Brett Easton Ellis' dark satire on yuppiedom in the '80s was considered unfilmable for the intensity of its graphically described violence. Screenplays, including one by Easton Ellis, came and went until almost a decade after its publication, this adaptation was released. So how did it go?
I recall a conversation in the '90s where a friend proposed Oliver Stone as director and the still young enough Robert Downey Jr as Bateman. It was a thrilling idea, the kind that can take a conversation from fat chewing to the corners of inspiration. We imagined scenes from the book we'd read in annihilating colour on screen. The novel was a must read at the time, a book deemed taboo here but bold there.
The original cover art gave us a Bateman in a suit. His face was either a mask with darkened eyeholes or his face crowned with a film of bloody red. Out of context, you'd take it as a tribute to Francis Bacon. It looked fearsome. Then, when I read it, I found it to be wincingly violent but also constantly humorous in the same way as his debut novel Less Than Zero. The violence, though, is flavour and emphasis, not purpose. That is what Mary Harron understood.
Easton Ellis' uber privileged are shown as shark-like competitors in bespoke clothing, suggesting that Bateman is only enacting what his friends and colleagues only dream of doing if they weren't already performing an abstracted expression of it in their business dealings. In one of the few passages addressing his childhood in the novel, Bateman is afflicted by rage. We don't need that here and a lot of that has to do with the casting of Christian Bale.
Bale at twenty-six presented an unblemished beauty strengthened by near constant exercise. His blankness is perfected rather than undermined by his narration and has Bateman perform his smile which is free of any genuine joy. If you've ever known someone who engages in conversation in order to pounce on points and finish their ridicule with a weird blurting AI laugh, you will know this characterisation: a life-draining continuous antagonism. When we see him prepare to attack, we don't need to see the results. If anything they would detract from the effect of Bateman's remove (even from his own actions). Harron continues the mystery of the scene with the coathanger from the novel in that neither explains what he used it for, only suggesting its gravity through the results, knowing that we who read and see and fill in blanks are going to supply the worst we can. And when we do, we are, however temporarily, kin to Bateman.
The rest of the cast are also astutely chosen to give us an elite New York that is intimidatingly urbane and dangerous to approach with the likes of Jared Leto, Justin Theroux and Reese Witherspoon. Chloe Sevigny also impresses as the timid but observant Jean. Willem Dafoe turns up in a role that shows he really can do restraint, as the quietly canny detective who understands more than he reveals. I can't finish this without mentioning the work of cinematographer Andrzej Sekula whose compositions go from sumptuous lifestyle brochure perfection to the ugly over lighted moments at venues that are rinsed with discomfort.
American Psycho is the kind of literary adaption that comprehends its source material. The book that might have got its author cancelled if it appeared more recently and the film based on it both prove both funnier and less extreme than feared. The thread of wavering identity, the rupture between a fantasised wish fulfilment and diegetic reality is nauseously blurry. It recalls another supposedly unfilmable novel made a few years before. David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch threw the issues with forming a literal report of Burroughs' eyepopping satirical epic by creating a companion to it. More recently Luca Guardaningno's take on the much shorter Queer managed to overstretch the source and make an unsatisfying thing of it. Guardangnino is currently at work on a remake of American Psycho. I won't be in line for that one, though, as Mary Harron has already made this one.
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