Watched on Blu-Ray

Schocktober 2024 #29

The world into which "American Psycho" transports us is a world that has been planned down to the last detail: the sequence of the training programme. The course of the care programme. The course of the sex life. Nothing is left to chance. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) attaches great importance to control and controllability. The wealthy investment banker only loses his cool when he is unexpectedly outdone - for example, when one of his groomed colleagues holds a business card under his nose which, unlike his own, even has a watermark. The fact that this Patrick Bateman, of all people, who made his first appearance in Bret Easton Ellis' novel of the same name, has matured into a popular culture icon could, at first glance, be declared an alarming transfiguration. After all, the man is everything but adorable.

Patrick Bateman is one thing above all: never really present. Don't get me wrong, his physical presence is truly incisive, not least thanks to the formidable performance by Christian Bale, who is in absolute top form under the direction of Mary Harron. However, Patrick Bateman must be seen more as an entity; as something illusory. He resembles a bitter principle in which no clearly identifiable emotion is depicted, apart from greed and loathing. And so the figure of Patrick Bateman is naturally also to be understood as a figurative commentary on the morally starved field of activity on Wall Street. The people here endeavour to achieve a life of all-encompassing perfection, but have de facto never learned how to live at all. It goes without saying, however, that "American Psycho" is not interested in subjecting Patrick Bateman to a horizon-expanding learning process.

Instead, "American Psycho" sees itself as a single, never-ending and self-serving surface stimulus, in which status symbols and thus also oneself are constantly on display. "American Psycho" is a bilious stocktaking of the present and an analysis of the prevailing social value system. And of course Patrick Bateman offers himself as an excellent test track in the course of this, because he reveals himself as such an extreme and garish figure that his true personality completely disappears behind all the profile neuroses. Or also: that the idea arises that Patrick Bateman has no personality at all, but only exists as a human shell that is filled to the brim with perversion, cynicism and fetishism. And this also needs to be addressed once again: The way Christian Bale plays out the epitome of the you are what you own mentality is simply outstanding.
In a world in which conformity and availability dominate everything, Patrick Bateman's murderous urges seem to reflect the last possibility of counteracting precisely this fixed, self-enforced regularity. American Psycho" does not answer the question of where the madness that Bateman smugly lets out in bestial excesses of violence comes from. Instead, the film undermines our claim that we have to psychologise everything in order to decipher it, make it tangible and process it in the next step. That's exactly what "American Psycho" doesn't want to do. Strictly speaking, everything it tells works without any background. It's all about taking the mask of sanity ad absurdum. And these millionaire yuppie arseholes, who have never achieved anything in their lives, are simply perfect for this. Hurray for nihilism! Cheers to materialism! Cheers to everything that is sick and to the indifference that drills shafts into your guts with an insistent coldness.