Seth Lamey
“Greed is good” claims tycoon Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street. Hollywood would reflect on this concept years later with more Wall Street-set satirical films with Martin Scorsese‘s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street and Adam McKay‘s 2015’s The Big Short. They feature egomaniacal male protagonists playing in their proverbial sandboxes, swaying millions of dollars in the name of capitalist “business” and whatever debauchery comes along with it. There is one film celebrating its 25th anniversary that is the connective tissue between these three films, and it is Mary Herron’s adaptation American Psycho from the Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name. The film combined the nature of black comedy in the form of satirization of the 1980s pop culture and glut of consumerism with nods to slasher horror movies that came before it. The shining star of American Psycho is Christian Bale, whose sharp and measured performance as Patrick Bateman helped earn the film cult status. Bale’s breakout role set him up for one of the best acting runs of the new century.
The film centers around Patrick Bateman and his life as an investment banker during late 1980s working on Wall Street in New York City. His name already invokes Norman Bates, the killer from Hitchcock’s infamous 1960s horror/thriller Psycho. From the opening scene, Bateman narrates his cold and calculated life. He has a strict workout, diet, and beauty routine which feeds his inner vanity to enter the world of high end business at his firm “Pierce & Pierce.” His high-end apartment is sparkling clean, and he does sit-ups while 1970s slasher The Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays on the TV. Patrick’s lust for killing at night intertwines his banal conversations with co-workers as they try to one-up each other’s posh yuppie lifestyle. His urge to murder spills over to the homeless, escorts, and soon even his own co-workers.
Director Mary Herron nearly missed out on the chance to direct the film as her follow-up to I Shot Andy Warhol, with Lionsgate set on Oliver Stone to direct and Leonardo DiCaprio to star. After DiCaprio’s price went up from his post-Titanic fame, Stone left the project and Herron took the project once more. Although the studio didn’t see it with Christian Bale, she insisted he get the part and he signed on. Bale gained some fame for his teenage performance in Steven Spielberg’s 1987 drama Empire of the Sun, but his run in the 1990s hadn’t created a full breakout quite yet. The Method actor stayed in character on set with a balance of intense and comedic bursts that were seen as confusing to some of his co-stars. The performance transcends on screen, however. Christian’s good looks and charm give Patrick Bateman the two-faced virility he needs to live a double life on screen.
Herron and co-writer Guinevere Turner (who also acts in the film as Elizabeth) brought a feminist touch to the screenplay, satirizing the 1980s with attitudes egos and behavior towards women. Bateman is portrayed as a serial adulterer, juggling between his own girlfriend and the girlfriends of his co-workers. He also belittles escorts by dangling money and high-priced material possessions to them before sex and sometimes often killing them after. The character’s uncomfortable homophobia slips out when Luis (Matt Ross) accidentally takes his strangle attempt as a gay “pass.” In often humorous fashion, Bateman gives long monologues about 1980s pop music and what it means to him upon reflection.
Herron and Turner tone down some of the violence from the novel, but leave enough gruesome details in Bateman’s murders to cause shudders. Bateman killing his co-worker Paul Allen (Jared Leto) while pontificating about Huey Lewis and the News is a highlight of the film. They echo this scene of spoken rhetoric again when Bateman has a threesome with two escorts while the Phil Collins and Genesis hit “Sussudio” plays diegetically in the room. Bateman comedically basks in his narcissism as the camera fixates on his admiration of his own body in the mirror, flexing his muscles and posing.
Futhermore, American Psycho‘s satirization of toxic masculinity extends, not just in the overt aggression of Bateman’s dark nights, but also manifests in his day-to-day life. While showing Wall Street big wigs barely doing any tasks at work besides watching TV and fighting for lunch or dinner reservations, they also show the petty competition that drives Bateman up a wall. While in a briefing room before a meeting, he meticulously sizes up the appearance or McDermott, Bryce, and soon to be next victim Paul Allen. The comparing of business cards is shot with extreme sincerity from Bateman’s point of view, as he sweats profusely over the fact that Allen’s card has feature his does not. “It even has a watermark…” Bateman exclaims. Around lunch and dinner tables, the business men make off-color misogynist comments, brag about reservations at high-end restaurants, and Bateman even makes a couple Donald Trump remarks.
The third act of American Psycho executes the paranoid collapse of its unreliable narrator, as he desperately tries to avoid not only the guilt of his actions but responsibility for them entirely. Bale does a great job switching between charming, menacing, and vulnerable. His final monologue in Paul Allen’s apartment confessing his crimes to his lawyer over the phone showcases the acting range that would lead him to one of the strongest careers of his generation of actors.
This performance, without question, inspired Christopher Nolan to cast him as Bruce Wayne/Batman in his Dark Knight trilogy. Bale’s range to pull off the duality of a suave Bruce Wayne and intensity Batman was all seen in American Psycho. Bale would also attract work with other auteur film makers like David O. Russell, where he would give an Oscar-winning performance in the 2010 sports-drama The Fighter. His Method acting devotion has seen him go gaunt and frail in The Machinist, strong and muscle bound in American Psycho and Batman Begins, to overweight and disguised in Vice. Few actors in the last 25 years have commanded the respect for the devotion to their craft like Christian Bale.
Beyond Bale’s breakout performance, there are other notable casting choices and careers that have come out of American Psycho. Future Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Jared Leto also give admirable performances that would keep their career trajectories ascending towards their statuette victories in 2005 and 2013, respectively. Character actors Willem Dafoe and Chole Sevigny use solid performances in their small roles to continue on to respected acting careers in the 21st century as well. After gaining traction as an independent director with her 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol, Mary Herron released American Psycho in 2000 and it became her biggest hit. She has since worked in TV without much success as a big screen filmmaker.
During its initial release, the film gained modest praise from critics but was hit was a dismal “D” score by audiences on CinemaScore. To those who appreciated American Psycho, the satire, the horror/comedy balance in the screenplay, and Bales’s dynamic performance were seen as the strengths, which still stand today. The inclusion of 1980s hairstyles, clothing, and pop music references such as Genesis, Robert Palmer, Huey Lewis and the News, The Cure, and David Bowie give the film the feel and tone it needs to be appropriately dated. Bateman’s quotes and antics have grown the film towards a cult status especially during the social media era of the 2010s and beyond. “I’ve got to return some video tapes,” “I’m in murders and executions,” “Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?” These lines have all become staples of millennial meme culture as well as the dark satire in American Psycho.
Patrick Bateman doing sit-ups to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while later chasing a screaming escort naked with a chainsaw is so absurd that its dark nature could not be misunderstood. However, like any satire, some of the wrong groups have taken the film’s messages the wrong way. Some sections of the culture and internet see Patrick Bateman as a “sigma male” ideal. Mary Herron, Guinevere Turner, and Christian Bale are clearly presenting the Bateman character as someone not to aspire to be. Moreover, Patrick Bateman may be the purest example of dark American psychopathy hiding behind the face of greed, capitalism, and toxic masculinity seen in the last 30 years in film making. The amount of horror one male protagonist businessman could unleash internally or externally makes American Psycho a sharp execution of said tenets.
