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.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the murder scenes are staged and cut. (cutting)
Bateman arranges the room, sets the music and plays to a spectator before anything happens. Andrew Marcus cuts the sequences with a choreographer's timing rather than a thriller's shock rhythm.
Payoff: The violence is presented as one more performance for an audience, which puts your own watching inside the scene.
Track what other people call Bateman across the film. (structure)
Colleagues mistake his name for another man's. His fiancee barely registers him. Dafoe's detective keeps almost seeing through him and never does. Nobody in the film ever confirms who he is.
Payoff: No outside witness is supplied, so his account of himself is never checked against anything. In the reading: powers of the false. The reading calls this the powers of the false: two incompatible versions of what happened, both allowed to stay true.
Look at the empty apartment near the end of the film. (setting)
The rooms he used are scrubbed, bare and on the market. The objects that anchored him have been cleared out. A broker talks about the view. White surfaces close over the whole story.
Payoff: The film removes the evidence instead of presenting it, and hands you back the same surfaces you started on.
Listen to what Bateman says about Huey Lewis and Phil Collins. (sound)
He delivers pop criticism in a sincere, detailed, entirely serious register, then cues the record as accompaniment for what he does next. The enthusiasm never once wavers.
Payoff: Taste talk is the only inner life he has on offer. He says it out loud because nothing else is there to say.
Carry this in: Watch the surfaces. Bateman puts more feeling into card stock and a skincare routine than into any person on screen.