Before watching the movie:
I think I first heard about this movie about a decade ago, somewhere on the internet. I don’t really know much about it other than that Christian Bale plays a serial killer business executive and it’s somehow really popular. There was a parody of a murder scene where Huey Lewis kills Weird Al for doing a middling parody of one of his songs. It lives in my mind next to American Beauty which I don’t think is much related at all, but I expect it to be more like Fatal Attraction.
After watching the movie:
Patrick Bateman, a young vice president of a financial firm in 80s New York, goes to great lengths to be just as flashy and arrogant as his peers at the company and projects the most perfect image. He is engaged to the CEO’s daughter, even though he detests her, and is seeing a colleague’s fiancée on the side as an even more disposable relationship. And at times when the need takes him, he finds people no one will miss, homeless people and sex workers mostly, and murders them. And then one day his fellow VPs are showing off their business cards and Paul Allen’s is better than his. And then at a Christmas party, Allen mistakes Bateman for another coworker, so Bateman takes him to dinner and then to his apartment, and puts an axe through his face while explaining the brilliance of the song “Hip to Be Square”. When private investigator Donald Kimball starts looking into the disappearance of Paul Allen, Bateman’s public life and private life begin to blur as his need for violence increases, and even his ability to discern the difference between fantasy and reality begins to slip.
This movie, and the book it’s based on, apparently drew a lot of criticism for being violent. And yes, it’s violent, but I don’t think it’s very glorified. In conventional slasher movies, the audience is kind of rooting to see the slasher kill people in graphic and creative ways, but I found the violence to be particularly disturbing and uncomfortable, aside from the Paul Allen murder, which is the most discreetly presented. It has a lot of sex that’s intentionally uncomfortable as well, in a way that I don’t think anybody but the most successfully compartmentalized could enjoy.
The movie reminds me the most of Fight Club, thought I think the intent is better communicated than in that movie. Both are a reaction to toxic masculinity and its intersection with consumerism, but the Narrator has checked out of it while Bateman is giving a master performance of it. Tyler Durden is the villain but the philosophy the movie tried to show as detrimental has been carried by a lot of people who cite it as their favorite movie, while here, Bateman is the protagonist but there is also no mistaking that he’s doing evil things and needs to be stopped or reformed. We want Bateman to find some way where he can stop hiding and running, and stop swimming in bloodlust.
I don’t believe I want to see this movie again, in the way that says it was effectively done. The only thing I don’t think was as effective as it could have been is that everything from the climactic fugue to the end throws the rest into doubt and just ends up being a little confusing, where supposedly the book was trying to be unreliable all along. Denouncing it for the uncomfortable and explicit subject matter is like denouncing Huckleberry Finn for containing explicit racism. The point is that you’re supposed to object.
Yesterday's Movies 