American Psycho

[Warning: Spoilers | Also not advised for children]

As it turns out, my blog list was missing several movies from my horror marathon with my friends. Along with The Midnight Meat Train, I forgot American Psycho.

We figured that this was one of the classics, but it was not what any of us were expecting. We kept confusing it with the classic Psycho. It turned out that we actually knew nothing about the story.

Patrick Bateman is a middle-class, American businessman. His life is the ideal. He strives for a perfect appearance, and has a friendly demeanour, but the soul seems completely absent from the shell that is Parrick Bateman. He himself makes comments about being emotionless, hollow, and robotic.

All that matters to Patrick is keeping up appearances. He wants to be the best businessman in his office. He is engaged, but it seems that this is only because it is respectable for a man of his age and class. He is having an affair with his fiancé's best friend, since he thinks his fiancé is sleeping with his friend. Again, he does this more because it seems like something he should do, rather than because it is something he wants to do. 

He doesn't care about either of the women in his life, in fact he is misogynistic. He verbally abuses his secretary, and he doesn't notice the way she looks at him. Oddly, she's the only woman who really cares about him.

Bateman seems passionate about his work, getting jealous of those who do a better job than him, though we never actually see him do any work. In fact, there is basically nothing in his office besides some furniture and a day planner.

As he gets frustrated with work, Patrick starts escalating into insanity. He takes his anger out on random people, including a dry cleaner who seems hesitant about cleaning his bloody sheets. He lies about who he is, taking co-worker Paul  Allen to dinner, then killing him quite joyfully. He later hires prostitutes and forces them to make sex tapes, abuses them, and finally starts killing them. He pretends that Paul Allen went to London, and uses his apartment for murdering and hiding bodies.

A detective keeps asking him questions about Paul's disappearance. Patrick does a terrible job at lying about the whole thing, and it seems that the detective is onto him, but he never acuses him of any crime.

One day, Patrick snaps. After dumping his fiancé, he tries to stuff a kitten into an ATM. When a woman sees him point a gun at the cat, he shoots her. Then he starts to run, killing people when he thinks that he is in trouble. There are sirens, helicopters, and police everywhere. He hides in his office and calls his lawyer, admitting to murdering Paul Allen.

The next day everything is normal and Patrick goes to Paul's apartment. It is empty, the walls all painted white, and an open house is happening. The bodies are not there, and don't appear to have ever been there. Then he has lunch with his work friends. He sees his shrink there, and discusses his crime, feeling guilty. The lawyer says Paul is alive and in London, and he saw him only a few days ago. During this scene, his secretary is shown flipping through his day planner, finding an increasing number of angry and violent doodles, the most recent being images of all the murders he has supposedly just committed. We are left wondering, did any of it ever happen?

The main theme of this movie is the blandness of middle-class, American life. Over and over again, the businessmen are mistake for one another, being almost the same. Even their business cards are practically identical. The whol thing is some kind of commentary on the absurdity of such a lifestyle, an perhaps on how it might drive someone mad. Then again, if he was mad from the beginning - and he really did kill those people - then the message is somewhat different, isn't it?

This movie was explicit, full of drug, sex, and murder. And it had me very confused. It was, strangely, the mostdull horror film I've ever seen.