American Psycho
Writer and director Mary Harron
"I think that [female filmmakers] come with a different set of tools or approaches to those areas where men and women's experiences are different," says Mary Harron, co-writer and director of American Psycho (2000). Based on Bret Easton Ellis's hot-button novel, the film follows Patrick Bateman — Reagan-era Wall Street shark by day, sadistic Jack the Ripper predator by night — who chronicles his repellant, degrading crimes while fetishizing the status objects of New York yuppie culture.
"There are so many large areas of experience that are the same if you're a man or a woman," continues Harron, "eating a peach is the same, but having sex is clearly different and some experiences in the outside world are different. So I think that, obviously, any movie dealing with sex and violence, a woman will bring a different perspective to it. Certainly, I'm sure I explored a whole set of female fears in the film because the character is something that would be frightening to a woman. What could happen to you on a date, or that good-looking, charming person turns out to be a monster. Men at their worst, what could they do to you."
When the Canadian-born Mary Harron first read American Psycho in 1991, she was in London and working for a BBC arts program which was covering the maelstrom of protests surrounding the novel's publication.
"As soon as I started reading it," she explains, "it seemed obvious to me that it was a social satire about the 80s. The press coverage I read omitted that, so right away it seemed it had been misidentified."
When the film's producers (who were impressed with her 1996 debut feature, I Shot Andy Warhol) approached Harron to direct American Psycho, she didn't shy away from the material, which had been labeled as misogynist.
"I wouldn't make a film that endorses the maltreatment of women," she states, "but it's clearly an attack on it. It's a critique of bad male behavior, not an endorsement of it. Where the controversy came from was the level of violence and the graphic detail. Some people felt that [Ellis had] gone too far in describing in a first-person book the killer's frenzy. That doesn't mean that the novel as a whole is saying that Patrick Bateman is a good thing. People saw the level of violence and the detail of it and couldn't see anything else. It's almost a willful misunderstanding of what the book is trying to say."
Her adaptation of American Psycho "would focus more on the social satire," and while Harron does not ignore Patrick Bateman's bloodlust, she chooses to leave the most grisly aspects of his crimes to the audience's fertile imagination.
"I would do that with any kind of violence anyway," she asserts, "because I'm not really interested in gory things. But that was definitely the approach I thought American Psycho needed. It fit my temperament, to keep it off-screen, but also I felt if there was too much violence, the same thing would happen all over again — that's all people would talk about — and it wasn't what really interested me."
Harron likens American Psycho not to serial killer films or a jokey slasher movies, but to other genre-busting explorations of American maleness like Fight Club (1999).
"Male culture has become very interesting to look at," she explains, "because it is under threat and changing after the impact of thirty years of the women's movement and everything. Even though they still run everything."
High level Wall Street executives in the go-go 1980s (prior to the democratization of the stock market) represent a particularly fascinating microcosm for Harron.
"I think what Bret caught was this whole alpha male culture," she says, "but it's also fantastically insecure and panicky. They're always worried about someone outdoing them and they're very concerned about what other people think of them. They don't want to transgress the social code. It's as rigid as the court of Louis XIV."
It's the kind of world that could harbor someone like Patrick Bateman — striver, conformist, control freak, killer — who has "constructed his identity from a lot of external images, from the reflection of how other people see him."
"It's like he's born without a center," Harron continues, "without an inside. He's not really a human being, but he's trying to construct an identity that will allow him to pass as a human being." Bateman, she adds, is less a real person than "a collection of symptoms."
"You have to remember," she asserts, "it's not a naturalistic film. It's not a realistic psychological portrait of an actual killer. In the real world, he'd get caught because he kills people he knows. So it's clearly a surreal satire with horror elements."
As opposed to a horror film with surreal elements, which is what many critics and viewers expect from American Psycho. So while Mary Harron watches from the sidelines (her second child with husband, director John C. Walsh, is due in two weeks), her hotly-debated film opens in theaters nationwide. She is not disturbed by the fact that audiences — love it or loath it — are taking the work quite seriously.
"The thing is," she states simply, "it's supposed to be upsetting, this film."
© 2000, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.