American Psycho at 20: a vicious satire that remains as sharp as ever

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American Psycho at 20: a vicious satire that remains as sharp as ever

By Scott Tobias

 

Christian Bale in American Psycho. The final joke is that nobody seems to notice that anything is all that wrong about him. Photograph: Allstar/Universal Pictures

 

Three years after the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho finally got made into a movie, after a production odyssey nearly as tortured and calamitous as its publication as a book, a documentary called The Corporation caused a mild stir among arthouse viewers and political thinkers.

 

Inspired by a 14th amendment detail that allowed companies to be seen as individuals, the film asked a simple question: if a corporation were a person, what type would he be? In a little under three hours, the film concludes that he would be a psychopath.

 

It’s common to think about Patrick Bateman, the narrator and brand-conscious mass murderer of American Psycho, as representing certain 1980s themes: the greed and rapaciousness of Wall Street, the emptiness of consumer culture, and a Reagan era where old-fashioned values covered the whole Darwinian bloodbath in the sharp, piney scent of Polo cologne.

 

But both book and film, craftily adapted by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner, are not thinking about him as a symbol per se. 

 

Full Story: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/14/american-psycho-bret-easton-ellis-christian-bale#img-1