411mania.com: Movies - 31 Years, 31 Screams: American Psycho

Sure, the thought of Michael Myers reigning havoc down on the small everytown of Haddonfield is a scary thought – terror from without shattering a normally idyllic setting. But what happens if the whole damned world is corrupt? What happens if the Michael Myerses of the world are created not by abnormal circumstances (or Druids, if you prefer)? What if our society had rotted so thoroughly through our own selfishness and apathy that serial killers just began to pop up due to the rampant decay?

That's the premise of Mary Harron's American Psycho, a slick adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' groundbreaking novel of the same name. Christian Bale plays Patrick Bateman, a character totally created by artifice. "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there," he tells us in voiceover.

Bale is the vice president of Pierce & Pierce, a brokerage firm. He dresses in designer clothes, gives himself morning facials, and works out regularly. In fact, he's obsessed with this fa?ade of physical perfection. Deep down, however, he's sickened by the world he sees around him – the imperfect, the poor, the wretched huddled masses.

Bateman's inner rage seems to come out in short vocal bursts of profanity and threats, but no one takes notice. His confrontational personality, Harron seems to suggest, takes place solely in his own imagination. We see him kill a rival/friend named Paul Allen (Jared Leto), and Bateman's very motivation for this act alone should give you a hint of the parody that lies beneath the slasher movie text.

Bateman sets out killing vagrants, prostitutes and other women, all while giving overblown dissertations on the genius of Phil Collins or Huey Lewis. One can read into that any number of things. It's an indictment of conservative fascism. Bateman affects the Madison Avenue culture of superiority, so he believes himself superior to all these dregs. He, therefore, believes he has the right to kill them, just as John Dahl believed he had the right to kill in Hitchcock's flawed masterpiece Rope.

But the film, like many in post-modern cinema, also attacks the intellectual elite of the left. The precepts of Modern philosophy say that research, methodology, and study should be able to solve the world's problems. As Hume and Locke postulated, as free societies began to explode across the world, the freedom to explore and learn would create a new era of peace and prosperity. That philosophy held for half a century. That was before the Holocaust where knowledge and science were used to efficiently wipe out millions of Jews. That was before the splitting of the atom, which led to the atomic bomb. Never before did mankind have the ability to wipe itself off the face of the planet. That was all before Communism and Socialism, utopian ideas of economic structure on paper, stifled and starved entire generations in Russia and Eastern Europe.

So as Communism fell and the threat of nuclear annihilation subsided, we began to realize that maybe knowledge and intellect weren't the be-all and end-all answer to our problems. Maybe part of it had to do with our lack of soul. Maybe lying on a therapist's couch twice a week was less about curing our neuroses and inadequacies and more about finding someone to blame so that we could avoid personal responsibility.

And so the whole societal landscape of America shifted. No longer did we ask ourselves who had the best policy to feed the poor. We ask if the poor even deserved to eat. We no longer sought a cure for AIDS or cancer. We ask instead if a cure is even a good idea because these diseases are such great deterrents to behavior we don't like.

All this, believe it or not, is what lies underneath the surface of American Psycho (and, in some ways, Seven and Fight Club). Our institutions can no longer be trusted, so we have no need for the Church. Our intellectual muscles have atrophied to the point where our keen analytical powers are used to dissect fluff like a Genesis album (or, say, a bunch of horror movies). So, if we've lost spirituality, and our intellect is only an artifice, then what do we really have left to offer as a society?

In many ways, Patrick Bateman, John Doe, and Tyler Durden all share a commonality. They all believe in the nihilistic view of the world, and they all want to do something so extreme that people stand up and take notice of just how shitty things have become. Durden is almost certainly a Futurist, believing that the corporations and institutions have so whittled away at our individuality and masculinity that, if they were to be cut away like a malignant tumor, society could move on and rebuild itself. Doe, a much tougher read because he exists off-screen for so much of Seven, yearns for a sort of warped Catholicism, a return to the Old Testament. But, as Somerset reads from his journal about Doe puking all over a man on the bus because the conversation was so banal, we realize that it's less about sin with John Doe and more about the loss of potential. What could Gluttony have been had he not become a shut-in from gorging himself? Could Pride have used her charisma as a leader instead of worrying about her physical appearance? As for Patrick Bateman…well, Bateman's just fucking nuts.

Mostly, the film acts as a condemnation of the 1980s in America, an era when you killed or got killed. The rise of the corporate model in the 1980s meant that you either had to screw someone or screw over someone to get to the top. Ethics no longer mattered. "Whoever has the most toys at the end wins," the bumper sticker reads.

In the world of Patrick Bateman, it doesn't matter how you get there so long as you look good doing it.

The 411: An unsung film, mostly because it's only taken at face value by critics who only see violence, sex, and degradation as exploitation. Harron stays somewhat true to Ellis' novel while focusing on the social criticisms rather than Bateman's disturbing acts. The result is a film that deserves to be considered a classic. A

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