"American Psycho" is seen as a "black satire". It exaggerates a portrait of how certain business classes in the United States sit back and manipulate other people's money without creating anything for society. This, of course, refers to the kind of people on Wall Street. These characters often appear on screens in Hollywood movies such as The Ultimatum and The Arbitrage Deal.
Bateman, the film's protagonist, symbolizes the materialism and self-centered mental state of the 1980s.
He's not focused on people, he's about things. For him, imported foreign moisturizers, expensive suits, high-tech equipment and fancy business cards are more important than his fiancée, wife or colleagues.
The protagonist of The American Psycho is Patrick Bateman (Christian Bell), the ideal American of the 1980s, handsome, intelligent, educated, and successful. He was omnipotent, engaged to a wealthy woman, Evelyn, and was quite a woman among his colleagues. Bateman ostensibly works on Wall Street, but in fact he spends his days with friends from wealthy families at the hippest restaurants and clubs.
The film is full of empty Americans. Bateman's work was just to "follow the customs", and the large sum of money left by his parents was enough for him to quit his job easily. The whole world of this person is not only about maintaining a harmonious relationship with friends of the same class, but also about having to be the best in everything.
When he and his friends showed their expensive business cards, they preferred the other person's business card to his, which made Bateman sweat profusely. He is a man who is completely obsessed with appearance and spares no effort every day to make himself look the best. The others around him were just as superficial.
But Bateman has one difference from the others: He brutally tortures and murders people.
At least he thought so himself. This is not a problem, because the hero simply lives in a world without the consequences of his actions.
He first killed a professional rival, Paul Allen. A detective who came to investigate spared Bateman because someone had mistakenly proved that Bateman was elsewhere on the night of Alan's death. This mistake arises because all of those people are equally empty and boring, and as a result, it is difficult for people to truly identify different people.
The plot of this movie seems very simple, and the character structure has some empty flavor, but if you think about it carefully, you will find the "mystery" in it.
The film emphasizes that no matter how much Bateman actually does, he is seen as a "success" person. His father actually owned a huge company. We never saw What Bateman was doing in his office, and his calendar was blank except for violent graffiti.
No matter how arrogant he was to his colleagues, they still admired or revered Bateman. No matter how much Bateman disparages his female secretaries and other staff, they still compliment him. His fiancée also defied Bateman's indifference and sarcasm, and was desperate to marry him. Even when he talks to his friend's fiancée, he doesn't have to pay any price, and he can be absent-minded no matter what he does.
Bateman despises people who do not belong to his "category". He has money and power.
Is Bateman crazy? At some point in the film, the protagonist's voiceover says this:
"I have all the characteristics of a person: blood, flesh, skin, and hair, but I don't have a clear emotion that can be recognized, except greed and disgust. Something terrible is happening to me, and I don't know why. The bloodlust at night extends to daytime. I wanted to kill, on the verge of rage. I think that mask of sanity is about to slip down..."
This is very clear self-reflection. Can a truly crazy person parse himself so deeply?
His murderous tendencies were unpredictable. A street wanderer, a competitive colleague, an ordinary woman, and everyone else has fallen victim to Bateman's irrepressible desire to kill and extreme boredom. The jealousy that comes with comparing business cards may explain Bateman's murder of a colleague, but all the rest of the crime seems completely haphazard and unpredictable.
And this may be important, the protagonist is almost the kind of "untrustworthy narrator".
The film skillfully plays with the notion that Bateman's violence belongs only to the revenge fantasies of a group of bored corporate upper-class white-collar workers.
For example, when he carried a chainsaw in his hand to chase a girl who had escaped from his house in the corridor of a high-rise apartment building, he did not attract the attention of anyone in the apartment building. On another occasion, when a colleague saw Bateman dragging a box that apparently contained corpses (even blood stains), he said nothing about what was inside.
The above fragment is more like the hero's fantasy world than reality, because in the real world this conception obviously does not exist.
Critics have said a lot about the confusing nature of the film. Is the film about reality, or is the whole experience just a series of phantoms? When a film is deliberately designed to be confused with reality, it often causes resentment among mainstream audiences.
If you don't like this feeling, you should avoid "American Psycho". It represents a stylized illusion of reality, a black hi-world full of absurd events. Beneath bateman's smiling surface lurks violence and danger, showing us the elite who hate everything in the week.
In fact, if you taste carefully, the real purpose of this film is not to show how crazy a person is, but to depict an entire class and extend to the entire economic system. It is this economic system that has created American upstarts like Bateman, who have "many descendants" in American society.
And when the ideal American becomes an invisible killer, the director uses comedy to satirize an entire class and express the theme he wants to show.