American Psychosis.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER
• Position: Review

WRITER-DIRECTOR Mary Harron's rendering of Bret Easton Ellis' hypercontroversial novel American Psycho may be less interesting as a movie than as a cultural event, which seems to be the fate of a number of films in the age of Hollywood's intellectual bankruptcy. The picture continues the fascination over the past two decades with the cinema of serial murder, and more than a few reviewers have suggested that this movie is little more than the latest addition to the genre. Obviously, "American Psycho" isn't marketed as such. Like the book, it has expansive ambitions, foremost of which is the association of serial murder with the predatory 1980s, when corporate capital and the Age of the Yuppie seemed to scrap all humane values. The point is explicit in everything from killer Patrick Bateman's obsessive-compulsive acquisitions to Pres. Ronald Reagan's appearance on the TV set in a toney restaurant, trying to rationalize his cover-up of the Iran-contra affair.

The political moralism of "American Psycho" makes it seem a bit more than a slasher film, but its relationship to the genre is clear enough, so much so that we need to reflect on the centrality of this form of horror to the contemporary cinema. In the lead role, Christian Bale is an athletic, less anemic-looking Anthony Perkins, and the link of "American Psycho" to director Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960) goes far beyond the similarity of the titles and the names Norman Bates and Patrick Bateman. Perkins once referred to the demented character he helped Hitchcock create as "the Hamlet of the horror film." The remark now seems very prescient. "Psycho" marked a change in the horror genre, as emphasis slowly shifted from vampires and laboratory experiments gone awry to monstrosities created by the ordinary middle-class family. Today, Leatherface, from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and Jason, from the endless "Friday the 13th" series, have a far greater iconic place in the popular imagination than Frankenstein or Dracula. After "Psycho," the "monster" no longer could be seen as a grotesque aberration within an otherwise normal society, but the representation of a serious crisis within American life, one illuminated by an emphasis on psychoanalysis. This new sense of the monstrous brought a different consciousness about the nature of evil, with pluses and minuses for the spectator.

The centrality of the image of the serial killer and his motivations raised questions about the valorization...