American Psycho

But American Psycho is also about vanity and shallowness, to the extent that it’s often quite funny. But be assured. The world will not seem a better place for having seen American Psycho.

It’s power lies with its remoteness. We are hardly ever introduced to any human we would gain pleasure from, largely because the story is told almost uniquely from the perspective of the murderer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale). His emotional pallor, and the stark, compressed environment he surrounds himself, push far from us any warmth or consolement.

It’s almost as if he’s some sort of foreign creature, slithering about, remote from his surroundings, alienated. He doesn’t analyse what’s happening and we are not asked to either. Making a judgement on how truly American Psycho might correspond to the real world depends on how bleakly your own opinion might be of high earning, idle, shallow, urban males. Not all of them are serial killers after all.

So how could this be funny. Well Bateman and his male mates are obsessed with form, fashion and one upmanship. There’s a particularly memorable scene where they compare their business cards. This is taken very seriously. If only the others knew the peril of bettering Bateman!

And then there’s the scene where Bateman is having sex with a pair of prostitutes. As he grinds away he’s flexing his torso, working his biceps, admiring himself in the mirror. His morning bathing and exercise routine, which is just one of the ways he differentiates himself from his competitors, the other males, would put anyone to shame - and that’s his intention.

And what of his mates, similarly self obsessed and carefully preened? Well they’re male and misogynistic, but even they’re shocked by some of then things that Bateman says. Bateman could be a bit weird you can imagine them saying, but these people are essentially selfish. If it didn’t affect them, well those murders are just something happening to someone else in New York.

Essentially Bateman is a flawed object, with a great ability to blend in with his crowd.

The mood is accentuated by Bateman’s surroundings. Greys, blues and whites are mixed with precision in an apartment that you’d think Bateman couldn’t bare to smear with so much blood. His club and the various restaurants in which he meets his nouveau riche friends become haunted and if ever you needed to be convinced that sadistic murderers can be well dressed, and if you believe what you see at the movies, then here’s the proof.

In spite of what I’ve said there are some human moments. His secretary (Chloe Sevigny ) would be likely to be dead meat you’d think. It’s wonderful in fact how a nail gun pointed at the back of a head can concentrate an audience’s attention! Reese Witherspoon plays his fiancee, who must be also definitely at risk and Willem Dafoe, in yet another far too short performance plays the detective.

I won’t tell you much more except to indicate that perhaps some of the murders are imagined and to emphasise the dreary power of American Psycho, a film that will dwell with you for some days.