Empire List #435: American Psycho

Five years before he donned a cape and played Batman, Christian Bale played a truly monstrous man in “American Psycho.” His Patrick Bateman is a vane, arrogant, misogynist Wall Street trader who loves to stare at himself while having sex with two prostitutes in his rich Manhattan penthouse. He values money above all else, dresses well, works out obsessively and uses more skin care products than some Hollywood actresses. Oh, and he occasionally kills people with axes, knives and chainsaws. As if working on Wall Street wasn’t bad enough.

The violence and depravity in this movie is legendary. Based on a 1991 novel by Brett Easton Ellis, the adaptation attracted the likes of David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone as directors and Leonardo DiCaprio as Bateman. Fortunately, the task of filming and performing the scenes of sex and violence fell upon the shoulders of Marie Harron (“I Shot Andy Warhol”) and Christian Bale. The result was a cult movie whose violent scenes were both brutal and somewhat comical.

This is not just my opinion. Back in College in Quebec City of few of my classmates would YouTube the scene where Bateman hacks Paul Allen (Jared Leto) to death with an axe to the sound of Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square.” Shocking the first time you see it, but they thought it was hilarious. A few years later I got in on the joke while living off-campus near the University of Sherbrooke. If it’s October and we’re only a few days away from Halloween, why not rent a movie filled with blood, depravity, naked women and Christian Bale running with a chainsaw?

Set in the 1980s, at a time when Wall Street was running unchecked and brokers thought they were masters of the universe (déjà fucking vu) Patrick Bateman barely stands out amongst the other coke-addled millionaires. A great scene defines how these men view each other when they compare their business cards during a boardroom meeting. Whoever has the most expensive card with the best ink wins (i.e. has the bigger dick).

Yet Bateman is clearly more unhinged than anyone in the boardroom. An early montage shows him exercising religiously while delivering a monologue about his diet and beauty regiment. Like a carefully oiled machine he plans everything in his day, including murder. When he kills Paul Allen, the winner of the better card contest, he has clearly thought this out. He has him sit on a couch surrounded by newspapers while he puts on a raincoat and enthusiastically talks about his love of Huey Lewis.

This guy was Dexter Morgan before “Dexter” became a TV show. Except unlike Dexter, we never really learn Bateman’s motivations. Just why does he randomly kill a homeless man in a dark alley? Was he jealous of Paul Allen’s success so he just had to hack him to death? Has sex become so dull to him that he needs to kill prostitutes in order to feel anything?

A scene in which an ATM asks him to feed it a live cat suggests he just might be crazy, plain and simple. But I don’t believe “American Psycho” is just about a psychopath. Otherwise Bateman would be just another murderer living in some motel hacking tourists.

The movie is about the excess that comes with money. Bateman and his friends define themselves by who can access the most expensive restaurant in the city, who has the biggest apartment and of course who has the most money in the bank. It’s all about them and to hell with the rest of the world.

Bateman’s murders are the just satirical exaggerations. It would be pretty shocking to find a Wall Street with corpses in his closet like Bateman, but it wouldn’t be surprising to find one with the same lifestyle.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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