Friday, Jul 25, 2008
"American Psycho": Trenchant social commentary? Plus: Linking to hate sites; techno-geeks debate libertarianism.
Apr 18, 2000 | "American Psycho"
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
(04/14/00)
What a relief it was to read Stephanie Zacharek's dismissive review of "American Psycho."
For a while I was afraid there was a conspiracy of critics to fob off "American Psycho" as a great piece of satirical moviemaking and incidentally to rescue the reputation of Brett Easton Ellis, whose lack of any real imagination apparently shouldn't keep him from being thought of as a first-rate novelist.
The men who work on Wall Street are drones, not sublimated serial killers. Their work makes them tools. It's degrading and dehumanizing, but it doesn't make them monsters, it makes them worker ants and it's important to remember that in ant colonies the worker ants are female.
The swaggering and the posturing guys like Bateman and his pals do -- it's really nothing more than wound-licking. The misogyny, if it exists as Ellis and the movie portray it, is their way of reassuring themselves that they are still men. Ellis might have been onto something if he'd shown that Bateman's violence was his way of compensating for his emasculation, for all the groveling, cringing and bootlicking he has to do in order to hold onto his job and his pretty toys.
"American Psycho" lets us envy the lifestyle while pretending to criticize it. Neither the book nor, apparently, the movie, actually satirizes these guys' greed. The target is their swaggering masculinity (making the old, old Andrea Dworkinish point that just being male is an act of misogyny). We're left with a loophole: Lives built around money and expensive consumer goods are only bad if you're not a woman or a sensitive male who would never hurt a fly or open his.
-- David Reilly
I always laugh when people talk about how shallow the '80s were, as if the '90s and today are any different. We had a vapid and corrupt Republican president in the '80s and we had/have an intelligent, corrupt and sleazy Democratic president in the '90s and today. Pop music is as crappy now as it ever was in the '80s -- I'll trade you one Ricky Martin for one Huey Lewis any day. Big bucks were made on Wall Street and Silicon Valley both in the '80s and '90s in a way that appears obscene to most people. The only difference between the two eras is that many more people will be hurt financially when the dot-com frenzy finally implodes than were ever hurt by the Michael Milkens and Ivan Boeskys of the 1980s.
-- Martin Kannengieser
Zacharek admits she has never read the book. Given this fact, I'm not sure why this review is even considered worthy of print. As someone who has been able to bring himself to read Ellis' novel, I'm part of the population most likely to watch this movie, deemed by many too graphically violent.
Instead of a thoughtful review I get bland, hackneyed generalizations about the 1980s by a reviewer unwilling to take her own advice: It is never hip to be hollow.
-- Bob Ellinger
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