can someone explain the end of american psycho ? i’ve seen it a couple times and still can’t really understand the ending, thanks.
Well I always saw it as two endings.
SPOILER ALERT!
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1: Bateman truly was crazy, and imagined the entire thing.
2: Bateman truly was crazy, and killed all those people.
If you really want to screw with your brain, try reading the book. It screwed me up for weeks afterwards. The movie is tame by comparison.
How did the novel American Psycho become ‘respectable’?
I remember when it came out, there was a huge outcry about its supposed misogynism. A writer I know said he wanted to read it to see what the fuss was about, but was patiently waiting for it at the library, so as to not contribute any money to the odious endeavor.
When I heard they were making a movie of AS, I thought, “Oh boy, here comes trouble”. But nary a peep.
What happened?
If memory serves, the claim was that AS was (in addition to misogynistic) shamelessly exploitive.
I personally never saw how AS was more misogynistic than, say, Silence of the Lambs. Admittedly, I think SOTL was really good, while I would rate AS as mediocre (I have not read AS the book, but I did see the movie – was the book somehow more objectionable?)
Apologies for hijack.
Wasn’t the movie was directed by a woman, who defended the misogynistic themes as a true part of the male characters? As for the book, I figured the complaints fell to the wayside when people realized that Ellis is not woman hating writer. Rather, a few of the characters in his books are woman haters, some brutal.
Per the OP, IMHO Bateman did kill the people. The 80’s New York he lives in the epitome of the yuppie generation. Everyone is incredibly self absorbed, lusting for power and money, following their scant few role models (like Donald Trump), current fashion magazines, and trendy music. They have all turned into carbon copies of each other, with minor examples of one-ups-man-ship, and they constantly confuse the identities of characters with other characters.
Bateman is the worst of the lot. He is a pure product of his surroundings. He says “There is no Patrick Bateman,” just an person who is a conglamoration of his peers, a pure psycho who lacks any emotions besides greed, contempt and anger.
He wears in incredible disguise. His own lawyer doesn’t even recognize him. He blends in perfectly with the right girls, the right clothes, the right apartment, the right job etc. He looks fit and handsome, and has enough money to act as a social lubricant when someone is starting to see through him, as in the second time he picks up the prostitute.
He gets away with his crimes because he’s just another yuppie to everyone who sees him, and when they try to ID him, people confuse him with someone else, they also confuse his victims with someone else. But I always thought mainly they choose to not pay attention to him because of the self absorbed nature of the times.
Bateman never gets caught, the only lesson he learns is by being a little more careful, he will be able to kill with impunity (he makes a cameo in Glamorama some years later wearing a possibly blood splattered suit).
People, people, people. Bateman didn’t kill anybody, and here’s the one thing in the movie (I haven’t read the book) that shows this fact the best: right before he goes on the killing spree at the end, the ATM says “FEED ME THE CAT.”
Now, I’m not sure how experienced with ATMS you folks are, but ATMs don’t ever ever say “FEED ME THE CAT.” Therefore, you absolutely cannot see the movie as a completely factual portrayal of events. Other improbable things happen too (e.g., the chainsaw dropping scene (both the really good timing on Bateman’s part and the fact that none of the neighbors here it)), but the ATM is the film’s way of bringing it home to those who may have thought all of the nasty stuff really occurred.
Nope, sorry. The movie shows us the period of Bateman’s insanity that leads up to his actually committing murder. The murders in the film never take place, except inside his head. But by the end of the movie, his psychosis has reached full bloom and he’s ready to get to work. There are all kinds of clues to support this reading, many of which are naively seen as “bloopers.” E.g., when Bateman is dragging the body in the suit hanger to his car, we see the trail of blood he’s leaving in his wake. But when his friends pop up, suddenly we’re seeing things through THEIR reality, not his–and there is no trail of blood. Some idjit reported this to IMDB as a continuity flub, but it’s actually a subtle clue as to what’s really going on.
[My “Nope, sorry.” was for debal, not TaxGuy, who posted as I typed.]
That still leaves some questions, though lissener. If I remember correctly, after he axed the guy in his apartment people were wondering where he was and there was a police investigation. Real people noticed the disapearance, and the guy wasn’t seen in the movie again. Maybe I’m forgetting something but I don’t think it could just be his wishful thinking.
The guy he allegedly “axed” in his apartment later turns out to be alive and in Europe, just like he claimed.
I read the book back in the day and it was a total waste of time. However, I thought the end of the book was pretty clear: Bateman imagined the whole thing. This is one of the few cases where the movie was much, much better than the book.
I enjoyed both the book and the movie, and I never really got the impression that he killed anyone. I always thought that Bateman was looking for something different because he didn’t really like who he was so he began to think about killing people. Notice what he says to a lot of people, or at least what he thinks he’s saying about killing them, and then we hear what he really said and it was nothing like what he wanted to say.
They also found his notebook that was full of images. Personally I think that what was happening was that he was imaging these things going on then trying to draw them. I know that if I were to draw what I saw in my head it would look like that.
I also saw part 2, thinking that it would be really dumb but I liked it. It was not as gorry but it was pretty funny, well worth the rent if you liked the first one.
The guy was missing first, which supplied Bateman with a starting point for the story in his head.
I don’t know. There’s still the example of the “cranberry juice” stains on the sheets. The cleaners are very put off by them and the female character sees them quite clearly.
Provide some of these other clues and I might believe the blood trail is more than a continuity error. If I remember right, in the movie, Lewis is primarily focused on the maker of the bag, maybe his “reality” wouldn’t even see the blood trail, because of his focus on Bateman.
Well, deball, TaxGuy’s ATM example is pretty conclusive and inarguable. Anything else can be seen as subjective interpretation: it WAS cranberry juice, and only Bateman’s imagination made it anything else.
The whole thing is subject to interpretation. Mine is one of them. So is yours. Who knows, since it’s not clearly stated in the movie, whether it’s all in his head or not? We can only speculate either way.
He’s obviously not sane.
To me, the ATM scene is not conclusive or inarguable, it’s another example of a psychotic episode. Actually, the beginning of a major one. I certainly wouldn’t consider it a blooper or subtle clue since it’s right in the open. Bateman is psychotic, the title of the book/movie is American Psycho, and part of being psychotic is loosing touch with reality, as in hearing voices, seeing cryptic messages, the works. Was he actually doing the murders? I say yes, others say no.
I’d say on another level it really doesn’t matter whether he killed anyone or not, since I always thought Bateman is supposed to be a metaphor for the conspicuous consumption and corporate immorality of the 1980s, “a pure product of his surroundings” as deball stated above. The more important part of the title is not that he’s “psycho,” but that he’s “American.”
While the movie is intentionally vague, I’m going to have to go with the “imagined the entire thing”. His rampage from the ATM through the WTC (I think that’s where he worked) was simply too ridiculous to not have been mentioned by any other character.
When he went back to the other appartment and everything was gone.
Note:
In the beginning of American Psycho 2, the Jackie from That 70’s Show character introduces herself as a survivor of Batemans attacks, implying that he actually was a Psycho. I believe there are two possible explanations:
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The second movie should be completely disregarded (and it should)
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Bateman could have crossed the line from imaginary psyco to real psycho some time after the first movie.
Dang! I didn’t even know there was an AP II. Since the movie generally covers the book, the sequel must be a pure Hollywood creation. So, I’ll go with point number one.
The book is a very dark comedy/satire of the 80’s. Parts of it are hilarious, like Bateman’s musical reviews that read like they are straight from the lamest mainstream pop writer ever. Most of it is pure satire of the consumer culture. Noted is the extensive attention to name brands. The rest is Patrick’s obsession with violence. The book, and other Ellis novels (he and his brother Sean show up in a few), also touch on Bateman’s past and future. If I remember right, the disappearence of his college girlfriend is mentioned somewhere in there. I walked away from the book(s) with pretty clear implications that Bateman was a pure sociopathic killer and had been maladjusted since his childhood.
The movie stays relatively true to the book. Again, IMHO, the climax is ridiculous (without spoiling it) and even Bateman thinks so. He goes so far as calling his lawyer to confess everything he’s done, figuring he could never get away with such a garish crimespree. The chilling thing is that nobody in his social strata, the one Ellis is satiring, believes him. They don’t even recognize him. If they knew of the crimes, they certainly don’t care enough to even connect him, it simply does not effect them. Society at large would never finger him, because his incidental disguise is too perfect. He gets away with it, proving what he knew all along, that because of who he is, he will always be able to get away with it.
Deball, I don’t care what the book was about; this discussion is about the movie. You need to watch it again with this in mind: it is the director’s intent that it be slowly revealed that the murders covered by the period of the film occur only in Bateman’s mind. It’s open to discussion whether, as I contend, he comes into flower as a murderer and begins to kill after the movie ends, but by the time the credits roll the director has made it very clear that, till now, Bateman’s psychosis has not escaped the confines of his imagination.
I don’t think there is any real question as to whether Bateman actually committed the murders. He did.
C’mon guys, the movie is a work of satire, and the satire flows like a high pressure jet. If you pick apart the logic by saying “but how could he possibly get away with…” and “why didn’t they notice that…”, then you’ve missed the point. This is not a “movie with a really cool twist at the end”. I agree that the movie is an independent work from the novel and should therefore be considered in an independent light, but to take away the reality of the murders would be equivalent to making a movie version of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” where we discover that the narrator is in fact psychotic but has merely imagined the whole story. Not very compelling stuff.
The recurring theme is that the characters, archetypes of the worst of the 80’s yuppies, are so self-centered, aloof and detached that they constantly misidentify and misunderstand one another.
Bateman is constantly telling his friends what he does, but they are all so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t hear him or don’t believe what he’s saying. After feeding his girlfriend the urinal cake, he tells her quite openly that “My need to engage in homicidal behavior on a massive scale cannot be, um, corrected.” She responds to his admission by saying "Patrick, if you’re going to start in again on why I should have breast implants, I’m leaving.
This is how he can get away with the murder of Paul Allen - its the fact is that nobody cares whether Paul Allen is dead. The characters can’t even agree on who Paul Allen actually is. The hideousness of both the novel and the movie lies in the portrayal of a society where “human life wasn’t as meaningful as the perfect Cerruti suit”.
I agree that there does come a point where Bateman begins to question his own vacuous identity and loses his grip on reality, but this is at the end of the tale, near the nadir of his psychotic spiral where he begins to hallucinate strange ATM messages.
Once we say that he was imagining the murders from the beginning then where do we draw the line? Do we really want to have to question whether everything in the movie was merely imagined? His job? His friends?
For those who remain unconvinced, this interview with the director Mary Harron makes it pretty clear that the movie is a satire about an actual murderer (as is the book - by coincidence!?!
) : http://www.boxoff.com/issues/apr00/harron.html
Cankerist, did you read the interview you linked to? Harron never even discusses whether the murders are real on a literal level. Just because it’s a satire doesn’t mean anything one way or another. Of course it’s a satire. Frankly, it works better as a satire the way she filmed it: with all of Bateman’s power and violence–and control–limited to his imagination. Again, there’s no other way the clues that Harron drops in the film can be interpreted than that Bateman’s sense of control and power is a delusion.