American Psycho
In his 1987 introduction to Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the
American Mind” Saul Bellow wrote: “People reserve their best thinking
for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious
matters confronting the alert citizen — economics, politics, the
disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day's work done, they want
to be entertained. They can’t see why their entertainment should
not simply be entertaining.” Bellow was answering the charge that
his novels have proved “difficult” for some readers and alluding
to the fact that what he meant to be a satire of pedantry in “Herzog”
was taken for pedantry itself.
A comparable confusion clings to “American Psycho” in its novel
and film incarnations. While misinterpretation by readers or viewers
is sometimes a failure on the part of an artist to make him- or
herself understood, a failure to “understand” filmmaker Mary Harron’s
slyly entertaining adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s notorious
1991 opus must be placed squarely on the audience. Yes, the movie
is about a soulless serial killer who works in high finance in
New York in the 1980s — but it doesn’t have a single good or admiring
thing to say about soulless serial killers in that or any other
era.
There’s more blood visible in a French steak served à point than
there is onscreen in “American Psycho.” And, unlike the evening
news or most written accounts of famine, massacre and natural
disaster in the world, “American Psycho” is funny.
Christian Bale gives a stunning performance as homicidal yuppie
Patrick Bateman. Patrick has no inner life so he compensates by
working on his external characteristics: physique, skin, hair,
wardrobe, home furnishings and, uh, business cards. The virile
one-upmanship that took a whole chariot race to express in “Ben-Hur”
is distilled into a terrifyingly funny scene in “American Psycho”
in which a few young men whip out their business cards. And the
1980s equivalent of trench warfare — the class-leveling crucible
that forged and/or broke men of previous generations — is depicted
as managing to secure a reservation at the “right” restaurant.
Could it be that some people are missing obvious signs of social
satire in “American Psycho” because we are once again — or still
— mired in an era of “Greed is good,” as immoral financier Gordon
Gekko put it in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street”? This leaves squeamish
potential viewers with little to go on but the mistaken impression
that Harron’s outlandish comedy is some sort of ode to bludgeoning
co-workers and slashing women with impunity.
I came home from the press screening of “American Psycho” to find
a story in the April 17 issue of Variety saying Harron’s film
will not be distributed in the Czech Republic. Jan Bradac, managing
director of Falcon, the local Czech distributor for Columbia Tristar
International, “tells Variety he rejected the film on moral grounds
after seeing only a trailer. ‘It’s not even “Natural Born Killers”
or a Jean Claude Van Damme movie,’ he says. ‘This is just realistic
murder.’”
Harron herself may have put it best in an April 9 essay for The
New York Times, in which she described the production’s scattered
problems with protestors on location in Toronto and knee-jerk
condemnations of the film by people who hadn’t seen it and loftily
proclaimed that they never would. “Once you accept the idea that
the representation of violence is in itself harmful to society,”
Harron writes with a Cartesian shudder, “much of the finest world
cinema could be banned, from Eisenstein to Kurosawa to Kubrick
and Polanski to Coppola and Scorsese. Most genre films would have
to go too: film noir, horror, gangster films, westerns. This form
of censorship, taken to its logical conclusion, clearly means
the end of art. However, it does have a point, because no matter
how moral or ironic or satirical a filmmaker might think a work
is, he or she can have no control over how a member of the audience
will receive it. No sane person could watch ‘Taxi Driver’ and
decide it was a good idea to shoot the president — but an insane
person did. And who is to say that your audience will always consist
of the sane?”
In his Times review of Ellis’s book in March 1991 Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt concludes: “The author is saying that today such
monstrous criminality [as that indulged in by Bateman] is indistinguishable
from the general behavior of society. But Ellis’s true offense
is to imply that the human mind has grown so corrupt that it can
no longer distinguish between form and content. He has proved
himself mistaken in that assumption by writing a book whose very
confusion of form and content has caused it to fail, and for that
offense and no other does one have cause to excoriate ‘American
Psycho.’”
People who have always paid others to do their laundry may take
solace in a different sort of laundry list. In his indignant,
withering call to ignore Ellis’s book, Roger Rosenblatt wrote
in the Times of December 16, 1990: “What ‘American Psycho’ has
is the most comprehensive lists of baffling luxury items to be
found outside airplane gift catalogues. I do not exaggerate when
I say that in his way Ellis may be the most knowledgeable author
in all of American literature. Whatever Melville knew about whaling,
whatever Mark Twain knew about rivers are mere amateur stammerings
compared with what Ellis knows about shampoo alone.”
In a March 6, 1991, interview with the Times, Ellis said: “Bateman
is a misogynist. In fact, he's beyond that, he is just barbarous.
But I would think most Americans learn in junior high to differentiate
between the writer and the character he is writing about. People
seem to insist I'm a monster. But Bateman is the monster. I am
not on the side of that creep.”
I am not on the side of that creep either. Nor is Harron. But
I am most definitely on the side of this movie. (June 7)
Mission to Mars
Welcome to Film Reviewing 101. Your assignment today, class, is
to come up with as many variations as you can on the sentence
“This is not a good movie.” For inspiration, we will watch Brian
De Palma’s space opera “Mishmash to Mars.”
“Mission to Mars” was an Official Selection shown out of competition
at Cannes. It is not the worst celluloid concoction ever to benefit
from such a prestigious slot, but it is what we in the profession
call “a bad movie.” It starts on June 9, 2020, at a chummy backyard
barbecue on Earth, quickly switching to the surface of the red
planet 13 months later. The film offers fascinating insights into
the evolution of popular culture. For example, perhaps elevators
will have been replaced by teleporters in another 20 years, meaning
elevator music will have to migrate elsewhere. This movie’s score
proves that even if you go all the way to Mars, smarmy music can
still find you. It also points out that there’s only a 3% discrepancy
between human DNA and ape DNA, “but that 3% gives you Einstein,
Mozart — and Jack the Ripper.” It also gives you De Palma, who,
in one of the few segments of this venture I applaud, demonstrates
that M&Ms are part of the key to the origins of life on Earth.
Their early advertising slogan was “Melts in your beak, not in
your prehensile paw.” (May 12)
Cut
“Cut” is several cuts above most teen slasher flicks. This self-reflexive
comedy from Australia, which has drawn inevitable comparisons
to “Scream” and its sequels, is as inventive as it is deliberately
cheesy. Fourteen years after the director of gore-o-centric B-movie
“Hot Blooded” was mysteriously murdered in mid-shoot, some film
students round up the surviving footage, lure the unfinished pic’s
American star (Molly Ringwald in a very funny turn) back to the
original spooky set and take their chances on awakening the alleged
curse that shut down production the first time. There are plenty
of laughs about low-budget filmmaking and a few clever set pieces
about masked killers and the power of creativity. A dumb movie
that doesn’t insult your intelligence, “Cut” is a guilty pleasure
and a lot of fun. (May 31)
Alive and Kicking
(La Rage de vivre)
Martin Sherman, who wrote “Bent,” penned the screenplay to this
flawed but enormously affecting film set in a London dance world
decimated by AIDS. Handsome Tonio (Jason Flemyng in a memorable,
versatile performance) is HIV+ but refuses to take medication
for fear that it will prevent him from dancing. The members of
his ragtag band of dancer friends are flamboyant and supportive
in ways that often seem cloying and precious. But the portrayal
of Tonio’s budding romance with a tubby therapist (Antony Sher)
is so convincing in its humor and vicissitudes that one is completely
drawn in. There is also an incredibly well-wrought depiction of
Alzheimer’s robbing a batty choreographer of her wits as surely
as AIDS whittles away a dancer’s body. Emotionally satisfying
despite uneven moments, this is a movie that sticks to your ribs
instead of gliding off your eyeballs. (May 31)
Blast from the past
(Première Sortie)
Born and raised underground in the ingenious fallout shelter his
father built as a hedge against Cold War lunacy, 35-year-old Adam
(adorable paragon of comic timing Brendan Fraser) discovers contemporary
Los Angeles with the eyes of a Candide schooled in impeccably
wholesome 1950s-style manners. I saw this after a long day of
insufferable French films that should never have been financed
let alone slated for Cannes, and its sweet, zesty humor gave me
the strength to go on living. (You may think I jest, but prolonged
exposure to insufferable French films can be nearly as bad as
nuclear radiation.) (May 24)
