Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch American Psycho
2000 · Mary Harron · American Psycho on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the business cards being slid across the table. (setting)
Sekula's camera goes in close on stock weight, embossing and watermark with the reverence usually saved for a relic. Bale's face goes slack over a typeface while four men rank each other in silence.
Payoff: A man's whole standing is loaded into a rectangle of paper. That charge is the joke and the threat at once. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls the card a fetish: a small object carrying a compulsive charge it could never actually hold.
Count the mirrors and reflective surfaces in Bateman's apartment. (camera)
Sekula stages the private moments in glass. The gel mask comes off in front of a mirror. Polished stone and windows return his image everywhere. He addresses himself more often than he addresses anyone else.
Payoff: You almost never get him unreflected. The film keeps an image between you and the man at all times.
Watch Bale's smile and how long he holds it. (performance)
Bale assembles Bateman out of borrowed signals: a pressurized talk-show warmth, a built body that reads as construction, enthusiasm that switches off the instant no one is looking.
Payoff: He copies the shape of feeling without any of the content. Watch for the second the shape drops. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that exposes a social role instead of revealing a private self.
Notice where the men sit across the wide frame. (staging)
Harron and Sekula use the 2.35:1 width to arrange restaurant tables and open-plan offices as geometry. Colleagues line up evenly spaced, in matching suits and glasses, holding their positions like opposing pieces.
Payoff: The composition makes the men hard to tell apart. The running joke about mistaken names starts in the framing.
Listen to how quiet the film is between conversations. (sound)
John Cale's score stays sparse and dissonant and declines to tell you how to feel. Long stretches carry no music at all. Then Bateman puts on a record and lectures a guest about it.
Payoff: The quiet holds you at a distance. The pop songs are the only enthusiasm the film supplies, and it belongs to him.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the surfaces. Bateman puts more feeling into card stock and a skincare routine than into any person on screen.