Late last year, it was reported that director Luca Guadagnino is developing a new film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel, American Psycho. Ellis has cast doubts on that report by suggesting it’s more of an idea than a committed project, but the news sparked mixed reactions. Guadagnino tackling this relevant text through a modern lens seems appealing, but many argue that director Mary Harron’s 2000 American Psycho film doesn’t need a companion.
While Harron’s film has aged incredibly well, a strange cloud looms over its legacy. For 25 years, conversations about Harron’s adaptation have been dominated by a debate over its ending. Fans remain eternally divided over whether the events of the film occur largely as they are presented or whether most (if not all of them) are all in protagonist Patrick Bateman’s head.
It’s bizarre that the American Psycho film has succumbed to the simplified fate of its ending debate. Not only was its ending not meant to be nearly as ambiguous as it has become, but that often misunderstood finale feeds into some of American Psycho’s most disturbing themes.
The “It’s All In His Head” Theory
American Psycho protagonist Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is a yuppie who works as an investment banker by day and commits gruesome murders at night. After a particularly bizarre string of violent incidents, Bateman seemingly confesses his crimes via a message he leaves on his lawyer’s answering machine.
However, as Bateman wanders the aftermath of his supposed spree, he finds that nothing is quite as it seems. The realtor selling one of his victim’s apartments denies the home was recently the scene of a crime. Bateman’s lawyer not only treats his message like a joke but insists that he recently had dinner with one of Bateman’s high-profile victims. All the while, Bateman continues seeing and hearing increasingly bizarre, seemingly impossible things as those around him insist that he’s too square to have done such horrible things.
That finale forms the basis of the “it’s all in his head” interpretation of the material. Those around Bateman appear to offer compelling evidence that he could not have done those things, and the nature of Bateman’s final spree is absurd. He blows up cars with a pistol and evades the entire NYPD. In the movie, an ATM tells him to feed it a stray cat. In the book, he watches a Cheerio be interviewed on TV.
Those who subscribe to that interpretation argue that Bateman is a privileged, pathetic young man whose hollow life has led him to fantasize about acts of violence largely inspired by the shallow media he consumes. It’s a theory that is not only seemingly supported by the text but is that kind of “aha!” revelation that seems so clever that it makes some feel stupid for believing anything else.
The only problem with that otherwise fascinating theory is that it’s wrong. At the very least, it’s a simplified reading of the events of the story that historically diminishes some of its most important and fascinating themes.
American Psycho’s Overlooked Themes Tell The True Story
American Psycho’s most consistent theme is “identity.” Specifically, it asks how one can forge and maintain a distinct identity in a capitalist culture where the consumption of the same media, fashion, food, and brands drives people to turn themselves into roughly the same version of the people they believe they should be.
It’s that theme that helps explain many events that otherwise seem inexplicable. When characters claim to have had lunch with one of Bateman’s victims, they seem to be confused about who they met. In the movie (and especially in the book), people often confuse one person in Bateman’s world for somebody else. Even elements of their lives that are designed to identify them (such as their famous business cards) are hilariously similar to many eyes.
The biggest tell comes when Bateman visits his victim’s apartment. The realtor catches Bateman in a lie when she asks if he read about a listing in The New York Times that doesn’t exist. However, she asks that he simply leave and never come back. The strong implication is that she knows there has been a murder, suspects Bateman knows more than he should about it, but would greatly prefer that this whole thing be swept under the rug so that she can sell a recently cleaned luxury apartment.
American Psycho observes and often criticizes the kind of world that enables a murderer like Patrick Bateman to get away with it all. As a handsome white man of means, he can always blend in. Those inside that world are either indifferent or focused more on themselves. Those outside of it are rarely offered a look inside and can hardly afford to take a closer second look.
Bateman himself seems frustrated by the idea that all of this is as easy as it seems to be. He can use violent language because the people around him all see themselves as sharks with chainsaws. He can murder women (especially sex workers) because society tells him that they’re ultimately not bothered that much by such violence. He tries to conceal the murder of someone more like himself, but even that effort proves to be superfluous. It turns out charging someone modern market price for an apartment is more valuable than making a big deal out of a tenant’s death.
To be clear, Bateman almost certainly seems to suffer a break from reality around the time that ATMs start asking for cats and he’s murdering en masse. Patrick Bateman actor Christian Bale described the process as going from “psychopath to psychotic.” Those events likely did not occur exactly as we saw them, though they do not necessarily negate what we saw before. They instead emphasize the idea that the real and imagined murders are ultimately interchangeable if they are committed by the right kind of person in a world that is ultimately indifferent. Mind you, that’s not simply a read of the film. It’s what those who crafted the story have long tried to preach to people who wouldn’t listen.
American Psycho’s Director and Creator Have Made Their Intentions Clear
American Psycho director Mary Harron has always been clear about her feelings towards the alternate interpretation of her movie. In an interview with Charlie Rose (which Ellis and Bale joined), Harron describes the movie’s ending as a “failure” that resulted in “people keep coming out of this film thinking that it’s all a dream.” While she and screenwriter Guinevere Turner intended to retain the ambiguity of Ellis’ work, she says that “I just got the emphasis wrong…it makes it look like it was all in his head. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s not.”
Turner expanded on that sentiment by simply stating “We didn’t think that everything was real because some of it is literally surreal. But we just decided, together, that we both really disliked movies where the big reveal is that it was all in someone’s head or it was all a dream.”
American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis has historically emphasized the story’s surreal elements and the doubt they cast on Bateman’s reliability as a narrator. In a 2010 interview, Ellis said of Bateman’s murderers that “I was always on the fence about whether they were fantasy or real. I don’t know and I prefer it that way.”
Ellis has said that Harron’s movie “tries to have it both ways by suggesting that [it’s real] and it wasn’t.” He mostly likes the adaptation but suggests that the story fundamentally doesn’t “really work as a film” and is “unadaptable because it’s about consciousness.”He believes that’s why the movie “confused a lot of people.”
While the ambiguity regarding certain events and themes in American Psycho was always there (LA Times reviewer Henry Bean brought up the idea that the murders never occurred in his 1991 review of the book), that broader “it’s all a dream” interpretation seems to have gained steam when the movie was released. And while it is incredibly difficult to adapt such a cerebral novel into a movie (Lolita famously ran into a similar problem), the reaction to American Psycho touches upon a more unique and often more insidious trend in modern movie history.
What American Psycho’s Misunderstood Ending Teaches Us
It’s remarkable to see which elements of the American Psycho movie have had the most lasting impact on popular culture. Christian Bale’s performance practically won him the Batman role (specifically, that of Bruce Wayne). That aforementioned scene with the exchange of the business cards has become a prolific meme. Bret Easton Ellis has tried to distance himself from the idea that American Psycho contributed to a style known as “serial killer chic:” a phrase the Wall Street Journal even used to describe the truly bizarre American Psycho: The Musical.
While many cerebral, perspective-driven works are often simplified when they are consumed and processed by a mass audience, it’s telling that American Psycho has been adopted as an unlikely piece of “bro” media. Like Fight Club, The Wolf of Wall Street, Breaking Bad, Taxi Driver, and more, it offers a clear condemnation of toxic masculinity and the world that toxicity results in. Time and time again, though, we see viewers (often young men) idealize the central figures of those works. If they are not simply ignorant to the themes of those stories, they consider them irrelevant compared to the primal allure of their central figures.
It’s especially frustrating and darkly funny that American Psycho has joined that pantheon. Patrick Bateman’s rambling monologues about the artistic merits of the most basic forms of pop culture (many of which he seems to have stolen from some magazine or newspaper) reveal his shallowness and inability to become the individual he claims he desires to be. Yet, the story that Patrick Bateman stars in has since been widely misinterpreted by a contingent whose arguments often echo existing theories despite all evidence that contradicts them.
And that is what makes the “it’s all a dream” interpretation of American Psycho’s ending so frustrating. It’s not that it’s entirely invalid. It even ties into certain themes of the story. But when you track that interpretation’s rise in popularity and realize it coincides with the rise of American Psycho’s “serial killer chic” legacy, it’s hard not to see it as another example of simplifying the story’s most complex concepts in service of celebrating Patrick Bateman’s “coolness.” It’s a lot easier to justify the idealization of a character if they only wished to commit murder. A popular online argument for that theory even argues that we’ve “all had those kinds of thoughts.”
Or maybe the joke is on the rest of us. Maybe the mass adoption of the “all in his head” theory proves the book’s deeper, subtler, and often lost themes right. Isn’t that what people tell Bateman when he tries to confess to his crimes? What could justify the book’s themes more than the idea of Patrick Bateman writing a tell-all about his deeds that is then turned into a movie only to have people dismiss his crimes as fantasy as they celebrate his charisma, hair, taste in music, and those wonderful white business cards?
That’s what makes the prospect of a modern American Psycho interpretation so fascinating and potentially frustrating. Such an adaptation could indeed help undo decades of damage. It could find a way to not only showcase the relevance of the story for the modern era but address those who widely misinterpreted it as they embraced Patrick Bateman’s most superficial qualities. Then again, maybe we’re past all of that. When you consider where the world is at, maybe it all was an American Dream.
American Psycho is streaming now on Prime Video and Hulu in the US, and on Netflix in the UK.
The post 25 Years On, American Psycho’s Ending Is Still Misunderstood appeared first on Den of Geek.
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