Weekend watch: ‘American Psycho’ and the art of depicting a monster

In a fleeting shot in Jithu Madhavan’s recently released Scene, a copy of Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho can be spotted. Scene stars Suriya as a maverick cop investigating a series of murders that are being committed by Naslen’s chilling contract killer Eeswaran.

Eeswaran shares with American Psycho’s lead character Patrick Bateman a murderous indifference towards his victims as well as palpable joy in the act of killing. Otherwise, Scene bears no resemblance to American Psycho. The shot of the novel is probably as a visual joke, to encourage a hunt for parallels with it.

Ellis’s 1991 book is a masterful, unsettling study of psychosis in plain sight. Patrick Bateman is an investment banker in 1980s New York City who is addicted to his beauty routine, luxury brands and dining at the poshest restaurant in town. Bateman is also a serial killer. At least, that is what the first-person account by a highly unreliable narrator informs readers.

The book was controversial for the sickening detailing of Bateman’s treatment of his victims. Ellis was accused of being uncaringly misogynistic and also brutally satirical. Mary Harron’s screen adaptation, which she co-wrote with Guinevere Turner, picks a side – and in the process memorably subverts the book.

Harron’s 2000 film largely replaces the graphic violence in the novel with a comedy of manners about Wall Street fat cats. Christian Bale indelibly plays the narcissistic protagonist who confesses early on, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman… some kind of an abstraction.”

Although Bateman is employed in a prestigious company, he is never shown actually doing any work. Instead, he devotes his time to meaningless pursuits, such as securing a reservation at the restaurant Dorsia, comparing business cards and keeping fit. Bateman’s real feelings come out at night, when he notches up gruesome murders.

The film leaves open the question of whether Bateman is actually a serial murderer or a fantasist. The stuff that Bateman gets away with slyly points to the leeway given to the elite to behave as they please.

What is never in doubt is Bateman’s monstrosity. Bateman is so far gone in his obsession with appearances that he has lost all connection with reality.

The film’s stellar cast includes Chloe Sevigny, Justin Theroux, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas and Willem Dafoe. Reese Witherspoon plays Bateman’s fiance, who never notices how much he hates her. Christian Bale towers over the film, utterly convincing as an ice-cold yuppie who takes his disgust towards humanity to extremes.

One perspective on the movie’s comedic tone is that Mary Harron dilutes the savagery of Ellis’s novel, taking the easy way out from dealing with the violence that Ellis intended as an outcome of American capitalism in the 1980s.

Another view that is Harron is playfully challenging Ellis’s narrative by refusing to depict the gratuitous violence that occupy vast portions of the book. Handed the project after several male directors passed on it, Harron put her own stamp on a deliberately provocative book. Harron pulled the plug on the shocking material and instead invited viewers to treat Patrick Bateman’s misogyny with the contempt it deserved.

American Psycho is available on Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and Apple TV.

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