My viewing experience of this 2000 masterpiece is enhanced immeasurably when I watch it completely billy bollocks.
I am writing this on a Wednesday, which means I have already watched my favourite film American Psycho three times this week. The first time, I introduced it to our Christian family friends Paul and Eileen, who had come round for an evening meal and certainly didn’t expect to stay for a further two hours after eating. The second time, I had it on in the background while my girlfriend and I ordered reasonably-priced furniture for our balcony. And the third time, I watched it on my own, in the dark, completely naked and covered in pigs’ blood I’d poured on myself from a pack of pork chops.
I find the last of those viewing methods is really the only way to properly experience Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of the original source material, written by Donald Trump, Roseanne Barr and Kanye West defender Bret Easton Ellis. For clothes are just an obstacle that get between me and the film’s indubitable brilliance. When Paul Allen’s annoying little head is stoved in by Patrick Bateman’s seemingly store-fresh axe, I want to feel the blood splatter on my bare chest and thighs as if I were in the room. So I flick the pack of pork chops at myself to create the effect, and then have a massive wank.
Despite what most fans will probably tell you, that scene is not the film’s best. I am far more aroused by Bateman’s perspiratory reaction to a finely-designed business card with its own watermark. And when he monologues about post-Peter Gabriel Genesis to two prostitutes, my prostate pulsates so hard I momentarily go blind.
The script is so ridiculously quotable I simply cannot help but recite parts of it in everyday life, especially when I’m murdering women. “There are no girls with good personalities,” I said in the middle of a feminist protest walk last week, and in my mum’s last birthday card, I wrote: “You’re a fucking ugly bitch. I want to stab you to death and play around with your blood. Lots of love, Chris.”
It’s Christian Bale’s exquisite delivery of these lines that makes them so memorable and hilarious. His cold and highly-relatable performance as Bateman is one he will never better, and I shall continue to emulate it when eating in fine restaurants and from bloody labias. Through the eyes of a female director, Bateman is portrayed as a highly insecure yuppie with a vigorous face exfoliation and workout routine, a man who personifies fragile masculinity in a pro-Trump world. It’s testament to the film’s direction, writing, lighting, sound and catering that such material only proves more relevant today.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to return some videotapes.