Based on Books - "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis

Ever since I (re)watched American Psycho (2000, directed by Mary Harron) last week as the feature film at the Final Girls Berlin Halloween showing, I feel a little bit obsessed with this picture. The first time I saw it must have been fifteen or even twenty years ago and I felt so in awe with the gore and horror back then that I had completely failed to see this film for what it really is - a brilliant and monumental satire.

I went home on Halloween night and still couldn't get this movie out of my head - the audience's giggles, the creeping and growing insanity, and Christian Bale fully owning the iconic personage Patrick Bateman...

I was so possessed by the specter of this picture that I spend my spare time in the past week reading the book, written by Bret Easton Ellis (BEE). And what can I say? If you thought the movie is striking and intense, wait until you've read the book. It will defy and tear down all expectations and conventions with absolute depravity, its hysteria will rub off on you and you'll find yourself dumbly giggling at the mere thought of Bateman. This book is excess, it is incredulity.

I assume that you, the reader, at least have watched the film since there will be spoilers here and you may not want to read this post if you haven't seen or read American Psycho at all. On the other hand, if you watched the film but haven't read the book, there are still minor spoilers since the film is a toned down version of BEE's text, and despite it wrapping up the idea of the story nicely, the book does much more in terms of testing your limits - and this is something I love in fiction. A detailed comparison follows below.

I don't think I can really review the story. I don't even think anyone properly can, as it would require a full PhD thesis to analyze what's going on here. So, I'll simply concentrate on some points that caught my attention so fresh after having been exposed to both the cinematic as well as the literary work, and hopefully encourage you to visit or re-visit this remarkable work in whatever format you like.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

On surface level we follow Patrick Bateman - a yuppie in 80's New York City, a handsome, fit, stylish broker at Wall Street, one of those mythic beings belonging to the top one percent, wearing designer clothes, dining in the best restaurants, dating the prettiest blond girls... He is characterized by arrogance, intelligence, social envy, and brands which are of almost totemic importance to him. But it's all surface. Patrick has a void inside him, a black hole which wants to devour all. He does everything to a fault to fit in, and that's his life's purpose, but inside he is dead. Or so he thinks, because what shimmers every now and then through his seemingly perfect life routines is very much living, but it wants to kill. Below the surface we follow Patrick Bateman - serial killer.

He is not an ordinary serial killer though, if I may phrase it so. As controlled, clocked and superficially perfect his life is on the day, as unhinged, barbaric, cruel and petrifying he is at night. Interestingly, his manners and endeavors which are highly sarcastic, bored, clever, exaggerated make for an amusing read in his everyday life, but they turn blood-curdling when he pursues his "hobby".

The contradictory inner life of Pat Bateman is the first point of divergence between the source material and the film adaptation; while the book lays bare all Bateman's very ugly thoughts and inner life, the film rather relies on acting. It is the book's basic goal to show the nasty that reigns inside Bateman while his outside is beautiful, polished and garnished.

I guess this would also be the right time to give out a warning, if you weren't already aware, which can easily happen among the current hype surrounding this main character: Yes, Bateman is a comedic figure with his extreme sarcasm and his extreme endeavors, but he's also a racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, islamophobic, hinduphobic, animal torturing, arrogant asshole. And the book shows how easily the line can shift between humorous and horrendous. As the title says, we're following a psycho.

It is important to highlight this, not because I'm so woke and feel offended by it, if anything I read this to be offended, lol, but because the film does not stress this point enough, if not hides it. I'm not meaning to criticize here, because this is where the actor Christian Bale's genius enters the game. While the book is swamped with insults and disdain, in the movie we only ever see Bale's charming, shining facade which only crumbles at moments of utmost pressure to show the nasty underneath - like the bar scene where he smiles beaming at the bartender who berates him the coupons he wants to pay with aren't valid anymore and he needs to pay cash, and as soon as she turns her back his face taking a 180 degree turn into psycho mode telling her he will kill her. I get goosebumps! Further into the movie he will gradually lose more often control until finally turning completely unhinged.

As mentioned above, the book, on the other hand, is absolutely transparent about Pat and you have long tirades of insults and profanities flying around, especially during the over the top brutality and the borderline pornographic sex scenes involving over the top non-consensual brutality. It is definitely more difficult to sympathize with the written Bateman than with Bateman played by Bale.

I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.

But Pat's duality and the representation thereof aren't the only aspects which make American Psycho a jarring read.

A Goodreads friend of mine understandably couldn't keep up and gave up reading the book because he couldn't take the flood, the outright bombardment with brand names, skin regiments and band reviews, which he found ridiculous, but watched the movie without problems.

Well at least Bateman is a thorough guy, I guess? The clinical, monotonous, arrogant and know-it-all language he uses to describe his morning routine is the same language used for the atrocious murders like the one during which he unleashes a famished rat into a woman's vagina and lets it eat its way into the poor girl. Disturbingly, when applied to his more normal interests, his love for pop music, or the extraordinary care he gives his body and face in order to better fit in and that he has perfected to a fault, this thoroughness and accuracy is rather... endearing? You can't deny he's intelligent. Evil, yes, but also undeniably intelligent too.

I like a person who takes their passion seriously and I especially like a person who takes music seriously. And although I have my personal preferences and feel rather connected with people who share those preferences with me, it doesn't matter to me what genre people listen to. Pat loves and respects pop music. But even here BEE manages to leak in his delicious satire in the shape of long review-like passages in which Bateman exaggeratedly gushes about Genesis or Whitney Houston or any other band he appreciates in the most flowery language, which, in parts don't make sense and are empty underneath - just like he himself. Just look at this sentence from the excerpt on Whitney Houston; "The dance single 'How Will I Know', my vote for the best dance song of the 1980s, is a joyous ode to a girl's nervousness about whether or not a guy is interested in her." The music passages are full of pompous sentences like this with little to no substance underneath. But who am I to judge? Maybe my book reviews sound equally absurd and silly to readers...

While we're discussing music - at the risk of contradicting myself when I implied all music is equally important, I will now let you in on the open secret of how much I dislike U2 and can't stand Bono. So it was a moment I burst out laughing when the greatest of American psychopaths claimed to receive a hidden message from the alleged human rights activist during one of his concerts and ups his violence from that point on.

Anyway, the same obsessive attention Bateman gives to music is unsurprisingly also brought to a certain Donald Trump, who seems to be the object of admiration and envy of his whole entourage, and, of course... to business cards.

Finally, it is impossible for me to finish my thoughts without mentioning the business card scene in which Bateman and two of his colleagues get into a pissing contest over the "best" business card, ending in devastation for poor Pat. This scene is one of my favorites in maybe all cinema history, a scene which perfectly sums up the absurdity of the state of Bateman and his likes - envious, frustrated, shallow, materialistic. I could watch this scene over and over.

My final verdict: Even though the book blew me away, I feel like I prefer the movie. I like the subtlety it offers when compared with the book and Christian Bale's was just a firework of an acting performance. Plus the business card scene was honestly hilarious in the movie, but not so much in the book. So my personal preference goes for Mary Harron's film adaptation!