David Cronenberg is no newcomer to gore, violence, and surreal treks into madness. Pairing the introspective, eccentric Canadian with the caustic, L.A. writer Bret Easton Ellis no doubt would have resulted in quite theAmerican Psychofilm. Too bad we’ll never know.
At the heart was the problem of protagonist Patrick Bateman himself, not just the persona but the tone. The entire plot of this film was based on a stupidly simple faux pas that the protagonist takes way too seriously. Murdering, while dispensing valuable health and beauty tips and his opinions on MTV’s playlist, his insecurities speaks to a larger subset of fragile alpha males.
In the film, much like the book, he’s a deceptively complex character who wants desperately to fit in with the crowd while his narcissistic urges demands vengeance for being mistaken for another yuppie who dresses and talks exactly like him. He’s both aloof and calculating, the subject for endless discussion for film geeks. If not for subtle off-white coloring on business cards, you couldn’t tell any of these corporate bores apart.
Director Mary Harron finally got the job, her constant clashes with the Lionsgate producers eventually paying off with a grisly yet humorous character study. It only took audiences a decade to realize the movie was actually good. Had Ellis and Cronenberg not bumped heads,American Psychomight have wrapped up with Brad Pitt singing karaoke on a skyscraper.
Jazz Hands
Cronenberg wished to bridge the literary with the cinematic according to biographers, who cite his “difficulty visualizing the interior world of Bret Easton Ellis' novel” as his reason for leaving the project. It doesn’t help that Ellis wished to culminate the film on the top of the World Trade Center as a joke. Ellis slowly lost his mind, forced togut his preliminary draftsat Cronenberg’s orders, drastically altering the script to appease his director until he was sick of his own creation. “I think Barry Manilow’s ‘Daybreak’ was playing, and there’s like Patrick Bateman sitting in the park talking to people, and then it ends on the top of the World Trade Center.” Probably for the best this incarnation got shot down pre-shooting.
The psychopathic Bateman would sing and dance for the audience’s amusement in the closing scene. Or maybe it was supposed to be black humor, it’s hard to say. Perhaps because this was a somewhat hackneyed recurring theme in movies (seeKing KongandMazes and Monsters, andRem Lazar)Ellis got booted. The subsequent draft by a new writer was just as bad, if not worse, and Cronenberg bailed altogether. And if that sounds like a catastrophe you clearly haven’t heard about Lionsgate’s direct-to-DVD sequel.
Related:Why American Psycho 2 Was Such a Monumental Failure
The Acting Carousel
Cronenberg wanted Pitt, but he chose another film. Considering histurn inFight Club, we can all safely say that it worked out for the best. Bale wasn’t the first, nor even the second or third choice. Based on Harron’s account, she had to lobby for the actor, he was such an unwelcome unknown. That cost her the job. Harron was out, and in came Oliver Stone and Leonard DiCaprio. According to legend, feminist Gloria Steinem convinced DiCaprio to ditch the role, however, in a suspicious turn, she later married Bale’s father, this celebrity tale so sketchy that conspiracy theorists can be forgiven for furrowing their brow at this development.
SensingAmerican Psychowas in production hell, every other young actor in Hollywood including Vince Vaughn, Ed Norton, Ewan MacGregor and Matt Damon was tossed the script, which they all ended up flinging into the trash. All would have brought their own intensity to the role, but the fact that Bale was unknown helped, as we had no prior opinions on him. Bateman is faking being normal, but it would be hard to see Matt Damon as anything but Matt Damon being Matt Damon. Bale got so lost in the characters, the cast weren’t even sure if he was really sane.
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Aging Like Wine
Lost on early audiences, and probably most of the people who financed the film, was the idea of satire. At the first public screenings at Sundance, film-goers were in a state of shock, Harron toldVulturein 2020. “We were the only people laughing in the theater. And now I think people know to laugh. People know that a lot of it is satirical.” After only one meeting, Harron and Bale immediately agreed on the tone of the film should take,Bale recalling that“We had the same very sick sense of humor.” Casting the choice of Patrick Batmen not just a matter of picking the guy who looks the best in a Valentino suit or can pronounce Apollinaris. As Ellis envisioned, neither Bale nor Harron really cared much about the inner thoughts of their protagonist.
Bateman is not Hannibal Lector. Ellis’s clashes with Cronenberg weren’t just a matter of dialogue or pacing, but the film’s meaning: the silliness of boring snobs competing to be the most stylish to fill the abyss that is their own soul. To Ellis, there wasn’t much to psychoanalyze in Bateman, a living cartoon character who wants others to take him as seriously as he takes himself. It was a joke plot dressed up in a shocking, over-the-top story. In aRolling Stoneinterview, he cites his inspiration not on the repulsive crimes taking place but how straight guys were “taking on a lot of the tropes of gay male culture and bringing it into straight male culture — in terms of grooming, looking a certain way, going to the gym, waxing, and being almost the gay porn ideals … that seemed to me much more interesting than whether he is or is not a serial killer.”
In other hands, written by less-attuned screenwriters, these details might have flown under the radar, and we might have gotten something far less clever or self-aware.
