Finding myself laughing at Patrick Bateman, American Psycho's stylish, verbose murderer, I couldn't help but wonder what is wrong with us -- or me, perhaps. What makes the film worth seeing is not its acting or screenplay - both of which were pretty good, by the way - but the deep cynicism toward the eighties that runs through the film.
Like A Clockwork Orange, our protagonist starts off with a lovely
monologue that pitches us fast into the camp of people who are willing to endure
a film with him as a narrator. It's a fine line to walk: it seems like it would be
easy to overdo that early stuff, creating a character who loses the audience and
sends them running to the manager. But American Psycho pulls it
off splendidly; the director keeps us entertained enough to get to know the character
before he causes too much mayhem.
What keeps the audience from losing its allegiance for the protagonist is the wonderful way that Bateman's persona is constructed; the film shows the audience see two sides of him. First, with Shadow-like vision, we see what evil lurks in his heart. We sit in his apartment, listen to his monologues, watch him from places that no one in the digesis could. We watch him go through the motions of yuppiedom and we see that no one suspects anything, even when he cracks jokes about Ted Bundy and Ed Gene. He is the epitome of materialism, he's snooty, he's glib. In short, he's everything that we think of when we imagine young, yuppie, eighties businessmen.
More importantly, the persona he projects is not unlike that of the other people he spends time with. For instance, Bateman's girlfriend, played by Reese Witherspoon, chatters on, to his annoyance, and then doesn't listen when he speaks to her. His friends drool and duel over business cards and reservation-making abilities. In fact, the other characters Bateman spends his time with are so reprehensible that we hardly feel bad at all when he kills them. Instead, we marvel at his audacity and sheer calm in the face of his own atrocity.
The violence in American Psycho has a strange tone. It seems understated if one considers the level of gore in the average horror film. On the other hand, the shock value of the film's vicious scenes are made all the more so by the restraint the filmmakers show early on. At the same time that the film shows the slow unraveling of Bateman's veneer as he continues to satisfy his bloodlust in increasingly bloody ways, it also shows the utter ignorance that the eighties culture shows toward its own violence. Bateman is just one of an army of soulless yuppies, trapped in the materialistic world they've strived so hard for.
In the end, it's hard to say why I liked American Psycho. Perhaps it was because of its blunt and stinging critique of Reagan-era materialism in the New York scene; perhaps it was because of its clever homages to other psycho-killer movies like A Clockwork Orange (check out Bateman's sparse, white apartment at the beginning of the film) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; most likely, it was because the film seemed to accomplish what it was trying to do. In the end, I think that's the best measure of a film's quality.