The Killer Inside

It's quite possible that American Psycho is a brilliant movie. It's also quite possible that it's a dreary, obvious chop-'em-up dressed in Alan Flusser suits and Ralph Lauren boxers, drenched in Pour Hommes aftershave, all to disguise it as bracing satire on the greed-is-good '80s. The option audiences choose to accept (most likely, the former) will depend on what they think about Mary Harron's interpretation of Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel -- the one no publishing house would touch nine years ago, until Vintage Contemporaries picked it up and hurled it into bookstores (the shit hits the fans, indeed). That ruckus took place forever ago. We'd almost forgotten about those scenes in which narrator Patrick Bateman cuts off the lips of still-alive hookers, then gnaws, slowly, on the remains of the dead and the barely living. For starters. After all, we've not yet mentioned batteries, rats, and microwaves. There is no need.

Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner have excised much of the book's gore. It's felt now, not seen, except in one smorgasbord scene during which a soon-to-be female victim stumbles across bloody corpse after bloody corpse. For their discretion, the filmmakers have been lauded by those who have seen the movie on the festival circuit -- as though merely gutting the book of its wretched excess has somehow redeemed it. The film is being hailed as caustic spoof, a one-fingered salute to the era of Reaganomics and preppy-handbook scum. Surely that was Ellis's original intention (one lost beneath the bloodbath), but simply eviscerating the book doesn't make its original intention any more clear. American Psycho could be set in 1987, 1997, or the day after the day after tomorrow. It's not as though Patrick Bateman is a product of his calendar.

He existed then, he exists now, he exists forever -- the serial killer hiding beneath the calm, clean-shaven visage of the upwardly mobile man whose medicine cabinet is filled with nothing but the finest in skin-care products. Before his name was Pat Bateman, it was Ted Bundy; before that, Ed Gein. Set the movie wherever you like -- in the glass-and-concrete castles of Wall Street or in the rural nowhere of Wisconsin. American Psycho is no parody -- no more than, say, The Silence of the Lambs was a put-on. Sure, there are "funny" moments, those scenes that elicit charcoal laughs -- especially one during which Bateman (Christian Bale) and his colleagues, all of whom look like members of the Wall Street: The Musical touring company, try to outdo each other with their business cards, comparing fonts and paper stock and watermarks. This is how they measure their dicks up in the ivory towers of commerce; shame upon the poor bastard who chose to go with Franklin Gothic.

But when viewed in the right light -- say, in the reflection of the ax with which Bateman kills colleague Paul Allen (played by Jared Leto) -- the movie is an ethereal, creepy, almost breathtaking meditation on the life of a mind snapped in two. It's very possible that the murders we see onscreen -- and there are perhaps a dozen, almost all of which take place just out of our view -- do not occur at all, at least not in any tangible "reality." Yes, Bateman commits them . . . but, quite possibly, only in his own mind. He fantasizes about drinking blood, chewing on bone, ventilating friends and lovers with nail guns and steel dildos. But he does none of these things, because he is weak, perhaps too weak to kill. He's a nothing, a replaceable nobody. Not even his closest friends recognize him; not even his lawyer knows what he looks like. And how can a ghost, a transparent apparition who floats through this world insubstantial and unknown, kill anyone? In fact, he will leave no imprint upon society whatsoever.

Patrick knows he is nothing but surface and sham. "There is no real me," he says in voiceover early on, while he is shown peeling a mud mask from his face (the film is often completely on-the-nose). "There is only an entity, something illusory." He delivers this monologue through gritted teeth, using a too-perfect American accent; you know no one who speaks so clearly, so cleanly. A little while later, he tells us he wants only one thing: "to fit in." And he does, sort of: He has a perky little girlfriend, Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), who just wants to be married; he has a mistress (Samantha Mathis), who is engaged to one of his colleagues; he has a handful of friends -- or, more accurately, people with whom he dines; and he has an assistant, Jean (Chloe Sevigny), who adores him to a fault. He has, on the surface, all the trappings of success. He is rich, but, like his stark designer apartment, he is utterly empty.