I read the book (good lord…shockingly dull any time we aren’t killing someone.) and I saw the movie. He didn’t kill anybody.
My interperatation of the movie fell pretty much into line with cankerist’s, but since the whole “the murders never actually happened” thing didn’t occur to me while I was watching it, I want to see it again.
I read the book a couple times and also saw the terrible movie. It details a life of absolute fiction in the mind of a real person whose mind wonders in and out of reality. All of you fans of Usual Suspects should watch this movie and understand how similar the movies are. In each movie there are portrayed characters and actions that simply exist only in the mind of one of the other characters. The problem you all are having is the old “I saw it (or read it), therefore it happened” flaw in logic.
Read the book, twice if you have to. It is VERY clear that the author’s intent was show that the murders never took place.
In the UK, at least, there seemed a distinct shift in attitude when it was noticed that it continued to sell. Everybody had expected it to be a nine-day wonder, stoked by controversy, and then to disappear. But after a couple of years, while no longer a bestseller in the sense of making the Sunday Times list, it was still shifting a couple of hundred copies a week. That’s very unusual for a piece of contemporary fiction here after the hype has passed and newer stuff is bring pushed. Unusual enough to be commented on. So people re-classified it as a “cult classic”.
Are you all philistines? (I just love using that word). The thing is, it didn’t matter if he did it or not. The point is that he ddi it, whether in his mind or not. I haven’t read all the posts on this board as I got really pissed off towards halfway and decided just to reply. And yeah, where was I? Oh rihgt, it really doesn’t matter whether it was real. The ending doesn’t matter, there is no closure. And that’s the point. You people who have to ‘get it’ have been too warped by normal text(not saying that that’s bad or avoidable. It is ery rare that we are presented with something like this).
You can speculate all you like, it doesn’t amtter what you think, inevitibly you are right and wrong, as there are no answers. You can follow the book through and find as many clues as you want to prove either case, but would it really help you at all? I don’t think so. For me, I just read the book, and at the end, yes I was puzzzled, but I didn’t seek to figure it out. I’ve read it about 16 times now and it gets funnier everytime, but the ending still isn’t crystal to me, and I don’t care. I like it like that you neevr find out.
Like bladerunner, you don’t find out, even in the directors cut, for sure if he is or he isn’t a replicant. Althoguh it is hinted at it is never revealed. And thus the beauty of AP (NOT AS, as Psycho is spelt with a P(sorry pedantic I know but schmeh).
Also the movie was terrible, although I liked some aspects of it and I thought the director did a good job of making the book into a movie which would not be banned, and Reese Witherspoon was great as Evellyn. But generally I thought the movie conveyed badly what Ellis was trying to say.
So to the original poster, please read the book and then look at it again, don’t judge the story on the movie’s mistakes.
And as for Mysogony, I never really saw that. The kill count for both male and females was seven, and although he did a lot worse to the famales, I don’t think we could accuse Bateman of Mysogony. I don’t think he hated women in particular, he was just brutal to anyone. His of power was effected on the prostitutes he killed because he had power over them, as he was paying them.
To conclude, I loved the book, I thought it was one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read. I think I enjoyed it beacause I took it as it came and never tried to figure it out, as I feel it ddin’t matter. And this is my advice to anyone who is going to read it.
I just read cankerist and I think he got to the crux of my argument better than I did. So go the people out there with brains!
Thank you Shy Guy and DarRRva, great to have you on side!!
Well, the book and the movie are very different. In the book there is no question that the murders are real (its not really that deep or interesting of a book). In all of Ellis’ novels, we can find characters who simply don’t ‘connect’ with other characters in the story and constantly misunderstand and misinterpret. This is a common feature of his works and so I don’t think its appropriate to use that as a basis for claiming that Patrick Bateman is imagining things. Like those around him, he just doesn’t care.
Now, when it comes to the movie, I’ll admit that there’s room for debate, but I just can’t see how or why a director would take such a ‘Wizard of Oz’ point of view of the novel. As you’ll see from the quotes below, BEE himself says that movie probably misinterpreted the novel (unfortunately he doesn’t elaborate on precisely what was misinterpreted). I read the screenplay of the movie as well, and there’s no support in there for the idea that the killings were imagined. I appreciate the concept of artistic license in the adaptation of a movie but to take away the central concept of the novel would have been something that the director would have had to at least acknowledge, don’t you think? I can’t find any acknowledgement.
Anyway, here are a few quotes from BEE regarding the novel and movie:
On the violence depicted:
http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3510/avfeature3510.html
[N.B. - note the use of ‘amoral’ here. Its not amoral to be a delusional psychotic]
http://www.dartreview.com/issues/4.21.99/bee.html
On the movie:
http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=126
Now I can foresee someone getting all Roland Barthes and claiming that “it doesn’t matter what the author intended, its how the reader (viewer) interprets it that determines meaning”…sigh Bring it on…
Reviving this zombie rather than starting my own thread.
I showed this movie to my wife who had never seen it, as it seems like essential cinema to me.
One of her employees subsequently watched the movie and has all these same questions about the ending.
I have seen the movie many times since it came out. My hot-take has always been a psychopathic manic episode that crescendos.
“Feed Me a Stray Cat” is a clear hallucination, but it doesn’t negate everything else.
I think Patrick is slipping more and more–either slipping deeper into his psychosis OR slipping at his meticulous machinations. Having to chase the prostitute is a bit more out of control than he normally appears to be. He was increasingly out of control of his emotions, outbursts, etc.
So I’ve always read it as the murders all happened, his grip on reality really starts to slip towards the end, and the ending is the antithesis of most movies: No catharsis, no redemption. The rest all works itself out because no one can tell anyone else apart.
This article claims to have the definitive take on the ending: Everyone was murdered except Paul Allen.
How’s that for a doozie?! Personally, that makes less sense to me. Using the context of “I saw Paul Allen in London last week” as testimony while rejecting everyone else misidentifying each other seems arbitrary. Bateman’s own lawyer calls him by another name to his face before confirming he saw Paul Allen. I just don’t know why this can be trusted.
As the article states in the first “alternative theory”–which aligns with my take-away–the sterilized apartment is problematic.
But it’s not THAT problematic: the place has recently been renovated, with fresh paint. The agent who plays a trick on him knows something’s not right, which to me feels a bit over-reactive if it’s just another yuppie lookie-loo in poking around a high-end, available apartment.
That interaction, her terse, tense, demeanor, I’ve always read that as her knowing they are flipping the murder house and why was this guy poking around in the murder closet, of all the places?!
Regardless, the fact the place has been white-washed, is newly available, etc, does add a layer to the onion. If he showed up to that apartment and it was the same looking as before, just with no dead bodies, it would hint towards delusion.
But in this case the apartment was truly painted over.
I think it all happened. Even/especially Paul Allen. I think that’s the point of the movie: uncaring yuppies too self-absorbed to hear his increasingly overt “calls for help” that kind of ends with “no one really cares,” at which point he seems to settle back in to his empty persona. The mania subsides.
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The end of the movie is actually the beginning. All of the violence leading up to the ending is in his mind. They’re fantasies of preparation. In the final shot, we see him look straight into the camera with a violently gleeful grin, as he comes to the decision to actually go out and commit the crimes he’s been rehearsing in his imagination. The movie is about what leads someone to be a serial killer; not a chronicle of his actual spree.
It’s like the end of Silence of the Lambs or Showgirls, where the final shot is of the character going out into the world to wreak hell upon the whole human race.