[Editorial] American Psycho (2000)

Mary Harron’s American Psycho has had a strange and convoluted path to its current position as a lauded part of the American horror canon, with a place in the popular cultural consciousness beyond the genre.

Although it’s now hard to imagine American Psycho being adapted any other way, details of the pre-production wrangling reveal the different American Psychos that could have been. The contrast between earlier draft scripts and the finished film highlights even more the ways in which Harron’s perspective as a female director and co-writer Guinevere Turner’s as a lesbian screenwriter, were integral to the artistic success of the film.

The film rights were bought up only a couple of years after the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel, and throughout the 1990s several directors were considered for the project, including Harron, David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone. Harron was fired due to disagreements over casting, objecting to the studio’s choice of Leonardo DiCaprio for Patrick Bateman. She was later rehired, and Harron’s persistence paid off as she was finally able to shoot her and Turner’s script, with her first choice of Christian Bale in the lead role. 

Mary Harron & Christian Bale

In interviews, Harron has consistently emphasised the importance of the humorous and satirical aspects of the source novel and her own screenplay. She describes the movie as a “black comedy/horror film”, and noted that in previous treatments, “I didn’t think that anybody else had really gotten the comedy right. That was so important to me.” As well as creating some superb comedy moments, like the absurdly dramatic scene in which Patrick becomes overwhelmed with envy over a business card nearly identical to his own, the shifts between comedy and horror add to the unique tone of the film. 

Despite being narratively similar to other dark thrillers of the time such as Seven (1995), the social satire adds another layer to American Psycho, making it less about a particular killer and more about the disturbing aspects of the society in which Bateman lives. 

While Bret Easton Ellis’s novel became most notorious for its graphic descriptions of extreme acts of violence, the film adaptation is far less explicit. Much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), American Psycho is scripted and edited in a way that makes the viewer feel that they have seen more gore than is actually shown. Bateman’s murder of Paul Allen is somewhat played for laughs - Bateman dancing around and lecturing on the merits of Huey Lewis as he prepares to axe an oblivious Paul. It’s notable, though, that the only time a violent scene is made explicitly funny is when Bateman kills a peer of his - one of many characters that seem to be almost interchangeable with Bateman himself. In instances when Bateman attacks someone more vulnerable than himself, the scenes have real emotional weight. We see  the initial hope that the homeless man has that Bateman will help him, and the effects of Bateman's actions on the two sex workers he hires, although the attack itself happens offscreen.

Harron avoids making Bateman into an anti-hero type by continually drawing attention to his unimpressive, "dorky" qualities. Her and Turner's screenplay retains the boring, self-aggrandising monologues about pop culture from the novel - speeches that clearly come not from a genuine love of the subject, but from the overwhelming passion that Bateman has for his own voice. In emphasising these characteristics, they are subverting gender norms; as Harron says: “these men are behaving like a stereotype of teenage girls. They’re so competitive, and they’re obsessed with their appearance and status.“

Guinevere Turner

Bateman is afforded no psychological depth - Harron describes him as "a symptom; he’s emblematic". The studio, according to Harron, wanted to explore Bateman’s psychological motivations and make him into a more psychologically rounded character, something she had no interest in: “it doesn’t matter if his mother was mean to him. I don’t care. He’s a monster.” One of the reasons that Harron fought for Bale to keep the part was his understanding of Bateman as an inherently ridiculous character - as Bale says in an interview: “you laugh at him, never with him.” In a media infatuated with suave, intelligent killers (both real and fictional), American Psycho is notable for showing us a serial murderer as dull, unimaginative and pathetic - posing the question: what could possibly be appealing about such a character? 

Serial killers in film are often presented as masterminds: carrying on double lives while skilfully evading or taunting the police hunting them. Patrick Bateman, by contrast, is objectively rubbish in all aspects of his life. He seems to do nothing at work except listen to his Walkman and doodle; in social situations he often becomes panicked, awkwardly escaping by announcing, "I've got to return some videotapes!" He is also terrible at being a murderer - shifty and nervous when questioned by Detective Kimball (Willem Dafoe), leaving copious evidence at Paul Allen’s flat, and confessing his crimes over the phone at the first hint of his discovery. In later scenes, Bateman’s identity itself seems to dwindle into nothing, as even people he apparently knows well call him by the wrong name or appear not to recognise him. 

Turner & Harron

Films considered as feminist or female-centered are often discussed in terms of their positive portrayals of female characters. American Psycho would definitely not pass the Bechdel test: like everyone in the film, the women of American Psycho are only seen through their relationships to Patrick Bateman. Despite this, they are seen to be more relatable, whole characters than the men, who are depicted as essentially identikit replicas of the Wall Street type. While the men bicker over the minutiae of their business cards and fret about their access to the latest fashionable restaurant, the women are shown to have a richer interior life than their male counterparts. Bateman’s fiancé Evelyn, though vapid, still has a normal emotional reaction to being essentially abandoned in a restaurant. We see the difficult choices being made by “Christie”, the sex worker that Bateman hires - after he has abused her once, she eventually agrees to go back to his flat once more, and we see the hesitancy she has in weighing up the risks involved. As viewers, we are invited to speculate on the female characters’ inner motivations far more than those of Bateman and his colleagues, who are presented as being driven by shallow impulses. Harron and Turner subvert gender stereotypes by showing these “alpha male” characters to be mainly preoccupied with  “vanity, competitiveness, gossip” traits often negatively associated with women. 

American Psycho’s specific satire of the naked greed and ambition of the 1980s made it something of a period piece even on its release at the start of the millennium, but the film’s sharp critique of hyper-masculinity and free-market capitalism has a timelessness outside its specific setting. Harron has said that she saw Ellis’s novel as “a gay man’s analysis of straight male behavior...the absurdity of these straight male Wall Street rituals” , and the film adaptation, co-writen by a lesbian and directed by a woman, continues American Psycho’s legacy as a narrative that can interrogate and critique the ongoing horror of patriarchy and capitalism  run rampant.

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