Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)
Given he’s an unquestionable corporate fucker, it’s amazing how little work Bateman does. Perhaps this is down to being employed at his father’s company, but a typical day involves little more than turning up late at his big office, ordering his secretary to wear a dress and high heels, switching on the TV, comparing business cards with other corporate fuckers, doodling graphic depictions of murder in his diary, and making reservations at fancy restaurants. We know he’s a horrible human being, though, not so much because he routinely dismembers people or keeps a severed head in his fridge, but because Chris de Burgh’s Lady in Red reduces him to a trance-like state of reverence.
The impeccably dressed, coke-snorting Bateman (Christian Bale) is an investment banker in a privileged white male world where women are lovelorn secretaries, vacuous fiancées, blank models, and unenthusiastic hookers. Misogyny runs deep e.g. “You’re a fucking ugly bitch. I wanna stab you to death and play around with your blood” and “A good personality consists of a chick with a little hard body who will satisfy all sexual demands without being too slutty about things and who will keep her dumb fucking mouth shut.” Bateman is also obsessed with the ins and outs of corporate life. When he gets two hookers up to his plush apartment, the first thing he wants to do is talk about his job, disappointed they haven’t heard of his Wall Street firm.
It’s clear, however, that his upscale occupation is a crucial part of the front he presents to the world. He worships image because he has no heart or soul (or brain, seeing how slapdash he is in the aftermath of the murders). He obsessively consumes but cannot build anything while also lacking a creative bone in his well-toned body. Sex doesn’t offer a means of connection, either, but merely the chance to admire his biceps in the mirror. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory…” he tells us while peeling off a deep-cleansing mask. “I am simply not there.”
Sometimes this Harvard graduate amuses himself by posing as a liberal, spouting concern over apartheid, the nuclear arms race and equal rights for women, but his depraved actions reveal both his true nature and a wildly misplaced sense of superiority. Yes, he’s superficially doing well, but the center of his being is filled with ‘greed and disgust.’ When he kills a colleague for little other reason than masculine competitiveness, his only moment of ‘sheer panic’ is upon the discovery that his victim’s apartment overlooks Central Park and is obviously more expensive.
Director Mary Harron takes Bret Easton Ellis’ outstanding novel and essentially mines it for black comedy. Not that she had much choice. A straight take would have been unfilmable, although you sense sooner or later someone will get around to concentrating on the book’s intense, grueling horror rather than its satirical look at 80s business culture.
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