Nightmare Fuel / American Psycho

Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est?

Patrick Bateman is far from the most mentally sane man and all iterations of the plot show just how disturbed his psyche truly is.

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From the book

• The description of how he cuts a prostitute in half just above her vagina with a chainsaw and she retains consciousness just long enough to watch him pull her legs away from her upper body.
• Patrick performs rat torture on a kidnapped woman by forcing a Habitrail tube into her vagina— using acid to widen the orifice— then forcing a starved rat to crawl into her vagina. He removes the tube and watches as the rat eats the restrained woman from the inside out... Not in the movie for obvious reasons.
• Some of the murder descriptions in the book are absolutely chilling, especially the deaths of Elizabeth and Christie.
• His description of himself near the end of the book and which also concluded the movie in a somewhat condensed fashion:
  "There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy, and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My consciousness, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever existed. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused, and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing...
  • One interpretation of this is that Bateman has conveyed the entire story of the novel through the act of brutally murdering the reader. "But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed..."
• Patrick murders a child at the zoo by baiting him with cookies before stabbing him in the neck. The kicker is that the child doesn't actually die right away so Patrick pretends to be a doctor and ensures the death of the child in front of his panicking mother.
• In the case of Bethany, it was not only the horrific way she was murdered but the added 'you can never really know someone' aspect of it being a man she once dated.
  • Bethany's death is so horrifying it loops around to being a Tear Jerker - she is the Woobie to end all Woobies. She is effectively crucified with a nail gun, then violently forced to give Patrick oral sex repeatedly. The last we hear of her is when Patrick mentions he has cut her left arm off - he uses it to morbidly disfigure her corpse, bashing her repeatedly in the face, causing it to cave in on itself.
• During a scene in which Patrick grinds up a woman's corpse into hamburgers and eats it, he muses that in his heart, he knows what he's doing is wrong, but then reminds himself that "this girl, this meat, is nothing". He knows what he's doing is wrong. He just doesn't care.
• Bateman's chaotic, disjointed and completely emotionless descriptions of sexual acts. For him, his sexual partners are just another thing he consumes in the same way he consumes champagne and buys expensive items. He describes women in exactly the same tones that he describes his furniture. Sex with them is a purely mechanical process, explained in extreme, vulgar detail. It's strikingly and unnervingly inhuman, almost like a machine describing sex.
  • In perhaps one of the most disturbing scenes in the book, Patrick segues immediately from the middle of his mechanical, emotionless description of sex with a woman into a mechanical, emotionless description of murdering her brutally. In his mind, sex and violence are practically indistinguishable.

From the movie

• The drawer of "implements" Patrick searches through. Among the more standard tools (knives, scalpels, and scissors) are a metal clothes hanger, a mousetrap, and a hole punch.
  • Christie even tells Patrick the second time he goes see her that she had to go to surgery and probably needs to get a lawyer.
    • Worse, this is almost word-for-word how it's depicted in the book too. The book, which is notorious for extremely graphic, horrific, upsetting and extremely disturbing murder sequences, lets Nothing Is Scarier take hold for once, and in both the film and the book, it's just as disturbing as the murder sequences we do see. Guinevere Turner even states in the blu-ray commentary track that she's had numerous people ask her how much they had to tone down that scene, and also that there are people convinced that they read the book and there was an elaborate scene of what happened between the opening the drawer and cutting to the prostitutes being walked to the door.
      I stand up and walk over to the armoire, where, next to the nail gun, rests a sharpened coat hanger, a rusty butter knife, matches from the Gotham Bar and Grill and a half-smoked cigar; and turning around, naked, my erection jutting out in front of me, I hold these items out and explain in a hoarse whisper, "We're not through yet…". An hour later I will impatiently lead them to the door, both of them dressed and sobbing, bleeding but well paid. Tomorrow Sabrina will have a limp. Christie will probably have a terrible black eye and deep scratches across her buttocks caused by the coat hanger. Bloodstained Kleenex will lie crumpled by the side of the bed along with an empty carton of Italian seasoning salt I picked up at Dean & Deluca.
• While much of the film is meant to be comedic, Patrick chasing a woman down hallway whilst wielding a chainsaw is downright chilling.
  • Add to the fact that Christie is screaming and running through the apartment and nobody bothers to leave their apartments.
• Christian Bale's performance as Patrick Bateman. Through the attractive appearance, stylistic clothing, and 'warm' personality, you can tell something is... off about him. Even without the implications (or at least we think) of being a murderer, you can tell there's something is unsettling about him.
• The end of the infamous speech mentioned above (moved to the beginning). As Bateman monologues, he slowly begins to peel off the face mask he had applied earlier... Which, rather than looking like removing a mask, looks like he is removing a layer of skin instead.
• Jean being a literal hairline away from getting shot in the head by Patrick, being spared only by him getting a phone call at the last moment and the lengthy message making him realize that doing her in wouldn't be to his advantage. She never even knew her life was in danger.
  • Then near the end she finds Patrick's planner with the graphic doodles of his torture, rape, and murder of another woman...
• Towards the end of the movie, when Patrick returns to Paul Allen's apartment, it's been completely cleared out and there's no implication that the murder ever happened in the first place. The scene really starts to get creepy when he talks to the realtor, who acts as though she knows nothing either. Rather than appearing to be just another person oblivious to the fact that anything is wrong, she actually manages to come off as menacing to even Patrick himself by coming off as just as much as an American Psycho as him, albeit one who is actually reserved, composed and in control of herself and the situation. Then there's the implication that she actually cleaned everything out so that she'd still be able to sell the apartment.
• The film's score by John Cale. In the film it's easy to overlook with the imagery overlaying it, but by itself, the majority of it is just atonal strings that are as beautiful as they are just plain eerie, and even if were one were to listen to it by its own, they'd be able to piece together a story of someone losing their grip on sanity; especially "The Desk", "The Day Planner" and "The End", either by themselves or listened to back to back. It's just downright creepy.
  • "The Day Planner" in particular, due to both the atonal melodies and the ghostly, soft, overlapping female voices. It's played twice in the film, and the second time is over Jean looking at the deranged scribblings in Patrick's day planner as she just sobs. Guinevere Turner has said that it's meant to sound like the ghosts of Patrick's victims calling out to him- if one listens closely you can hear the words "you break my heart", which makes it overlap as a Tear Jerker.

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