Patrick Bateman : There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman...some kind of an 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 may be you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable...I simply am not there.
..........
I have all the characteristics of a human being: blood, flesh, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly blood lust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.
Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is a 27-year-old investment banker at Pierce & Pierce who deals in "murders and executions". Being narcissistic and extremely self-obsessed, he finds it annoying when people always get his name wrong or if they haven't heard about the firm where he works. Picking hookers off the street and regaling them with expensive champagne and his knowledge of the 80's music scene comes as easily to him as killing them later and dumping their bodies in upscale New York where nobody notices anything.
There isn't a real plot in the movie, even though a police officer, Kimball (William Dafoe), is on his trail after a co-worker of Bateman, Paul Allen, mysteriously disappears. There are numerous scenes where all these self-obsessed Wall Street types are getting each other's names wrong and never really listening to what someone else is saying. The whole movie is a satire on the superficiality of New Yorkers in the 1980s where people are more concerned about the "Silian Rail" lettering on their business cards or the Valentino suits. Even when Bateman confesses in front of his friends, "I like to dissect girls", nobody gives it a second thought. A similar scene where he is explaining to his girlfriend, Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), about how he messed up while trying to kill a hooker while drawing the whole scene on the white sheet on their table, Evelyn isn't really concerned about what he is saying. When Bateman starts to fall apart while thinking his alibi on the night of Paul Allen's killing may not hold, he finally confesses to his lawyer about the 20-40 people he has killed. Only that his lawyer laughs it away saying Bateman is a "spineless lightweight" who never had it in him to kill someone. At which Bateman gets even more frustrated while shouting, "I'm Patrick Bateman". In the final scene as he sits with his friends with his back against a door that says, "This is not an exit", he wonders to himself-
There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, the mayhem I have caused, my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. 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. And even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me. And I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling, this confession has meant nothing.
A lot of people categorize this movie as a thriller where the ending is left open-ended to suggest Bateman might have imagined it all. While, on the contrary, there are lots of scenes to suggest that it isn't so. And once you read the book by Bret Easton Ellis (I'm still in the middle of it), the whole theme becomes pretty much clear. Even though the sequence of events in the movie does not exactly follow that of the book's and most of the gory details of the killings have been left out in this movie, the director, Mary Harron, does a brilliant job of bringing the controversial and much talked-about character of Patrick Bateman on screen. I had read somewhere that DiCaprio was also considered to play the lead character, however, I feel Christian Bale did have a slight edge on playing this role and was rightly chosen.
Rating: 8/10
No comments:
Post a Comment