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While the 80s may have a great time in an artistic sense, with some fantastic films, music and comics being created at the time, the decade also holds cultural significance for one other thing: Greed. The rise of corporate America on an international scale, the adoption of Objectivism and the works of Ayn Rand as a business and social philosophy, and of course the God of Neocons himself, Ronnie “Trickle-down” Reagan in the White House, it was an age of Wall Street, expensive suits, and copious amounts of cocaine. A plastic world for a plastic people. Sure, nowadays you have multinational corporations destroying the environment and attempting to force us all into some kind of neofeudalist state, but there was something new and primal about it back then that just made it more noticeable than today. Like how the Ramones are awesome and Green Day are a collection of chodes.
It is this very same ‘plastic world’ that Bret Easton Ellis satirizes in his novel ‘American Psycho’ and which Mary Harron adapts for her 2000 film American Psycho. Then future Batman Christian Bale plays Patrick Bateman, a 27 y/o executive of mergers & acquisitions in some unnamed company at the heart of the swingin’ 80s. During the day, Bateman lives the life expected of the yuppie generation which he is a part of: Lunches at classy restaurants with his vapid, boorish ‘friends’, meaningless affairs and meaningless sex with women who he doesn’t love and who don’t love him, and harping on such topics as business cards and getting reservations. At night however, Bateman’s bottled-up rage and disgust at his fellow man manifests itself into remorseless acts of horrific violence, sexual depravity and pop song analysis. When Bateman ends up murdering a coworker (don’t take another man’s business card design), those night-time activities start creeping into his everyday life. Soon Patrick Bateman finds himself falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole than he ever thought possible, and that thin veneer of sanity that he maintains slowly starts to slip.
And loving every minute of it.
I will admit to having not read Easton Ellis’ novel prior to watching this, so I don’t know how well the adaptation is, but I found myself enjoying the movie more than I thought I would. Harron manages to paint 1980s New York as some sort of Brave New World style dystopia, where the people (yuppies, you might call) are completely surface level. Empathy ceases to exist, and social interaction becomes this sort of routine one does to keep up their image (or fuck, as the case may be) rather than as a means of connection with another human. A utterly nihilistic existence, and only our protagonist Patrick Bateman seems to recognize his own inhumanity, the meaningless nature of the world around. In a way, Bateman’s acts could be seen as not only as a shot against the personalities and people that Wall Street spawns, but also Bateman desperately trying to find purpose in an uncaring world. He murders not only as a catharsis for his normal life, but also to establish some sort of control over his environment, rather than be what another nameless cog in the corporate machine. By the end of the film, as Bateman starts losing control of the severity of his actions, I feel like Bateman actually wants to be caught, because it would be a reaction, some sign that what he was doing actually meant something to somebody. Which is something I think a lot of people can identify with, especially a loser with depression like me, although the vast majority of us choose much less violent ways to express that discontent. Listening to Huey Lewis & The News, for example.
American Psycho has plenty of killing and sex for those who need that in their Halloween movies. Beyond that, it looks great, the soundtrack (by John Cale, former member of the Velvet Underground) is full of that synthy pop goodness, Christian Bale’s smarmy yuppie is at just the right level of exaggeration, and it’s even a bit funny in a twisted kind of way. Good movie, though maybe a bit too cerebral and morbid for a party atmosphere. If you’re watching some movies alone this Halloween, then this is one to check out.
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