Never meet your heroes. And never listen to an artist attempt to explain their own work. Especially if that artist appears to harbor disdain for the very audience responsible for the continued relevance of their art.
Mary Harron, director of “American Psycho,” spoke with Letterboxd Journal for the 25th anniversary of the cult classic film. The movie, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel of the same name, follows Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a yuppie New York City banker who moonlights as a serial killer. Maybe. (His sanity is ill-established).
Welsh actor Christian Bale on the set of American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Canadian Mary Harron. (Photo by Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
“There’s [Bateman] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power. But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous,” says the director, according to Letterboxd. “When he’s in a nightclub and he’s trying to speak to somebody about hip hop—it’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool.”
Harron really, really doesn’t want people to like Bateman. But young men in particular really do. As it turns out, “being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power” remains an attractive goal for this particular cohort. This, regardless of Harron’s attempts at subversion. Or how embarrassing she finds the character. Or the legacy media’s pearl-clutching condemnation of anything towards which young men incline. (RELATED: Dem Gov Struggles To Explain Why Young Male Voters Are Walking Away From His Party)
Bale’s performance has earned sustained interest since the movie’s release in 2000. Widespread internet access cemented his place in the meme lexicon. The advent of TikTok saw a particular boon in the character’s popularity.
“TikTok’s toxic worshipping of Patrick Bateman is another sign young men are lost,” reads a GQ byline from 2022. The article condemns Bateman as “problematic” — a plausible, if understated, description of a man who feeds a live kitten to an ATM. That Stalin was pretty problematic too, come to think of it.
Harron acknowledges the “memes” and “TikTok, or whatever,” in the interview with Letterboxd.
“I’m always so mystified by it…I don’t think that Guinevere [Turner, co-screenwriter,] and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them,” says Harron to Letterboxd.
Harron may have failed in her activism. But her mystification betrays a lack of curiosity in why her movie continues to resonate among “Wall Street bros.” (RELATED: ‘I Enjoyed His Policies’: Swing-State Young Men Tell NBC News They’re Planning To Vote For Trump)
The much-maligned yuppies of the 1980’s rejected the rotten fruit of the Summer of Love: psychedelic induced psychosis, untrammeled underarm odor, and refusal of all things nice. Yuppies yearned for the cubicle. They consumed conspicuously and without shame. It was, as Bateman’s favored Huey Lewis and the News track says, “Hip To Be Square.” There is some of this spirit in the post-Millennial generation.
An embrace of Bateman is a rejection of a certain henpecking attitude familiar to Gen Z: “You’re not enjoying this in the right way.” The right way, in this instance, being the feminist way. Though postmodernism was supposed to usher in an age of relativity, it instead cleared a path for the High Priests of Woke to assert dominion over morality. This is a morality informed by popular television and media — hence why the properly accredited are supposed to interpret it on your behalf.
Similar interpretative debates flare up with regularity over Starship Troopers, a 1997 science fiction film about Americans fighting bug-like aliens.
The Starship Troopers discourse is always great because leftists inevitably end up identifying with with hideous murderous hive insects while passionately rejecting everything that is beautiful and heroic pic.twitter.com/2K2LJJm8mq
— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) February 19, 2024
“I was looking for the prototype of blond, white and arrogant,” said Director Paul Verhoeven of his casting process in an interview with The Guardian. “These heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda. No one saw it at the time.” Indeed, critics did not interpret the film as satire.
“We were accused by The Washington Post of being neo-Nazis!” whined Verhoeven in 2014.
Lead actress Denise Richards seems to depart from Verhoeven’s strict interpretative mandate, too.
“I love my character, and the fans seem to appreciate she’s a strong woman,” she said, according to The Guardian, calling the character a “great role model.”
Fans, for their part, continue to empathize with the human characters over the visually repellant arachnids.
It doesn’t matter if he intended it as some kind of “dunk”. It’s an awesome movie.
Would you like to know more? https://t.co/GqvxB7FMSJ pic.twitter.com/korl9WVJcX
— Doc Strangelove (@DocStrangelove2) March 10, 2024
There’s a very simple explanation for this phenomenon. People like attractive people. Beauty elicits empathy. This is the logic under which Hollywood labored for years, to great effect. Even if they seem to have abandoned these standards in more recent films.
Perhaps executives will realize this in time for the upcoming “American Psycho” reboot. Whoopi Goldberg in the role of Patrick Bateman would likely elicit less enthusiasm among young men, one speculates.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatalieIrene03
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
