SPOILER WARNING: If you haven’t seen this film and intend to reading this post will certainly give away a lot of details.
I watched American Psycho last night with some friends and we’re a bit confused.
My take on the film is that none of it really happened. The main character had certainly gone over the edge but in his own mind only. All of the murders he committed were a fantasy as evidenced by the following:
No one ever questions the streak of blood he left behind as he dragged the other trader he axe murdered in his apartment through the lobby and past the security guard. Even if the security guard didn’t question the body bag in his hands he would have noticed the considerable blood streak sooner or later. Also, he dumps the body in the trunk of a cab and to my knowledge never took the cab anywhere. Again, the body would have been discovered and easily traced back but that never happens.
He kills the prostitute by dropping a running chainsaw 8 floors onto her head. Movie stretch? Maybe but not likely. That’s too weak for even most Hollywood directors to let by.
He returns to the apartment the following morning presumably to clean up the raft of dead bodies and blood everywhere only to find it empty of furniture and no bodies and a realtor showing the apartment.
He runs through Manhattan in an ongoing gun battle with police and gets away by running into his office building where he kills most of the people he runs across. Manhattan in this scene is deserted which, to my knowledge, never happens. Also, there’s no way the police would have given up on chasing him but again that may be movie stupidness we’re supposed to accept.
In the last scene he talks to his attorney who he confessed all of his murders to. The attorney laughs and says what a good joke that was. As the main character persists in pushing his confession the attorney responds that he had lunch with the ‘dead’ trader several days earlier in London. Was the attorney covering for his client?
Given the above my take is that none of it happened but my friends aren’t so sure. There is no easy way to distinguish what parts are his fantasy life and what parts are really happening (did he really break up with his fiance while doodling chainsaw murdering people on the table?).
At the very end his secretary is going through his desk and finds a notebook with increasingly disturbing doodles of murder and mayhem. I was guessing that this is where he did his fantasizing. At the beginning we find that this very wealthy man seemingly does nothing to earn his money and pretty much sits in his office bored and listening to music and reading porno mags. His boredom starts to translate to a rich and disturbed fanatasy life to the point that eventually even he can’t distinguish the difference. My friends think the notebook is merely indicative of his disturbed state of mind.
At the very, very end the typical “be scared, there’s more to come if this movie makes enough money that we can make a sequel” bit has the main character saying that his “confession” was all for nothing leading you to believe that he needs to start again and this time up the stakes (maybe really kill people) so his confession will work.
I figure it was a study on what the guy (a straight laced yuppie type) can have in a darker side of his mind and that not all your psychos can look like degenerates and such.
Quite frankly, the movie was rather boring though it had its moments like the explanation of Huey Lewis as he preps to axe the guy was hilarious and the scene where he is chasing after the Prostitute holding the chainsaw wearing nothing but a pair of solid white nikes and socks just struck me as so funny- I mean it was a just a funny picture.
Personally I prefer Pumas when I do my sawin.
But I tell you one thing now, Don’t read the book. It is utter garbage and so sick that I got nauseous.
I was not impressed with this flick. I got from it pretty much what you did but I thought it was pretty much a waste of time. Maybe the finer points were lost on me, I don’t know. I have read reviews of the book including some excerpts, the book does sound disgusting and vile.
I thought it was interesting that the Canadian release got release whole, while in the States they cut out some of the threesome to get a better rating.
Didn’t happen in the book, however the book leads you to belive it all happened and that new york, being new york in the 80’s no one noticed anything that happened.
This was not in the book, this was probably added by Hollywood to make it more fanciful, mainly becauswe the way he did kill her could never be shown in a movie in the states… if you want details, read the book
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He returns to the apartment the following morning presumably to clean up the raft of dead bodies and blood everywhere only to find it empty of furniture and no bodies and a realtor showing the apartment.
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In the book it turns out it’s actually weeks or months later.
In the book it was pretty much this way too, and the police ended up going into the wrong building. We watches them searching and such from his office, where he falls asleep and wakes up the next morning and the police have long since left.
In the book the attorney is a notorious name dropper and much is made of the fact that he says he has seen him in London earlier (Patrick had left a message on the machine that he was going to London after he killed him) and so the guy was trying to sound cool like saying “you’re not good enough for him to talk to? I had lunch with him”
The book also ends like this… and i hear it is eluded too in the book Glamorama.
I haven’t seen the movie but read about 2/3 of the book before I was so skeeved by it I had to get rid of it.
I thought that the action was all taking place. It’s exaggerated for satirical value but the point is that only looks matter, people only see what they want to see and if you fit the mold of what a well-off young man should be they notice nothing else. The fact that someone comes up to him in the garment bag scene and says “where did you get that garment bag” (the one leaving the bloody trail) says a lot. You fit a mold and people don’t see beyond that.
Throughout the book he is mistaking one person for another because they all look basically alike. His lawyer doesn’t know him or his victim from all his other young male clients.
The general theme that I’ve heard the movie presents better than the book is that the other men are able to compete through white collar work and channel their aggressions into competing over things like business cards and restaurant reservations. But this isn’t enough for him; he has to act on his psychotic tendencies. It’s a little like “Fight Club” in that sense; the challenges of the artificial world of programming aren’t enough and they must go find physical outlets for their aggression.
All of gigi’s points are spot on, but even if it really did happen in the book, I think it’s pretty clear that in the movie it’s all in his mind.
I do agree that the movie ends with the possibility that he’s begun to realize that it was all in his mind, and now he’ll begin to actuate it. We saw only what led up to the actual killing, which will happen after the movie ends. Pretty cool, IMHO.
I just watched it last night and thought it was brilliant. It makes all the points about 80s materialism and conformity, but powerfully I think by not having the killings be real: if they were real, they’d have been the only real thing is his world, and would have obscured the other truths the movie was after.
I saw the movie once at the theater and thought it was pretty good. Not great, but not bad either. I thought the movie did a good job of not letting on whether it was all real or just in his head. It seems to me though that at the end of the movie when he’s talking to someone (maybe the lawyer friend) the the voice track was out of sync and that this was the “clue” that his fantasy/reality was starting to come unglued. Did anyone else notice that or was it an anomaly the one time I saw it?
lissener, we are totally on the same page here. The movie absolutely destroyed 80s materialism. All of the little details, from the music trivia to the restaurants, were absolutely brilliant. I really enjoyed the movie as well.
I agree that if the depraved events had actually taken place, it would have overshadowed the movie’s argument on the impotence of materialism.
I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve read the book and I never got the impression it was real. The whole episode with the murdered-workmate-not-actually-dead and the running battle with police were too unbelievable for me…I read the whole book as about a man whose real life is so shallow that he turns to a sick fantasy life for excitement.
What a great movie! I also liked the part with the chainsaw and the Nike’s, hilarious. A scene that tells you he is imagining things is at the end at the bar with the lawyer. His friend says, “Why did we get beer? I need a scotch.” Then it shows him with a scotch slowly drinking it, he definately did not have it before his friend mentioned it.
