- The director of American Psycho says many followers are misreading the movie. We “never expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all,” says Mary Harron. The movie celebrates its 25th anniversary this yr.
American Psycho was all the time meant to be a satire. The movie, launched in 2000, starred Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a New York Metropolis funding banker who additionally occurred to be a serial killer. Since then, he has develop into one thing of a TikTok favourite.
Director Mary Harron, nevertheless, says she is “mystified” by the “Wall Street bros” who idolize Bateman, including they’ve missed the purpose of the movie.
Bateman would possibly put on good fits and have cash and energy, however he’s, at his core, a idiot, she mentioned—and the movie itself is “a gay man’s satire on masculinity,” she informed Letterboxd Journal in an interview marking the movie’s silver anniversary.
American Psycho was based mostly on a e-book by creator Bret Easton Ellis. Harron mentioned “[Ellis] being gay allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males, which is also true in sports, and it’s true in Wall Street, and all these things where men are prizing their extreme competition and their ‘elevating their prowess’ kind of thing. There’s something very, very gay about the way they’re fetishizing looks and the gym.”
It additionally went on to be a Broadway musical.
For that and different causes, Harron says she and different filmmakers by no means anticipated the movie can be embraced by the finance neighborhood, a lot much less a brand new technology. TikTok, although, has given the movie one other chew of the apple, as clips of Bateman have trended repeatedly with customers.
“I’m always so mystified by it,” Harron mentioned. “I don’t assume that [co-writer Guinevere Turner] and I ever anticipated it to be embraced by Wall Road bros, in any respect. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m undecided why [it happened], as a result of Christian’s very clearly making enjoyable of them.”
The movie was met with criticism from feminist teams earlier than its launch, with some pointing to its poisonous masculinity and misogyny. Afterward, some backed away from that, citing Harron’s course. Critic Roger Ebert, on the time, wrote “She’s transformed a novel about blood lust into a movie about men’s vanity.”
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
