Horror Actressing: The Women of "American Psycho"
Tuesday, April 14, 2020 at 3:00PM by Jason Adams
I don't think there's any good faith argument to be made that Mary Harron's American Psycho, which turns 20 today, is not Christian Bale's movie. His serial killing investment banker Patrick Bateman, now an icon for the ages for better or for worse, is in very nearly every scene -- Harron cuts away from his perspective only twice (both pointed moments I'll dig into below). We are, terrifyingly, trapped inside this most beautiful madman for every dissection and Whitney Houston diatribe -- it's much like Bret Easton Ellis' book that way.
But Harron, bless her, found ways to make the experience survivable, hell even somehow giddy and a deranged sort of fun, whereas Ellis' book is an undertaking swathed in ugliness and despair I've had no desire to revisit since my one and only traumatic read-through a good 25 years back. Harron navigated a supernaturally exquisite balance between her satire and horror, a vital "looking in from the outside" set of eyes that escaped the burden of Ellis' prose. And I think the key to it, besides Bale's brilliantly sweaty bananas work of course, is the vibrant gallery of women that Harron surrounded Bateman with...
And now, because it's impossible to choose just one, a tribute to five of them.
Reese Witherspoon as "Evelyn" -- If you were fortunate enough to see the American Psycho musical (I saw it three times!) then you know how the bulk of Psycho's comic consumerist vapidity falls upon Evelyn's sharply petite shoulders, there via ebullient song, but first and best came Reese. A year after gifting us with Tracy Flick she steered herself here under Harron's guidance towards the Legally Blonde persona to be -- her Evelyn's pig-cradling inanity exists mainly to box Patrick in and suffocate him. When he tries to break up with her she explains, "But your friends are my friends and my friends are your friends. I really don't think it would work," as she wipes a crumb off his lip. Watch how Patrick crumbles into hapless, manic infancy in her presence -- she bests him without even really trying; a May Welland in shoulder pads and matching necklace earring sets.
Samantha Mathis as "Courtney" -- Whereas Evelyn plays the role of Patrick's chaste wife-mother it's her best friend Courtney, doped up to hell and back, who shares Patrick's bedroom as his mistress. In lesser hands Courtney would have come off as a joke, nodding off her chair at restaurants and engaged to marry the local homosexual (the whole Yale thing), but Mathis saturates Courtney's every shallow breath with extraordinary pathos; this woman is so very, very sad. And with these options who can blame her? These women who so exasperate Patrick have entire inner lives being lived, you know, over there -- ones which Patrick has absolutely no ability, or willingness, to notice at all.
Cara Seymour as "Christie" -- Giving my second favorite performance in the film after Bale, Seymour bookends the film as a Meatpacking prostitute (whose real name we never learn) that Patrick hires to fill out a pair of threesomes. The first menage plays itself lightly enough -- "Christie" gets a big bathtub and champagne, there's dancing, good fucking, and even smiles. Until its end anyway. From the get-go Seymour infuses the character with verve and half-smirking humor belaying her circumstances -- one of the film's funniest moments come when she swats back Patrick's desire to show off his business bonafides and talks down to him about what a nice place he has.
But despair really sets in with Seymour's return to the film later on, as "Christie" allows herself to be led back to Bateman's (different, nicer) apartment for another tryst even after she had to go to the hospital the first time. You can see in her desperation that she has no other options -- she, along with the homeless man we see Bateman murder early on, are our foggy windows unto the less-well-off -- but her body language, poised on the edge of her chair and ready to run, speaks its own volumes. Run she eventually must, in survival horror, and we go along with her in the film's first break from Patrick's perspective -- suddenly dropped into the corpse-popping finale of a slasher film together we, "Christie" and us, make a most valiant attempt. But these towers of cement and glass are built for the rich ones, while the rest of us become nothing but red smears for the cleaning crew.
Related Read: EXCLUSIVE TO TFE - Cara Seymour interviewing the director of American Psycho
Guinevere Turner as "Elizabeth" -- Turner is only in one scene, that dark third-act threesome where nobody comes out better than naked and bloody, but Elizabeth leaves a thunderous impression as a ball-busting old "friend" of Patrick's. Earlier in the film the topic of "intelligent women" is discussed by the dickweeds Patrick works with with incredulity, as if they're ugly unicorns that only exist in the popular imagination, nowhere in real life. But Elizabeth storms in rough and tumble coming across as "one of the boys" -- you can tell she's been stomping such opinions under her heels for decades. Knowing that Turner co-wrote the film adds a delicious dash of irony -- Elizabeth, like us and like the film, gets so intoxicated by Patrick's empty catalogue-model perfection that she can't clearly see the bear-trap that she, and we, have willingly, wantonly, stepped into. Desire's a hell of a drug.
Chloe Sevigny as "Jean" -- I haven't worked out the seconds of screen-time a la the "Supporting Actress Smackdown" protocol but if I had to guess it'd be Sevigny as Patrick's sweet, clueless assistant Jean who gets the most screen-time of all the women in the film -- indeed the most prominent moment we spend outside of Bateman's perspective is with Jean at the film's end as she rifles around in his desk and finds his date-book filled with all those nightmare scribblings. Jean is given the film's emotional crescendo, her tearful horror filling up the vacuum left by Patrick's entire emptying out.
I'd say the sharpest scene in the film though is the earlier one where Jean goes on her "date" with Patrick, sweetly eating ice cream while he wields a nail-gun behind her worry-free head. The disconnect between how the scene is playing out for her and how the scene is playing out for him is I'd say maybe the richest expression ever put on screen of poisoned masculinity -- when she says she doesn't want to get "bruised" we can see plainly the starkly separate spheres of this experience; what that means to the each of them, and the dissonance ain't pretty. Chloe's underplaying of nice, ordinary Jean only adds to this disconsolate reality -- there can be no bridge here; only a terrifying fall.
There are other women in the film -- the not blonde enough call girl who's not drinking her expensive chardonnay, the real estate agent who swoops in at the film's end to clean up Patrick's mess, all in the name of obscene Manhattan property values (she might be the scariest character in the movie, if you ask me). Harron gives the pathetic man-baby creature of Patrick Bateman, a hollow suit of skin and expensive creams, its shape via a bombardment of illustrious actressing at all its sides, and makes of American Psycho a symphony of savage misogyny.
Reader Comments (12)
Jason -- this! It's totally why it works.
This is very well done. They're all good, but Cara Seymour is extraordinary.
Superb read JA. One of the best and most influential films of the century. Only gets richer with age.
I had a Samantha Mathis phase: The Thing Called Love, Jack & Sarah, American Quilt...
Agreed that it’s Bale’s film (of course) - however, Sevigny takes my Supporting Actress won for 2000 - she’s so low-key and real that it’s jarring and creates such a sense of panic whenever he’s near her... all other actresses mentioned are great too (with Seymour also making my Top 10)....
i love Cara Seymour in this so much.
She did an amazing job for her role. We love you Cara Seymour.
thanks for sharing us such a good information https://oreo-tv.com/
best wishes from us for the great information https://typhoon-tv.com/
best regards from HYFY TV for great article
best way of writing onmovies app
I think that is obvious.