But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory.” In Ellis’s book, Bateman has a fraught relationship to his brother and senile mother, but Harron and Turner wisely excise those characters from the film, to where he seems like someone who has no family and no past, as if he simply appeared in the world in a pinstriped Valentino Couture suit. “There is the idea of a Patrick Bateman,” he says in the early in the narration, “some kind of abstraction. They’re thinking of him like the maker of The Corporation: what if the era manifested itself as a person? How would he feel? How would he behave? The conclusion is more or less the same, right there in the title. But both book and film, craftily adapted by director Mary Harron and her co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner, are not thinking about him as a symbol per se. It’s common to think about Patrick Bateman, the narrator and brand-conscious mass murderer of American Psycho, as representing certain 1980s themes: the greed and rapaciousness of Wall Street, the emptiness of consumer culture, and a Reagan era where old-fashioned values covered the whole Darwinian bloodbath in the sharp, piney scent of Polo cologne.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |