Psycho-babble

A talk with Bret Easton Ellis

My senior honors thesis at Penn State was almost rejected because it dealt exclusively with American Psycho. Without even reading it, the committee had decided that Bret Easton Ellis's book was sex-ridden trash and unworthy of an honors treatment.

Such has been the ignorance surrounding the novel. Few books generate sufficient controversy to cause their publishers to recall them. For American Psycho, the situation was worse: Simon & Schuster, which had paid Ellis a $300,00 advance, refused to publish it. Vintage quickly bought the rights, and in 1991 it issued the first edition in softcover. That same day a women's-rights group opened a toll-free hotline so callers could listen to the goriest sections of the novel followed by the members' impassioned pleas to boycott it.

The film has inherited this controversy despite director Mary Harron's public announcement that the novel's infamous acts of sadism would take place offscreen. The troubles extended to the production itself. At first it was Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman and Mary Harron directing. Then Leonardo Di Caprio bumped Bale and Harron quit in protest. Oliver Stone replaced Harron but walked when Di Caprio bailed out because he thought the role would damage his image. Then it was back to square one with Bale and Harron.

Ellis admits his own initial feelings about Bale didn't help matters. "I initially thought Bale was a bad choice; I was reluctant. Mary was going to have to cut $4 million out of the budget if she wasn't going to cast a major star. And I thought, Bale? He's Welsh! And wasn't he that kid in that Spielberg movie?"

Indeed, Bale was that kid in Empire of the Sun. But when Ellis met the actor face to face, he found himself shrinking in his seat envisioning Christian as Patrick. "He is big! Big and menacing!"

And funny. At the press screening I attended, there were a lot of laughs and no screams. Like the novel, whose 400 pages serve up only 10 pages of graphic violence, the film is hilarious. Ellis saw it for the first time just the day before our conversation, and he was relieved. "For me the book was never about violence; that's not its preoccupation. I've always thought of the book as a criticism of male behavior, a very black comedy about that culture. The real psychopathological part of it is more cultural, and it's more unsettling because of the expectations of a culture that could create a Patrick Bateman. That's what the film clarifies."

Those willing to give the film a chance will be treated to the more comic incidents in the novel, as when Bateman and his co-workers one-up each other by flashing business cards. Harron films the scene with cards that look essentially the same (a notion you don't get from the novel), encouraging you to recognize the characters as the empty surfaces they are.

"I think it makes it funnier that the cards are the same," Ellis comments. "It's a competitiveness about style with these guys. It's about showing yourself off through a business card, by what suit you wear, by what you order at the restaurant, by whatever your cultural preferences are."

The film does, of course, depict Patrick's psychotic rage, and with material so difficult, some moviegoers won't be able to see American Psycho for the romping satire that it is. But Ellis, who had nothing to do with the script, finally decided that people can think what they want. "You know what?" he says in a moment of Batemanesque nihilism. "Ultimately I don't care. Did I just say that? No, really, it's being created by a team of individuals who are readapting this to another medium. I have no stake in this, and I have no interest in what other people say about the movie."

-- Steve Mirarchi

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