There are few things in life that are guaranteed, but one of them is that large groups of people will never fully understand satire. During a recent interview with Letterboxd Journal, American Psycho director Mary Harron made it clear that she doesn’t understand why “Wall Street bros” love her movie so much.
“I’m always so mystified by it,” Harron said. “I don’t think that [co-writer Guinevere Turner] and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them… But, people read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read The Catcher in the Rye and decide to shoot the president.”
American Psycho tells the story of a successful Wall Street banker named Patrick Bateman living in the 1980s who is also a serial killer. Harron acknowledged that social media might have played a role in glamorizing Bateman, but said that Christian Bale’s performance should make idolizing him almost impossible. “There’s [Bateman] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power,” she said. “But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous. When he’s in a nightclub and he’s trying to speak to somebody about hip hop — it’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool.”
Harron even added that the problem of wealth inequality, which is one of the core reasons Bateman can commit his crimes, has only gotten worse in the 25 years since the film first hit theaters.
“The rich are much richer, the poor are poorer. I would never have imagined that there would be a celebration of racism and white supremacy, which is basically what we have in the White House. I would never have imagined that we would live through that,” she said. Now that Luca Guadagnino is working on his own version of American Psycho, it seems like Bateman might have more to say about modern times.
