Halloween the Film Watchening Part 3: (#2) American Psycho

[xannoside]

So I had never seen American Psycho until a few days ago when I noticed it was on HBO Go, and I thought that I really run out of excuses for not seeing it as this point. I've heard it described as riveting, terrifying, surreal, and one of the best performances of Christian Bale's career.

Well...in order, sort of, no, no and yes.

Comments

[trinityvixen]

It will not surprise you, I'm sure, to know that I love this movie. I have quite the different opinion of the way the movie was shot than you, which did surprise me. I always thought the way the movie was shot/staged did an excellent job of being both mind-numing and paranoia-inducing at the same time, depending on what the shot called for, though the music (diegetic and extradiagetic selections, both) did the lion's share of the work demonstrating madness.

The thing that gets me about this movie is how fucking funny it is at the same time that it's everything abhorrent to me. It's a brilliant choice. The book is not as overt (unless you get how ridiculous all the fashion is supposed to be, which you won't, reading it thirty years after such fashions have been forgotten) in the awareness that its protagonist is a monster in a bad way. It's why I can buy a lot of the complaints people made about it glorifying violence against women. Bret Easton Ellis is definitely trying to be provocative while hiding behind "oh he's supposed to be a monster, so it's okay that I describe, in great detail, his monstrous deeds! It just shows how monstrous he is and we can hate him together!" Yeah, no.

But Mary Harron has the right of it when she has Bateman being no less disgusting but being demonstrably ridiculous, weak, and pathetic while doing it. A lot of that is helped by Bale's mania in the role. The business card scene? SINGS because you can feel the bile in his throat as he looks at Paul Allen's card. Harron's making a statement about the dick-measuring society that not only produces a monster like Bateman but excuses his behavior so long as the bodies can be cleaned up and the murder apartment on the park can be sold. And maybe, most pathetically at all, he doesn't even have the balls to do anything he fantasizes about. She skewers the culture more acridly without taking away hardly any of the actual action that Ellis wrote, and it's funny-horrible and I love it.

[xannoside]

Your description of the book makes it sound like I would just hate the book. :P

I did like the business card scene a lot, but because it was also shot more interestingly than most of the rest of the film, with the odd off-angles and the claustrophobic feel of the room.

I felt like Bale's performance was seriously hampered by how the scenes were shot. It was a lot like watching a one-man play where the stage was much too big.

[trinityvixen]

I like the book, but not as much as I like the movie. Can borrow it any time you like, if you want (which it doesn't sound like you do).

It's so funny that you think the movie hampers/hems him in when it feels like it can barely contain him to me. Like, it's running to catch up all of the time--in a good way. As he runs faster, it feels more tense.