CC Film Club presents: American Psycho (dir. Mary Harron, 2000)

[Losperman]

Happy New Years everyone, and welcome to the first installment of the CC Film Club. For my selection I have chosen the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho. It has become, in recent years, somewhat of a cult hit, so I won't be surprised if many of you have already seen it and love/hate it. It is, however, one of my favorite films of all time, so I look forward to seeing what you guys think of it, for better or worse.

What Dis?

American Psycho is somewhat hard to categorize. Some people look at it as a satire, others as a thriller or horror. Either way, it is the story of a young, successful Wall Street executive who is excessively concerned with "fitting in." His entire routine and appearance is centered around looking and being the best, but not standing out too much in the process. Beneath this cool exterior lies the mind of a killer. He is able to control his bloodlust for a time, but as time goes on he sees his need for violence becoming more and more uncontrollable.

Why I likes

Personally, I love this film for several reasons. The parody of 80s culture, the writing, acting, etc. I won't gush over it too much, though, because this is about discussion not praise.

Your Turn

I have recently read the novel, so discussion of the similarities between the two is open, but since the point of this club is movies, only one of the questions will revolve around the book. As Leek previously stated, these questions are NOT mandatory, but more of a guideline to get things started if there is nothing in particular that jumps out at you after watching the film. With that said, let us begin, shall we?

-How did you feel about the music reviews? Out of place and silly? Important to understanding the character? Something else?

-Although some of the violence is explicitly seen in the film, there is a lot of suggestion that much of it occurred solely in his mind, especially at the film's climax. Do you think the violence was real? Imagined? Some combination of the two? Or perhaps the point of it is not to know the difference?

-Is he the only one caught up in this obsessive, superficial focus on minutiae? His friends seem to be more indifferent, but at certain times (business card scenes) they seem to be similarly affected by the ridiculousness.

-If you have read the book, how representative of it do you think the film is? Too similar? Too different?

The film is not exactly popular in mainstream culture, but it is well-known enough to be available most everywhere. Netflix, rental stores, Amazon, etc. I don't know of anywhere online it's available for free (legally, anyway), but if you do, feel free to post it here.

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[DWARFINATORclock]

I think that he possibly committed some of the murders, and all the characters are so wrapped up in their own mind and only care about themselves they even get the names of their friends wrong or confuse them with other people. Bateman himself is confused for someone else on separate occasions as well.

[DWARFINATORclock]

It's kinda weird that we'd have to spoiler everything in this thread btw.

[Topcatyo]

Yeah.  We should just assume that everything after the first post is going to be spoilers.  It just makes discussion much easier.

[TabascoClock]

I watched part of it in a friend's place. I liked it, I might rent it and watch the whole thing.

[ChocolateCoffin]

I think the music reviews work as a means of showing the viewer that Bateman doesn't infact have interest in anything other than murder. I think the way he speaks of music is supposed to indicate that he is lifting it from a review, rather than his own personal opinion.

[Topcatyo]

I read a view of the movie's ending a while back that I just can't shake and I feel it's quite insightful.

-Everything in the movie did happen, Patrick killed all those people, but everyone is so absorbed in their yuppie lifestyle that they can't be assed to notice or care.  When the lawyer says he had lunch with Paul, he didn't but instead had lunch with someone who was exactly like Paul, the movie making a point that, in the end, all people like Patrick and his co-workers become the same, as shown in the business card scene where they make a big deal out of business cards that look exactly alike.
When Patrick goes back to the apartment to find it completely clean and refurnished, it's because the landlord saw all the death and whatnot as something that'll lower the real-estate value, so she casually swept it all under the rug to try and still make money.
It's a very good theory, in my opinion, and I wish I had come to it on my own, but I watched the movie my first time quite a few years ago so I wouldn't have been able to really piece it together back then.

I'll answer the rest of the stuff later on, I need to get ahold of the movie to actually watch it again.

[Losperman]

I read a view of the movie's ending a while back that I just can't shake and I feel it's quite insightful.

-Everything in the movie did happen, Patrick killed all those people, but everyone is so absorbed in their yuppie lifestyle that they can't be assed to notice or care.  When the lawyer says he had lunch with Paul, he didn't but instead had lunch with someone who was exactly like Paul, the movie making a point that, in the end, all people like Patrick and his co-workers become the same, as shown in the business card scene where they make a big deal out of business cards that look exactly alike.
When Patrick goes back to the apartment to find it completely clean and refurnished, it's because the landlord saw all the death and whatnot as something that'll lower the real-estate value, so she casually swept it all under the rug to try and still make money.
It's a very good theory, in my opinion, and I wish I had come to it on my own, but I watched the movie my first time quite a few years ago so I wouldn't have been able to really piece it together back then.

I'll answer the rest of the stuff later on, I need to get ahold of the movie to actually watch it again.

(I agree about not having spoiler tags after the first post, so I won't use them)

I was waiting for this to be brought up. I think it's an incredibly clever twist that all of the identity confusion could mean that all of the murders did, in fact, occur. But that's not so clean an answer, since there are several other things that aren't explained by this. The chainsaw drop kill is ridiculous because it is an almost impossible feat. There is no nod to that fact there, but there is when he blows the two police cars with the handgun. He looks at it puzzled, knowing that he just did something incredibly unlikely. Then there is the ATM that tells him to feed it a stray cat, which is obviously not real.

So all of the murders can maybe be explained by identity confusion, and all of his blatant confessions to people that go ignored could maybe be explained by the fact that the people he confesses things to either don't care or are too self-absorbed to listen to what he's actually saying.

But those certain impossibilities along with a lot of the nods toward it being in his head (the notebook of drawings, his obsession with horror movies/killers, the nameless prescription pills he takes, etc.) kind of make it impossible to say one way or another, in my opinion.

[DWARFINATORclock]

The impossibility of knowing what is real and what is not is what makes this movie so great.

[Biblo]

I've always felt that the music was just another element to Bateman's obsession with material detail. A lot of this is clearer in the book though. In the book there are whole chapters dedicated to his detailing a band or artist's history and giving his opinion on it. As well as these, whenever he walks into a room he usually spends about 2-3 pages describing what everyone is wearing in extreme detail.

In regards to the argument of it being real or not, I always felt the film leaned too far in the direction of it being in his head. The book is far more ambiguous and has plenty of arguments for either opinion.

Maybe I'm talking about the book too much...
I still enjoy the film a lot though, Bale's performance is fantastic. My 2 favourite moments of his both involve mirrors.
1. Right at the beginning when he's removing his literal face mask, the intensity in his eyes is crazy.
2. Just before he kills Paul Allen (or is it?) he goes into the bathroom and takes some pills and drops his figurative mask for a brief second before continuing.
Excellent

[PirateClock]

Personally i think that all those murders only happened in his head cause he loathed other people so much. Something to which i can relate.

[Losperman]

My 2 favourite moments of his both involve mirrors.
1. Right at the beginning when he's removing his literal face mask, the intensity in his eyes is crazy.
2. Just before he kills Paul Allen (or is it?) he goes into the bathroom and takes some pills and drops his figurative mask for a brief second before continuing.
Excellent

Similarly, I liked the shot when he and Evelyn are in the taxi and Bateman's face is blurred behind the foggy glass.

I also just realized that the Asian woman who speaks little to no English is the only one to react to one of his verbal admissions of violence when he says he will kill her if she doesn't shut up. Nice.

[LeekClock]

Great movie to start the ball rolling. I actually had this movie already but hadn't gotten around to seeing it until now.


RE: The question of the murders.

I see it like this: We don't know for sure whether he killed anyone or not because we are not meant to know; we're being told that this is not the point of the movie. Whether he did it or not doesn't matter. What matters is that he could do it, and the rest of the movie is an explanation of why.

The movie is not a thriller -- although it may be thrilling at times -- it's a dissection of society, with Bateman as the case-study. Bateman is the only character dealt with in any detail -- all other characters are impenetrable, two-dimensional, i.e. unimportant, not the focus of the movie.

The only characters other than Bateman that we gain a slight insight into are his colleagues, and that's only because they could just as easily be Bateman; we observe their lives through our observation of Bateman's. They inhabit the same world, dress in the same clothes, lead the same lifestyles.

The society that Bateman lives in is very limiting to him, he being someone at the very apex -- everything having been handed to him on a plate -- with nothing more to aspire to achieving except an unattainable self-image of perfection. Bateman has become an inward-looking monster, caged in this superficial society. Every person he comes into contact with only serves as a canvas onto which to project his own self-hatred and frustration. These people around him whom he kills (or fantasizes about killing) effectively become analogues of himself. Killing them is a primordial expression of his frustration with himself, and yet killing other people, he notes, is not cathartic. I think this is because no matter how many people he kills, he remains himself in life, maddened by how unfeeling he is, how out of touch with reality he has become.

From his place of detachment from reality, not even drugs can offer a thrill -- the cocaine he and his colleague are snorting in the public restroom is supposedly not good merchandise, but I think more likely is that the effect is simply not as strong as it once was.

[LeekClock]

ps. for the record I don't think we need to use spoiler tags except in the first post of these threads.

[Poltergeist]

Ahhh, I loved this movie. The whole character of Bateman to me is about disguises and masks. That's why the film opens with him applying his face mask.

I also feel it's his strongest motivation for killing; he was furious when he had the inferior buisiness card, as it meant his identity was being threatened, or was at least inferior. He also sounded pissed when he was in the other guys apartment and the prostitue said it was nicer than his other place.

Now, in the book the killings were definately in Batemans head, however, it's debatable here. Again, the main theme of the movie seems to be identity. I think Bateman may have commited the first two murders (and perhaps others), but not the big shootout or the chainsaw murder. At the end the guy says he ate lunch with the murdered guy, and that's meant to be the clincer to prove Bateman's imagining everything. However, throughout the entire movie, people are always mixing each other up, even to their faces (people make fun of Patrick right in front of him, believing him to be someone else). I think that at the end, the guy who went to London THINKS he dined with the murder victim, although he actually ate with someone else entirely.

[BootClock]

Why are they all vice president? I don't even know.

[Losperman]

Why are they all vice president? I don't even know.

My guess is that they were all given the position by people in higher positions, sort of an executive position that keeps privileged kids out of trouble. My only evidence for this, really, is a) Evelyn says to Patrick "Your father practically owns the company" when talking about why Patrick even keeps the job, and b) If I remember correctly, they also mention Price/Bryce having a very wealthy family in the book. I just apply that theory to the rest, but who knows? They may have worked hard for the positions... maybe.

[Silly Putty Clock]

They may have worked hard for the positions... maybe.

I haven't seen the movie yet, but I just wanted to say these are yuppies we're talking about.

[Poltergeist]

Why are they all vice president? I don't even know.

It adds to the feeling of comeptition between them and strengthens the theme of anonymity

[skeletal]

I don't think there can be much doubt about the fact that he didn't commit the murders. As mentioned earlier as the film reaches its climax Bateman's world begins to unravel which is illustrated when the ATM asks to be fed a cat and the police cars explode. The speed in which the police helicopters arrive on the scene alone suggests that what we are witnessing isn't reality.

When reading the book there were times when I had to stop reading because it was so overwhelming. The way Brett Easton Ellis writes is so cold and detached can be really terrifying and the Bateman's relentless documenting of what everyone is wearing is almost sickening. I found reading the book helped me fully understand the deranged mental state of Bateman when watching the film.

The only thing I disliked about the book was the music reviews, I understand they are included to further illustrate Bateman's lack of opinion and in the films the are infrequent enough to work but in the book I think there is an unnecessary amount and they disrupted the flow.