Greetings, loved ones, and welcome back to The Friday Post here on Trauma Response. Yet another slow news week, Kanye West is going full anti-semite, and just yesterday Liz Truss announced her resignation as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (and, like, who cares?). So, instead of talking about a trending topic or a new piece of media, today I will be talking about something that absolutely no one asked for: the American Psycho movie from 2000 and the 1991 book it is based on. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book and don’t want anything spoiled then please, by all means, pause your reading now and come back once you’ve finished the two. Finally, before we begin, and I normally wouldn’t do this, American Psycho, the novel, in particular, is extremely violent and this newsletter will feature discussions about specific acts of violence from the book, so consider this a trigger warning of sorts. Let’s begin!
I first saw Mary Harron’s 2000 film American Psycho sometime, I would guess, in 2019 at my apartment in the Near West Side of Chicago. I’d heard of the movie before, film-guys and film bros and alt-Twitter-girls love to sing its praises all the time, so I thought I’d check it out. From what I can recall, I remember enjoying the film! It was a tad confusing, but there’s always Some Guy™ on Reddit that is over-enthusiastic at the idea of explaining things to confused women and gays. It was a good movie but didn’t stick with me in the way it has so many other people, pretty soon it faded from my memory.
I would consider myself a “reader,” especially now in my 20s, I enjoy laying on my couch, in the silence of my living room, and reading a good book. Several months ago, after finishing, I believe, Doomed by Chuck Palahniuk (a fine book, but just fine) I was on the hunt for a writer that was similar to Palahniuk, not so much in voice or even content, in tone and ethos. After a google search and a hop onto the Amazon-owned book review website Goodreads (a site I barely trust, I just don’t think people understand books the way I do) I was introduced to Bret Easton Ellis. I scrolled through Ellis’ bibliography and found that he had written several books, among them American Psycho, the film of which I didn’t even realize was based on a book. Not soon after, I made my way to the local bookstore (Barnes & Noble), purchased the textual basis for a film I’d already seen, sat it on my bookshelf, and worked my way down my reading list until, at last, it was American Psycho’s time to shine.
I began Ellis’ work on October 4th, 2022, and finished it on October 17th. The book American Psycho centers on Patrick Bateman, a very very wealthy Wall St. yuppie who also enjoys killing people, and very creatively, I might add, in his spare time. The book deals with themes of perfection and facades in relation to capitalism and showcases Bateman’s steep decline into near-madness despite his superficial image of material wealth and pristine image. Bateman is an obsessive personality, demonstrated in the text by his detailing of the exact fabric, designer, and fit of every outfit every character who is ever introduced is wearing ever at any time. At times, Ellis’ commitment to displaying Bateman’s obsessiveness with material, and oftentimes seemingly superfluous, details can get tedious, but, in my eyes, only adds to the image of Patrick Bateman as a lunatic. The book is extremely graphic, with what I can only estimate as 30 or more people being murdered by Bateman in the text, and that’s not even to mention his various asides alluding to even more. To water it down a tad, the book is about being crushed by the hand of capitalism, both in body and mind. By the end of the book, Bateman and the reader are left wondering if any of the events come to pass have even actually occurred. Did American Psycho even happen, or is Bateman’s mind just been warped and torn apart by the heel of the market in his quest for greed?
Not five minutes after finishing the book did I turn on the film, I wanted to see how it compared. I should’ve been tipped off at the start when I noticed the hour-and-forty-minute runtime compared to an almost 400-page book, but I was confident that I was going to be watching something similar to what I had just read. Yes, American Psycho the film has the character of Patrick Bateman, and yes, Patrick Bateman is a murderous Wall St. banker, but the care put into his image of perfection is only barely there, and the nuances of why he murders that was so important to the book are all but absent from the film. While the novel took place over three or four years, the movie feels like it takes place in a single week and is paced in such a way that it feels like they wanted to wrap up production as quickly as possible. Needless to say, I was not a huge fan of the movie.
Ellis’ Psycho is less of a narrative and more of a series of events shown through chapters that, while chronological, have no real relation to one another. As I said, the book takes place over a couple of years, so it wasn’t unusual when one chapter would end, and another would begin with “Several months later…” In the span of time in between, who knows? Maybe Bateman killed a bunch of people, or maybe he just went out to a bunch of new restaurants and cheated on his girlfriend. Sometimes he would allude to what he did, but it’s up to the reader to fill in the blanks, and with a man as hard to pin down as Bateman, anything could’ve happened. The novel almost feels disorienting and dreamlike in this approach. In the span of just a few pages, the passage of time could be just a day or several months, and oftentimes it wasn’t spoonfed specifically where in time the story takes place. It adds to Bateman’s mystique and prowess as a killer that he can get away with so many murders for such a questionable amount of time, and has you asking the question the novel really wants you to be asking, “Can I trust this?”
Because the movie is only about 100 minutes it isn’t afforded the luxury of being, well, meandering. The film can’t walk through the story like the book does in 399 pages, it has to constrain itself, but that doesn’t mean it has to run at a full sprint either. Similarly to the novel, the movie starts as if it is going to be less of a narrative and more of a sequence of vignettes, Bateman out to dinner, cut to Bateman at the club, cut to Bateman at his fiancées Christmas party. Then it stops doing that. For about 15 minutes the movie pretends to be looser about its narrative and then becomes stricter with itself and tries to tie things together. Because it can’t afford to take its time, things from the book that happen at the middle or end are brought into the movie at the beginning, kills are rearranged or cut entirely, important book characters are introduced and swiftly done away with, they need to wrap this up! Suddenly Patrick Bateman is running from the cops and into his office building, frantically calling his lawyer and admitting to a series of crimes (many of which we didn’t even get to see in the film, but we’ll get to that in a moment) and maybe 20 minutes later they wrap the movie up. As I was nearing the end of the film I thought to myself, “This can’t possibly be right, it’s almost over?” The pacing of the movie made it feel like a short film, and, while I’d normally be over the moon about a movie being under two hours, they clearly didn’t have enough time to tell the story they were trying to.
Mary Harron’s American Psycho movie was made in the year of our lord 2000, I get that. It’s also not like this was an art-house movie that could get as crazy and freaky-deeky as it wanted to, there were studios involved. It’s only natural that this movie, while rated R and still fairly bloody, is nowhere near as close to violent and gory as the book. As I said before, in the novel Patrick Bateman kills roughly about 30 people on the page and in detail. Descriptions of him sawing off body parts, cracking open people’s skulls and eating their brains, biting off their lips, and singeing off their eyelids are all in the book. Patrick Bateman is a psycho he’s the fucking American Psycho! The parts of the book where Bateman was killing people, while the most exciting parts, were also the hardest to read and, I can’t stress this enough, violently detailed and grotesque. He has moments of weakness, one or two times in the book when he spares someone’s life, he even feels twisted remorse for killing a child at the zoo (albeit because it didn’t make him “feel anything”), but he is a psychopathic crazed killer. The book can take its time detailing a plethora of individual murder scenes, but not without good reason. Bateman is a narcissist in every part of his life, and the part of his life that is a serial killer is no exception. The book details Bateman killing so many people because, hey, he can do it, he can do it well, and he won’t get caught because he thinks he’s just that great.
Onscreen, in the film, Patrick Bateman kills maybe 15 people, and that’s counting the ones he killed when he was running from the cops and was frantically shooting at. The number of actual scenes of Patrick murdering people is around three or four. The murders are few, short, and much of the actual action happens offscreen. There comes a scene where one of Bateman’s victims is trying to escape him, she’s running through the apartment they’re in and every door she opens up greets her with the corpses of Bateman’s other supposed victims. To quote my high school English teacher, “That’s called telling now showing.” The title “American Psycho” is a lot less convincing when you have to tell me he’s a psycho. As I said, I understand that this is a big-budget Hollywood movie and they just simply can’t show Patrick Bateman nailing someone’s hands to the floor and luring a starving rat up a woman’s vagina so that it can devour her from the inside (graphic, I told you!). I get that! But don’t make a movie based on a book with violence as a key aspect if you’re going to play coy and bashful about the violence!
It’s my fault, I suppose, that I watched the movie immediately after finishing the book, I take full responsibility. That’s probably the reason I had the reaction I had. There are just so many things that the movie decided to change from the book, and I didn’t find them internally coherent within the narrative, therefore I don’t think they justified their existence. Pacing and runtime and violence aside, the movie just didn’t really feel like it enjoyed being based on an existing property, the filmmakers didn’t seem to like what they were given. From small things that bugged me for no reason like changing “Tim Price” and “Paul Owens” to “Tim Brice” and “Paul Allens” (seriously, why did they even do that?), to big things like having Paul Allen’s murder take place so close to the beginning and making it the catalyst of the whole movie when it was, more or less, just another murder in the book.
A good example of what I’m talking about is Patrick Bateman’s fiancée. In the film, Evelyn, (who was just his girlfriend in the novel, another inexplicable, needless change) is introduced in an early scene, barely shows up again, and then comes back towards the end only for Bateman to dump her at a restaurant. While the breakup happened in the novel, Evelyn is a prominent supporting character with her own fleshed-out relationship with Bateman, when they break up it means something. The film uses this scene to try and do the same thing as the novel: Bateman breaking up with Evelyn shows him severing his “meaningful” connections and isolating himself as he descends further into madness. But Evelyn was barely a character in the film to begin with. Tell me she’s his fiancée all you want, tell me she is Lucifer incarnate for all I care, but if she’s barely shown up until he breaks up with her then what do I care whether she’s his fiancée or just some broad?
The movie is confused. It’s confused, and that’s probably only exacerbated by the fact that I’ve actually read the book, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. An adaptation of a novel, a good adaptation, should reward the reader by providing a new, fresh take on the material, it shouldn’t leave them asking questions of intention. Even if I hadn’t read the book, I’d like to think I’d still have these critiques because even without my book knowledge some things just don’t make sense. Telling not showing, meaningless characters, the movie doesn’t really care about themes other than the one scene where Bateman has scrawled “Die yuppie scum” on the wall in blood. I walked into the movie excited to see how they adapted a novel that I quite enjoyed, but I found it hollow, devoid of the same ideas the novel was trying to convey. Adaptations don’t have to be extremely similar to the work they’re adapting, but they should, at the very least, try to capture the spirit of the work they are adapting, and I don’t think American Psycho did that.
This… was long! Thank you to everyone who has made it through this, hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading my feelings about a 22-year-old movie and a 31-year-old novel. I hope everyone has a wonderful start to their weekend, and I’ll see you again on Sunday!