American Psycho · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the business cards again. Four men at a conference table slide rectangles of paper across polished wood, and the camera leans in on each one — the weight of the stock, the off-white the dossier files under bone, the watermark, the "tasteful thickness" — with the reverence you'd give a relic lifted from a reliquary. Bateman's face goes slack over a typeface. The scene is funny because nothing is at stake and lethal because, for him, everything is. He could kill over the lettering. That, not the axe, is the murder American Psycho is really about, and it tells you which Deleuze to bring.

Start low, with what Deleuze called the impulse-image: a world of raw drives erupting under the social surface, sliding on a line-of-slope toward exhaustion. Its signature is the fetish — a part-object (food, a body, an embossed card) loaded with a compulsive charge it can't possibly carry. Harron's film is a catalogue of fetishes. The card stock. The skincare regimen narrated over a peeling gel mask. The Valentino suits and Hermès ties the costume notes call armor. The brand names recited like liturgy before the Phil Collins monologue tips into blood. The trick of the impulse-image is that the polished Manhattan of marble lobbies and open-plan offices — Deleuze's derived-milieu, the respectable surface — is only the skin over an originary-world of pure appetite. The reservations Bateman can't get, the cards he can't out-class: these aren't plot. They're the drive showing through.

But the body carrying that drive is doing something stranger, and here Deleuze gives us a sharper word: the gest. Not gesture in the ordinary sense, but a posture that exposes a social relation, the body caught performing its own role. Bale's Bateman, the dossier insists, is "assembled from other men's signals" — conspicuously built muscle that reads as construction, an affect modeled on a talk-show smile, warmth with nothing behind it. He mimics the shape of emotion without its content. The morning-routine sequence states it outright: a man narrating a self he has mistaken for a self, his masked face staring back from the glass. The film is a cinema of the body in which every attitude is a quotation.

Which brings the mirrors. They're everywhere — the dossier calls Bateman's most intimate moments reflections rather than direct address — and they push the film toward what Deleuze named the crystal-image, where you can no longer separate a thing from its image. In its saturated form, the crystal is an enclosed, mirror-lined world with no outside: nothing in it that isn't already a reflection of something else. Toronto playing a "plausibly New York without being of it" Manhattan; an apartment that is a shrine of objects displaying a man who is himself a luxury object among them. There is no real Manhattan behind this one, no authentic Bateman behind the reflection. The crystal has closed over. This is also why the surfaces feel crystalline in Deleuze's other sense — descriptions that compose an object and then quietly replace it. Taste has stood in for interiority so completely that the performance is the person. Consumption replaces a soul, and the replacement is seamless.

Then the film makes its real move, the one that resolved a novel everyone called unfilmable. It refuses to tell you whether the murders happened. The vanished bodies, the apartment scrubbed and for sale, Dafoe's detective forever about to see through Bateman and never quite doing it, the confession that lands on no one — Harron stages two mutually exclusive worlds and lets both stay true. Deleuze called this the powers of the false: not lying, but making true-and-false genuinely undecidable as a creative principle, falsifying narration where incompatible versions coexist. Its hero is the forger — the man of serial, shifting identity who doesn't possess a truth but fabricates one, over and over. Bateman is the forger raised to a worldview. "There is no real me," he tells us, and the form takes him at his word. The novel kept you trapped inside his skull, certain of the killing. Harron's invention is the slight remove — the camera "declining to fully enter his subjectivity" — that converts certainty into a question. The horror stops being did he do it and becomes there may be no one here to have done it.

The craft debts are exact. The fetish close-up — mundane object as menace — is Hitchcock's drain and eye from Psycho, and Sekula carried his own static-anamorphic object-worship straight over from the briefcase and watch of Pulp Fiction. The pop-song-against-atrocity counterpoint is Kubrick's "Singin' in the Rain" and Lynch's Orbison, inherited wholesale. The cold static wide that observes violence and indicts your appetite for it is Haneke's Funny Games. The dissonant score under an unreliable male voice is Herrmann's Taxi Driver. What Harron seeds forward is the millennial mind-game structure — the reality-destabilizing film built to be re-watched — but moralized into satire: the undecidable here isn't a puzzle to solve, it's a diagnosis. A culture that mistakes performance for identity will, naturally, produce a self you cannot confirm is even there.

Watch it again for the cards. You'll see the whole film in the font.