Raymond Luxury Yacht, on 22 October 2015 - 07:14 PM, said:
I finally got around to watching American psycho and was let down. I feel like I missed something, i was always under the impression that this was a really good movie. I felt it was just barely good enough to finish.
The dialogue was overwritten, the characters were caricatures, the plot underwhelming and the ambiguous ending was annoying rather than thought provoking. Is this movie overrated or did I just not get it?
If you look at it through the lens of "It's ALL in his head"...it makes for a much better film IMHO. If you actually go through it assuming that this corporate yuppie is a psychopath serial killer as it's painted, it's pretty boring and normal.
For my money, it's MUCH better if it's a Corporate yuppie who has had a psychotic break with reality due to the nature of his job and its people and literally IMAGINES all the shit that goes down in the film:
Cribbed from an article about it at The Dissolve from years ago.
American Psycho has a tone of heightened, satirical, not-particularly-real reality that makes it difficult to take anything onscreen seriously. Businessmen who socialize with each other all the time can’t tell each other apart. Bateman frequently tells people he’s a murderer, and they never seem to hear him. Statements like, “I like to dissect girls. Did you know I’m utterly insane?” elicit a chuckle or a blasé response. When he hacks up his associate Paul Allen, stuffs the man’s corpse into an overnight bag, and drags it out of his apartment building, leaving a thick trail of blood all the way through the lobby, the security guard doesn’t notice. An acquaintance who sees him bundling it into a taxi only expresses interest in the particular brand of the overnight bag.
As the film progresses, its grasp on reality becomes even more tenuous. A chainsaw dropped several stories down a stairwell happens to land perfectly on a fleeing victim, killing her. An ATM orders Bateman to feed it a stray cat. Bateman shoots at a police car, and it promptly explodes; in that moment, even he looks disbelievingly at his gun. These all seem like the daydreams of an increasingly disturbed man, one who isn’t even bothering to fit his fantasies into the real world anymore. And by the end, circumstances around Bateman are implying even more heavily that none of what he remembers doing to his enemies ever actually happened: His lawyer claims he just had lunch with Paul Allen, the man Bateman axe-murdered and stuffed into that swanky Jean Paul Gaultier overnight bag weeks ago. The additional bodies and destruction Bateman left at Paul’s apartment disappear, as if by magic. Although he remembers blowing up that police car, there’s no manhunt on for him. Even Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), the dogged detective with a seemingly supernatural ability to home in on Bateman’s favorite murder-music, loses the thread of pursuit. There’s nothing to tie any of this to reality: No lasting effects, no consequences, and no witnesses, apart from Bateman’s secretary Jean (Chloë Sevigny) finding his notebook full of scrawled obscenities and grotesquely graphic doodles. The film ends with Bateman zoned out and detached among his tedious friends, with the camera slowly, meaningfully zooming in on his eyes, as if trying to get behind them, back into the space where all the insanity is occurring. And yet…
...and the door behind him on that last shot reads "This is not an exit"...
This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 22 October 2015 - 08:02 PM
"When the last tree has fallen, and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money, oh no." ~Aurora
“Someone will always try to sell you despair, just so they don't feel alone.” ~Ursula Vernon