American Psycho · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Harron's film is organized around a sustained crystal-image: the murders Bateman commits — or imagines — are never resolved into the actual or the virtual, and this indiscernibility is the film's argument, not its puzzle. When Bateman dispatches Paul Allen to the rhythmic enthusiasms of "Hip to Be Square," the sequence's formal beauty — the choreography, the raincoat, the axe-swing synchronized to the beat — belongs equally to a fantasy of control and to a documentary of violence; Harron's compositionally severe camera, held at slight distance by cinematographer Andrzej Sekula, declines to adjudicate. This is the powers of the false operating at the level of identity as well as narration: Bateman is a forger with nothing to forge, a self constructed entirely of brand names and performed responses, whose murderous alter-ego may be the only place where something like interiority exists. Sekula's mise-en-scène — static, wide, compositionally severe — treats Bateman's Manhattan like a display case, every consumer surface rendered in the deadpan precision of a catalog. The extreme close-ups of competing business cards imbue embossed cardstock with the menace Hitchcock reserved for drains and eyeballs, a debt Harron openly inherits. But the deeper template is Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, whose technique of staging choreographed violence in precise rhythmic alignment with diegetic music — generating simultaneous horror and dark comedy — Harron transposes wholesale: the Phil Collins monologue before a killing is the Ludovico technique inverted, violence made aesthetic, the consumer made monstrous.