' into a corner. Although the idea of a yuppie serial killer had its symbolic attractions, I wasn't going to be forced to relive the eighties in all its narcissistic glory to experience it. But at the video rental, I felt myself tempted again by the idea and checked out the movie instead.
Patrick Bateman is portrayed perfectly by actor Christian Bale. Bateman is a highly successful demigod of his time. He's young, extremely good-looking, intelligent and rich. A recurring theme in the movie is the fact that these Wall Street yuppies keep getting confused with each other, and that, rich and attractive though they may be, they are conformist to their own culture. They compete in who has the best looking business card; in the ability to reserve seats in bars and restaurants; in dressing and looking as well as they can. In the end, they are all interchangeable, including (most of the time) Patrick Bateman.
That is, on the surface. Because in his private life, Bateman leads a life of extreme boredom on the one hand, and grotesque violence on the other. He kills people at random, starting with the murder of bums and prostitutes, but succumbing to his urge by killing a colleague, girls, and people in his office. So is this movie about the evil that is the yuppie, overdramatized by creating a yuppie serial killer? No, it's not, and it would be a bad movie if it was. The point that the film makes is that even when Patrick confesses his horrible crimes in a crying fit to his fiancee and to his lawyer, first on the answering machine and then face to face, both people simply ignore the facts in front of them. In the vacant universe Patrick Bateman inhabits, you could be a serial killer and no one would care. Is it any wonder, then, that at the end of the movie, Patrick tells us that he feels no redemption or remorse? In this sense, 'American Psycho' is a great portrait of that ugly, disgusting, callous and materialistic decade that was the nineteen eighties.
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Posted by cronopio at 11:53 PM, January 14, 2002 | Comments (0)