I watched this film last night and I have to admit I was rather confused by the ending.
After he goes a bit mad and starts shooting people he leaves a message on his lawyers answer phone.
After this he goes round to the flat where he’s been doing some of the killing and there’s nothing there. Where has it all gone?
Then later on he meets his lawyer in his club and goes over to talk to him. His lawyer doesn’t know him by his real name and refuses to believe the message on his answer phone is any thing but a joke. Why?
The only reason I can come up with is that his lawyer had it all sorted out for him without his knowledge. Is this right?
Please can someone fill me in as it had both me and my girlfriend stumped.
I haven’t seen the film. In the book, though, you’re deliberately left with the impression that none of what he does actually happens. The implication is that his life is so shallow and empty that the whole psychopath theme is a fantasy to make him seem deeper and more interesting than he actually is.
One of the leading theories is that the murders never happened. Another one is that though they happened, nobody knew who really committed the murders.
Or something like that. A search on ‘American Psycho’ in Cafe Society will probably yield the pertinent thread(s).
Yeah that’s what I got from the movie when I saw it. Still that movie has one of my favorite lines in it. It’s when he’s at the ATM and it says “Feed me a stray kitten” on the screen. I don’t know why but me and my friends lost it on that one.
I haven’t seen the movie but I never got that impression from the book. It all seemed real enough but he could just get away with it all because of the shallow society in which he lives. Nobody pays attention to anything other than image and the fact that he kills a child at the zoo or rapes his maid as a child is, and was, all just ignored.
I think you might have to take the film and the book as two very different texts. I hear the film is very tongue in cheek and it just wasn’t possible to be faithful to the original anyway for obvious reasons.
In the book, apart from his victims, the only guy with a clue is the detective who has some suspicions but it has been a long time since I’ve read it.
[quote]
I watched this film last night and I have to admit I was rather confused by the ending.
After he goes a bit mad and starts shooting people he leaves a message on his lawyers answer phone.
After this he goes round to the flat where he’s been doing some of the killing and there’s nothing there. Where has it all gone?
Then later on he meets his lawyer in his club and goes over to talk to him. His lawyer doesn’t know him by his real name and refuses to believe the message on his answer phone is any thing but a joke. Why?/quote]
I was confused at first too, and I’ve read the book and seen the movie. I’ve found that a lot of people believe Patrick imagined the killings. I came away from both the movie and the book with a stronger feeling that he actually did commit the murders.
Patrick leaves a message on his lawyers machine admitting to all the horrible things he’s done. He sees his lawyer at a party and his lawyer doesn’t recognize him. He tells Patrick he thought the answering machine message was a joke. The lawyer did not recongnize Patrick because Patrick looked just like every other client the lawyer had. For the most part our point of view in the story is that of Patrick’s. As he moves through his world the only description we get of the people around him is what they are wearing, where they work and who they’re screwing at the moment and for the most part this is all that he cares about. This is where the confusion stems from, no one really knows what anyone else really looks like because they’re too busy noticing the Armani suits and raised lettering on their business cards. It was the 80’s and materialism at its best.
There is also a theme of dehumanization and desesitization throughout the story. This point was illustrated with the beggars and treatment of women. These characters did not look upon other people as human, they looked upon them as something beneath, something of lesser or no value. Nothing of substance effected these men, as long as nothing happened to them they were happy to ignore it.
I also believe that there actually was an empty apartment that Patrick used in his murders. In the book when Patrick goes back to the apartment and finds it cleaned up with a realtor and prospective tenants in it he is taken aback. It’s Patricks reaction here that people would point to this as evidence that he imagined it all. If it were true that he had imagined it then why did the realtor react to him the way she did. She seemed to know something about him. She seemed scared of him. She told him to leave and never come back. What did she know about him?
I think the story is a mixture of fact and fiction for Patrick. I believe that some of it did happen. I believe that some of it was imagined because I don’t know many ATM machines that ask to be fed stray kittens.
I just thought that the whole movie was his fantasy. Basically as he was bored at work he was imagining doing everything that happened in the movie, and in reality was just drawing it in his notebook. I guess he thought about it so much that he convinced himself that he really did it.
That’s exactly what I thought. I think that the notebook scene was in the movie to reveal that all of the murders were just his fantasy. I’m not sure about whether or not he really abused the prostitutes though.
I read this book because someone told me it was the sickest thing he’d ever read. Post-American Psycho, I cannot remember which book I’d previously thought was the sickest thing I ever read. I can’t believe I finished it, nor can I believe I still went to see the movie.
Having said that, I’m going to have to agree with the posters who think that Patrick did commit all the atrocities, but nobody noticed, simply because at that level of society, such distateful issues are not on the radar screen.
I can see how one might think it was all Patrick’s fantasy, but I’m afraid Ellis’ other novels wouldn’t really bear that out. Note, he also wrote Less Than Zero and a number of other gems. His characters are generally pretty grisly and I can’t see him, as a writer, shying away from making his characters do the gritty deeds.
A quick search, and some quick persuing of interviews with BEE, revealed nothing. In one, he said American Psycho was autobiographical (in a way) and in another, he said the opposite. Mostly, I think he’s trying to avoid the controversy the book stirred up in the first place. He pretty much had to go into hiding after it came out.
There’s an interview with the book’s writer at http://www.canoe.ca in Jam! movies, where the writer voices disgust at the sequel, saying that they’re going to turn it into a jiggly breasts/teen slasher flick despite his complaints that there have been no female serial killers in history.
While complaining more about how little input he has in the sequel, he reveals how closely he worked with the director in the first movie, and reveals that the murders and everything all happened in the main character’s head. Hence, more stupidity in creating a slasher sequel when no one really died in the first one.
Since I don’t really like the first one, I don’t really care, but I like to hear how stupid Hollywood is.
Didn’t read the book. Avoided the film for a long time, assuming it’d be horrifically nasty, etc. But when I saw it I just laughed my ass off. Very, very funny, and not really all that scary. For some reason what impressed me most was the shininess of all the murder weapons. He’s obviously gone out and bought them brand new at the most expensive chainsaw place he could find.
I’m another one for the “he did it but nobody noticed/cared” list. It was so easy to mistake all the suits for one another anyway, and nobody much missed the dead folk.
The only character who actually seemed at all real was the prostitute he kills. I winced at that, but the rest were just interchangeable.
Right you are, Lindy. In fact, at that very link it says:
*Women have been murdering serially for as long as men, though their victims are usually family members or acquaintances, and they most often choose poison over other means of disposal. *
Someone should tell that to whatsisname. (On an unrelated note, I love http://www.crimelibrary.com but I wish they had a synopsis section. I’d like the option of not reading every article in minute detail.)
te lawyer also says that the Yuppie he killed is, in fact, not dead. IIRC, he said the Yuppie had been travelling in Europe or somewhere, and had been gone long before Patric imagines the killing.
Of course, I could be wrong.
IIRC, the lawyer says that he saw Bateman’s last victim in Europe. But it’s questionable whether the lawyer saw who he thinks he saw, since in the movie and book people are always being mistaken for somebody else (in fact, at first the lawyer doesn’t know that Bateman is Bateman).