American Cycle

The long cultural life of 2000's American Psycho is kind of fascinating. I've never read the Bret Easton Ellis novel it's based on, which Ellis, among others, considered to be unfilmable. It must be very different from the resulting movie, then, because the movie is so slick, like "shit from a duck's ass", to borrow a phrase from Lost Highway, it seems like it could only be destined for film. I imagine the main character, legendary anti-hero Patrick Bateman, was less of a caricature in the book.

Patrick Bateman has loomed over the landscape of American cultural commentary ever since the film's release and his presence only became more relevant with the election of Donald Trump. Trump was the epitome of precisely the cold, rich, yuppie New York culture that the film parodies. But while Bateman and his friends have the oddly childish, vicious hot takes in casual conversation that recall Trump, Bateman also spends time with carefully crafted moralistic bullshit to cover the left wing psychos, too, like his feigned concern for the environment and cultural sensitivity.

To be sure, there are many qualities to Bateman's madness to be found anywhere in the world. You don't have to be American to be a vicious hypocrite. But Bateman's madness is a perfect perversion and consummation of Puritan ethics that were part of America's formation. It was the Puritan who had no power to affect their own salvation and so compulsively constructed a psychological mask in the hopes that the inside would match the outside. Cognisance of it being a mask would, one would think, shatter it, but by the 1980s, the American Pscyho could comfortably look into a mirror and say

There are a lot of different uploads of precisely this clip on YouTube. It obviously struck a nerve.

The studio, Lionsgate, wanted Leonardo DiCaprio to play Bateman but director Mary Harron chose Christian Bale, an Englishman. I always felt that casting a non-American was perfect for a character whose persona is a consciously crafted shell. Harron also liked Bale, according to Wikipedia, because Bale didn't think Bateman was at all cool, as some of the other actors who auditioned for the role did. Nevertheless, he has his place in the line of late '90s, '00s anti-heroes with whom audiences found themselves sympathising. The movie bashes Bateman's world constantly while Bateman's only honest moments are when he is bashing it too, physically. Perhaps the excessive violence of the novel, which was toned down for the film, was meant to sicken even the most jaded horror fan.

American Psycho is available on Netflix and on The Criterion Channel.