The Cathode Ray Mission: American Psycho

There’s something incredibly rewarding about seeing a movie that is both so reflective of its time while also seeming to convey the time that is yet to come, expressing an understanding of a system of symbols and beliefs that are more or less stable in the face of everything outside of wholesale revolution. Videodrome by David Cronenberg is, to my mind, the best example of this kind of effect, and in fact its potency seems to grow in strength with every year that passes and technology and media continues to monopolize how we interact with the world; but I haven’t seen Videodrome recently, so I’m not writing about it, although it’s almost certainly going to fill these proverbial pages in the future. No, I want to think about American Psycho today, which I feel is another film that, in spite of the specific importance of its historical context, only seems to grow more crystalline in its meaning as time goes by.

Before I get fully in the weeds, I want to give a brief lament for director Mary Harron’s career, which is not to say that it’s bad or subpar by any means, but on display in American Psycho is such a filmmaking intelligence and such a sharp sense of storytelling that I can’t help but wish that she was given the keys to more medium-to-big budget films in the twenty years since, and I struggle to find reason behind the thought processes that would deny that alternate history, beyond the obvious ailment that has shunted so many talented women filmmakers out of the spotlight known as institutional sexism. Of course, this is selfish wishing on my part; for all I know she was offered those projects and chose to do her own thing instead, which is totally valid, but it can’t stop me from imagining what the past twenty years of films would look like instead.

So, with that said, American Psycho. Based on a book by Bret Easton Ellis that I have not read, it’s about some yuppie scum known provisionally as Patrick Bateman, played by Christian Bale in what can only be described as one of the most iconic film performances I’ve ever seen. Patrick doesn’t really do a whole lot in his high-rise corner office besides listen to pop music, doodle in his journal, and make dinner reservations. He does a little more outside of the office, but only a little: he goes to dinner, he works out and performs an exhaustive skincare routine everyday, he does a ton of drugs with his “friends” at nightclubs. He also has a compulsion that he feeds, consisting of murdering the women that he has sex with.

To start, then, is a question at the very heart of the whole story: who is Patrick Bateman? This question isn’t purely an existential exercise, as it does have literal implications. Patrick is constantly misrecognized by the people around him, and rather than correct the record, he glides easily from name-to-name to accommodate those misrecognitions. One of the natural questions this activity raises is about the truth of his apparent real identity. Is ‘Patrick Bateman’ someone else’s name that he has adopted to move through the higher rungs of the social ladder? He tells us himself in one of several brilliant narrated monologues that “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory.” There’s no real way to confirm or deny this speculation, but while pursuing the answer may lead down intriguing pathways, the real truth of it is that ‘Patrick Bateman’ could refer to anyone, just like ‘Paul Allen,’ ‘Timothy Bryce,’ and ‘Luis Carruthers’ could refer to anyone. I find the role that names play in this film so fascinating. All of the slippages they take, the completely conditional role that identity takes, but simultaneously the importance that they’re bestowed. In the world of the film, who you know is more important than who you are; who you know may not be who you actually know, but it’s the names that count, the names are what can get you reservations to Dorsia and the better drugs. Patrick knows this better than anyone in the film; he’s obsessed with the surfaces around him, including his own, and he knows that it’s the surfaces that are valuable here.

The superficiality of everything in the film feels like it could fall into a rote or toothless critique of contemporary society, some sentiment repeated in boomer memes ad nauseam about how ridiculous the Kardashians are and that people online are fake. No shit people online are fake; I’m not logging on for my health, logging on is a performance that I compulsively take part in, and I like watching other people do the same. American Psycho sidesteps the critique that superficiality is something to bemoan and reject, and instead gets at some terrifying sort of truth, that yes, these immensely wealthy and powerful people have nothing substantive beyond the surface, there’s nothing behind the eyes, but that fact is actually a further entrenchment of their power. They’re all empty suits, and that’s exactly what they need to be. If there is nothing actually characteristic about Patrick Bateman or Paul Allen, nothing identifiably human or comprehensible about them or their actions (why does Patrick even have his bloodlust to begin with? we never find out, to which I say, good), then how do you ever appeal to them, how do you ever disrupt the control that they have? We’re at a point where we aren’t dealing with ‘people’ in the normal sense, but instead symbols, names and suits and business cards that act as stand-ins for humanity and that are not simply killed, but continually reinscribed onto other subjects, just waiting in the wings, the Luis Carruthers of the world. Paul Allen may be dead and dissolving in Hell’s Kitchen, but there are other ‘Paul Allen’ surrogates out there, ready and waiting to plug the gap he left in the machine.

Patrick may be a homicidal maniac, immeasurably cruel in his misogyny, greed, and lack of empathy, but he is also ironically the most human person of his stature that we see, due in no small part to the fact that he is deeply troubled by his own superficiality. The life he leads is taking its toll on his psyche, and by the last act of the film, he has come around fully to that most human of emotions: guilt. He calls his lawyer and tells him that he’s a mass murderer, talks about all of the vile things that he’s done, in some manic resemblance of a confession. In his monologue that closes the film, he expresses the desires that he had with this action, the catharsis he wanted to feel at actually experiencing consequences and the inscription of meaning onto his life. But it never comes. Instead, it’s back to business as usual. Good joke Patrick, I talked to Paul Allen in London. The cycle continues unbroken.

There’s a lot to be said for how this superficiality manifests itself not even just textually, but visually. Patrick’s apartment is frequently returned to, and seems to be the ultimate embodiment of modernist, minimalist interior design, all open spaces, no color, stainless steel appliances, and defined by its price tag and view more than anything inside. The famous and excellent business card scene has assuredly been scrutinized to death, but the joke of it, the entire premise of the scene, is that the characters are all jockeying for status with their business cards that are visually near-identical to one another. Patrick himself is possibly the object of most interest to the camera. He’s framed visually in a way unlike almost any horror movie monster I can think of, and even of most male protagonists outside of the horror movie purview, with great attention being given to his undressed body and the processes that are helpfully detailed in how he achieved his physical state. Patrick is just as enamored with his body as anyone else, and for good reason, he’s insanely hot. Even in the scene where he has sex with two sex workers, his focus is not on his participation in the act, or his partners, but on the the reflection of himself in the mirror, posing and flexing like some parody of a porn star, complete with camera setup. On the topic of the male gaze in film and its alternatives, I think it’s reductive to say that it can be subverted simply by swapping out who gets to be objectified. Taking male actors and presenting them in ways that are formally similar to the ways in which female actors are historically presented, for as interesting as that could potentially be, would seem to be an insufficient reimagining, but understandably so, due to how deeply ingrained male dominance is in any sort of artistic or technical craft, filmmaking included; it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, etc. With that said, though, what Harron and co. do in manipulating the status of her film’s men, particularly Patrick, in relation to the camera and the audience is fascinating stuff, and I think could prove to be a well of serious critical inquiry on both the female and queer gaze in film, if it isn’t already.

With a film like this, and a character like Patrick Bateman, one of the prime traps to fall into would be in extending too much sympathy to Patrick. ‘He’s a victim too!’ would be a grossly flat and meaningless message to impart, especially when weighing his existential concerns alongside the actual, real harm that he has done to innocent people and will probably continue to do. So all credit then goes to Bale, Harron, and co-writer Guinevere Turner for not taking this route. The film manages to walk a very fine line, condemning both the character and the environment that creates the character, letting neither off the hook. The most sympathy-inducing scene I would point to is one in which Patrick calls to make reservations at Dorsia and is chillingly laughed at on the phone, but otherwise, Bale projects such a slimy, vile, sociopathic veneer that it’s hard to not feel immediately repelled by his character. His monologues are so cold and devoid of any sort of emotion that, for as riveting as they are, stir nothing but unease. Even in his confession, his panicked rambling is interrupted by maniacal bursts of laughter. He is a monster that attempts to atone for his monstrosity, but in his failure to do so, he continues on nonetheless, even more complicit in his own violence and the violence of his environment.

On the point of monstrosity, though, I think it’s worthwhile to ask if Patrick is even a monster. This is an argument of definitions being placed against one another and choosing which one we like best, but for some common ground we can ask ourselves what are the fundamental traits of something that we deem monstrous? Violence and fear are some common effects of a monster, but even those are representative. What kind of violence is sanctioned, and what kind is monstrous? It would seem that murder is a monstrous act because it is deemed an unacceptable action by society, until it isn’t, and then it’s okay; a serial killer terrorizing and murdering a family is awful, but to a lot of people, a police officer or soldier killing people is justifiable or even laudable. To call Jeffrey Dahmer a monster is accepted parlance, and to not call him one would inspire raised eyebrows and sideyes; to call a cop or a soldier a monster is a political statement that will almost certainly bring uninvited objections into your replies. This all to say that monstrosity, much like normality, is a socially-determined definition, dependent on external factors. What American Psycho ends with, and what makes the film deeply disturbing, is the revelation that the violence that Patrick commits, for as terrible as it is, is sanctioned. He will not receive punishment for murdering a homeless man, murdering sex workers, murdering Paul Allen, because none of those acts are objectionable to the society he lives in, nobody even notices that they’re gone. The former two victims are in a state of such marginalization that they basically don’t exist, and Paul Allen as I’ve gone over above is more symbolic than anything. So if the people Patrick is killing aren’t really thought of as people, if they, like Patrick, can hide their cold gazes, and you can shake their hands and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense your lifestyles are probably comparable, but they do not exist, then what punishment is there to even give to Patrick? For fear of sounding very “we live in a society” right now, it’s Patrick’s environment, similar as it is to reality, that is truly monstrous, an environment that atomizes people to the point of their actual lives meaning nothing more than what their surface details would indicate. Patrick is an actor in that environment, and while an unusually extreme one at that, he is not breaking any rules set out for him; there are no more barriers to cross, because there never were any to begin with. Try as he might, he is not a monster, and never will be, only another face in the crowd, interchangeable as all the rest.