Intimate Portraits of Madness: American Psycho, Uncut Gems, Remains of the Day
[In this column, I will again return to the mini-art-criticism format by discussing three works of art which I have read/watched over the last several months, which I believe are extremely connected to each other. Obviously there are lots of spoilers.]
American Psycho (2000)
"I can't believe Bryce prefers Van Patten's card to mine..."
My story parallels those of many other men of my generation. I finally watched American Psycho recently after years of seeing business card memes on the Internet.
American Psycho is what is known as a "cult classic."
Like many other critics to write about American Psycho, I am haunted by the fear that I may sound as nonsensically bullshitting as its protagonist, stereo aficionado Patrick Bateman, does in the key scene in which he energetically monologues meaningless critical jargon about Huey Lewis and the News while dancing around with an ax.
This cult-classic critical indie darling...*axe noises*
This, though, is what struck me most forcefully after finally watching the film: that it is the only movie I have seen in the last seven years that actually feels relevant.
America has changed a lot since 2016, and especially since the Pandemic. Now, we are supposed to have a fundamentally negative view of our society, and especially its leaders and elites, Wall Street and the Banks and the 1% and the Deep State. Now, we are supposed to be afraid of angry young white men, incels or deplorables or white nationalists or just arrogant mansplaining assholes. Now, we are supposed to be concerned (sometimes, at least, when not talking about someone on our side of the culture-war divide) about sexual violence in all its forms. Now, we are supposed to be aware of privilege and power.
And yet, and yet...it is difficult for me to think of a single work of art during this period that has successfully dealt with these allegedly relevant topics. Movies with rich-asshole antagonists are presented with breathless pride, as though Columbo and It's a Wonderful Life and all of pop culture had never existed, and yet fail to present their antagonists with any particular insight or novelty. Movies with young maladjusted white male villains, alas, rarely rise even to the level of Heathers. Movies and television shows portraying "Trumpist"-analogous villains are in practice entirely indistinguishable from pre-existing stories of villainous poor people, rural people, and/or terrorists. Popular culture, in general, has chosen to tackle contemporary phenomena by simply repeating without elaboration hoary tropes that go back, in most cases, to the Great Depression, or at the very best to the War on Terror.
American Psycho, though, does capture these allegedly relevant topics in contemporary America, in a way that is both insightful and (to me) novel.
To sum up: the film follows Patrick Bateman, a featureless, extraordinarily well-groomed young white man who works in finance along with a bevy of other well-groomed young white men, all of whom are largely indistinguishable and are frequently mistaken for each other. Like his peers, Bateman appears to spend most of his time eating lunch and/or dinner with his finance colleagues, where they crack ironic jokes or repeat Wikipedia summaries to each other, or else sitting around his office or fashionable apartment watching pornography. He may also be a serial killer.
What makes the film feel sharply relevant, though, is not just that it happens to be about a rich white man working in finance who (probably) commits violence against women. There are, alas, plenty of films that touch on these issues much more directly, and much less effectively. What makes it feel so relevant is how these matters are handled.
To start with, Patrick Bateman is one of the few filmic villains or serial killers to not be portrayed as cool, or at least iconic. He is offputting in his mannerisms, intensely social conformist in all outward aspects of his person, and a dweeb. This is far more true to life.
Likewise, the portrayal of Wall Street and elite circles is not in Great-Gatsby-esque grand hedonism and charming-villainy mode. It is, rather, a crushingly boring world filled with blank conformists performing interchangeable and meaningless tasks.
Then, too, Bateman and his peers anticipate by several decades the speech and habits of "Internet-poisoned" young men by communicating entirely through symbols, ironic pseudo-jokes, personal image-projection, references, and Wikipedia summaries--or in other, word, memes.
Then, too, my going assumption before watching the film was that Bateman would primarily kill his fellow Wall Street competitors, thus serving as a satire of real-world elite competition and systemic violence. Instead (with one possible exception), he kills (or doesn't) anonymous homeless people and prostitutes. This is both a more interesting satire (in that such elite systems do more directly harm such people) and a revelation of the degree to which Bateman and people are like him are totally crushed by and bound to their social system, and unwilling and able to work against its grain and logic rather than merely furthering its effects.
Then, too, and most importantly, Bateman himself appears to spend all of his time alone watching pornography.
Dare I say, what this film grasps that few films about either young men or America or both grasp, is that the crisis of Bateman and young deranged men and America is first and foremost a crisis of interiority and relationships--especially relationships with the opposite sex.
What drives Bateman, by his own admission, is the overpowering fear that he does not exist. Existing in a competitive system surrounded by replaceable peers, he fulfills various economic and social and relational functions, meticulously conforms himself to social conventions, and in so doing loses any sense of his own existence, dignity, or value. And this, I firmly believe, is in fact the driving force behind much of the psychotic behavior in young American men today.
Like many such men, too, Bateman responds to this crisis by attempting to "break out"--and like virtually all such people, his breaking out ends up merely an extension and reification of the system he hates. Bateman thus spends his time watching pornography, and is obsessed with sexualized violence against women.
This again feels relevant in an almost uncanny given when the movie came out. Articles today inform me that most pornography on the Internet is violent--and many Internet men I have encountered are clearly obsessed in a similar fashion with similar things.
The basic joke of the film, though, is that this obsession, although treated by Bateman as a shocking and exciting aberration to be kept hidden from other people, is in fact perfectly in keeping with the ethos and values of the conformist system Bateman lives in; and no doubt shared to one extent or other by most of his peers.
Of course, most of his peers are not, in fact, murdering prostitutes. Is Bateman? Here lies the basic ambiguity of the film--an ambiguity apparently even more pronounced in the book it was based on (which I have not read).Apparently the author of the book was unhappy with the movie precisely because, in his view, it weighted that ambiguity too heavily towards the reality of the murders.
Still, the film is in the end at least broadly ambiguous on the point. And here, I think, lies the crux of its meaning and significance.
The film ends, after Bateman has confessed his murders to his lawyer and been coldly informed that they are impossible since the lawyer recently had lunch with someone he claims to have murdered, with Bateman back with his colleagues sitting around eating lunch and discussing Ronald Reagan. Gazing at this perfect media President, the young men half-humorously question whether the image of grandfatherly benevolence he projects is actually genuine or not--what is he like on the inside? At which Bateman thinks: "But inside doesn't matter."
Turned around, this is the question posed by the film: does inside matter?
A relatively surface-level take on the film would be that, in the film's view, it does not matter whether Bateman has actually committed murders or not. I don't think this is true, though: in fact, it matters a great deal, both to his possible victims, and to Bateman himself.
Bateman is a young man who has outwardly conformed himself externally to the competitive economic system and society and ethos around him while filling his entire interior self with imaginations of sexual violence. Does this matter?
One could just as easily put this question in entirely contemporary terms: does it matter that there are hundreds, thousands of young men on the Internet who have done just this, outwardly conformed themselves to the demands of bizarre Internet societies and/or their crushing workplaces while filling their interior selves with violent pornography?
Hence the importance of the murders both to Bateman and the film. If Bateman has actually killed someone, anyone, then it is a sign that his interior madness does, in fact, have outward effects that matter to someone, if only to the persons he kills. The one member of his Wall Street elite world that he manages to (allegedly) murder raises the threshhold of significance, at least for Bateman, significantly. If Bateman is a serial killer who has murdered dozens, the threshhold of significance is raised yet further--while nonetheless not fundamentally changing Bateman's own hellish interior life and lack of personal relationships or sense of personal dignity and value.
One might say similar things about the popular culture engagement with Internet male subcultures since 2016, and the glee and fervor with which their condemnation has been greeted by people within these communities. If they are in fact really and truly Nazis, really and truly a direct political threat to America and the government and motherhood and apple pie, then, despite their hellish interior lives and crushing social conformity, they in fact truly matter. They exist. Otherwise, they are merely stuck in hells of their own making.
All of this is brilliant and effective enough. Yet the most surprising thing to me about the film, in the end, was its rare ability to portray and yet break out of its shallow world of masculine conformity and obsession. This is, in my own experience, essentially unique in films about masculine pathologies.
Directed by a woman, the film successfully brings women into the picture not merely as symbols of masculine obsession, but as human beings, glimpsed at oblique angles through Bateman's obsessions but genuine nonetheless. Most striking is Bateman's young secretary, who at first appears merely as one shallow part of his shallow world, transparently smitten with him but naively unaware of his madness. At key points in the film, however, she does get glimpses of who Bateman actually is, inside--and is the only character in the film to respond appropriately, or at all, to what she sees there. This culminates in one of the film's closing scenes, where she looks in his desk and discovers reams of paper covered with Bateman's bizarre, obscene, violent scrawls. As she looks through this pathetic, disgusting vomit of a ruined interior life, she breaks down and cries.
To me, this scene is the heart of the film: an appropriately strange Pieta for a strange time and place. And what it affirms, through sorrow, is that, whether Bateman has killed in fact or merely in his imagination, he does exist, and it does matter.
Uncut Gems (2019)
If American Psycho portrays one relevant, contemporary American type, Uncut Gems portrays a much older and less outwardly relevant one, to great effect.
My sister-in-law, before I watched it, described Uncut Gems as a "really stressful film." This is perhaps the best encapsulation of the film I can think of.
The person centered by American Psycho is an isolated young man whose inner world has been choked with images of sexual violence. The person centered by American Psycho, though, is an older man, not outwardly isolated at all, with a wife and children and a mistress and colleagues and customers, who is addicted to stress.
It is remarkable, upon reflection, just how much American society, and especially the American economy, depends on such people. Small business owners, hustlers, crypto bros, all full of schemes, all constantly taking risks and making bets and taking advantages to get ahead, all constantly stressed out of their minds and all constantly pushing themselves to yet higher and higher levels of stress before eventually succumbing to a heart attack.
As I said, Adam Sandler's character (who I will refer to as Adam Sandler) is outwardly an ordinary business owner with a good business, good connections, a family, and a mistress. Because of these things, he naturally finds himself in stressful situations, having many stressful interactions. At first, we might see him merely as a victim of circumstances, or the victim of a system--but the opposite quickly becomes apparent. Whatever problems exist in his life, they are due almost entirely to Adam Sandler himself. It is he that constantly takes absurd and unnecessary risks--it is he that constantly doubles down in his risky decisions, piles more risky decisions on top of them, makes more ride on them, makes it harder to back out, makes them affect other people more, and in so doing puts himself in conflict with the people around him. He is, fundamentally a gambler--an addict.
What makes the film successful is the degree to which it allows one to see the world from a such a perspective--a monumentally stressful and exhausting perspective, but one that is not without its pleasures. If American Psycho is ultimately a sort of tragedy, Uncut Gems is one only in the most abstract sense. Our main character has an interior life--just one that is totally overwhelmed by and contained within the constant decisions and bargains and calculations and bets and highs and lows of his addiction. He cannot be called happy--nor can he exactly be called unhappy. He curses, screams, laments, argues...and then immediately turns around and does it again. Whether he wins or loses, succeeds or fails, seems almost incidental: the only necessity is to keep the game going.
The main thing that makes the film brilliant is its style, which is extreme and frenetic and over-the-top but in no way gratiutous in its portrait of a man who is even more extreme and frenetic and over-the-top.
What makes the film to some degree transcendent, though, is its ending. Sandler goes further than ever before, doubles down in every way possible, refuses to stop, against opposition and violence and threats, and wins a massive sports bet. Then he is shot, and dies.
The odd thing about the film is that this, somehow, feels like a happy ending. As the film has again and again shown us, Sandler cannot stop, cannot rest, cannot cease destroying his victories and wins by doubling down, repeating, going further, gambling yet more. He is, again, most fundamentally an addict, whose whole life, including his business and all his personal relationships, have become an extension of that addiction. For such a person, what mercy could be greater than to die immediately after a big win, still in the middle of the high, before he can ruin it all?
Anyway, at least he (and we) can finally rest.
The Remains of the Day (1989)
I have met people like Patrick Bateman; I have met people like Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. That is the really frightening thing about both of those movies.
Ishiguro is one of the preeminent masters of this kind of thing, this kind of exacting narration of the inner lives of deeply deluded people. His masterpiece, which I hope to write about soon, is The Unconsoled, which has become in the last few years one of my favorite works of fiction. The Remains of the Day by comparison, is both more accessible and more outwardly realistic, tied to history and to context. The novel's one flaw is that that history and historical context is somewhat flimsy, at least to this historian.
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