Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?
by Aisha Feranmi and Elijah Phillips
“I like to dissect girls. Did you know I'm utterly insane?”
American Psycho is discussed as one of the greatest horror films of the century. The film follows Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street executive (“mergers and acquisitions”) and serial killer (“murders and executions”). By day, he competes with his equally narcissistic, sexually insecure, misogynistic, and arrogant colleagues over trivial things like the font and color of their business cards. Believe it or not, one of these conversations drives Bateman to his first kill, and the start of his nightly engagement, murder. His rival trader, Paul Allen (Jared Leto) seals an almost impossible deal, dined at a restaurant he (Bateman) could not make a successful reservation at, and worst of all, and had a better business card. This action reveals an innate and insatiable desire in Bateman. He soon becomes bored with his normal life and even finds it harder to fit in with people around him. “And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there,” Bateman says himself at the start of the film.
Narcissistic, neurotic, self-centered, and power-hungry in every sense of the word, Bateman wants to control everything around him. There is a scene where he tells his assistant to starts wearing dresses and heels because he likes them. He also renames the women he sleeps with.
Bateman notes that there is something seriously wrong with him inside but does nothing to address it. He enjoys the thrill of his leisure pursuits till Paul Allen was reported missing and a detective (Willem Dafoe) starts questioning his whereabouts on the night Paul was last seen. It’s here we see Bateman get angst and sloppy but its business as usual when the detective drops the case suddenly. He slips again when he was just about to kill a stray cat and gets interrupted by an elderly woman. He kills the lady instead, right there on the street. He is immediately found out by the police in the area but doesn’t surrender. Rather, he indulges the officers in a game of cat and mouse and ends up doing what he does best, killing. We watch Bateman go on this killing rampage, breaking down completely and confessing to killing 20–40 people to someone on a phone call.
The last act of the movie is where it gets confusing. Patrick is at the restaurant with his co-workers when he sees his lawyer, the person he confessed to the night before. His lawyer mistakes him for someone else and says someone as lame as Bateman could never kill a person, he also says he saw the man Bateman claims to have killed in London only a couple of days before. To top it all off, he calls it a really good joke. The scene cuts to his assistant (Chloe Sevigny) going through his journal and seeing drawings that inform her (and us) of her boss’ mental state.
Now, the question the viewers are left with is… Did Bateman kill all these people, or did the murders start and end in his mind?
American Psycho was ahead of its time. When it was released, film critics, the general public, and the author of the book the film was adapted from did not find it satirical like Harron and Bale did. Conversations surrounding the film regarded it as disturbing, crazy, and evil. The majority of what we see in American Psycho is what we see and love in movies/characters like Joker and John Wick. John Wick as a movie has far more gore and violence compared but even that is justified. “They killed his dog”. Joker, on the other hand is a great portray of mental disturbance, just like American Psycho and that too is received properly by the general public. Perhaps, we can say the time has changed, and people with it.
