American Psycho director Mary Harron said she’s “mystified” by the way the 2000 film has been “embraced by Wall Street bros.”
The filmmaker recently chatted with Letterboxd Journal about the “sigma male” social media phenomenon and how some men have grown to look at Christian Bale‘s Patrick Bateman as a role model.
“I’m always so mystified by it,” Harron said. “I don’t think that Guinevere [Turner, American Psycho writer-actress] 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.”
However, The Notorious Bettie Page director added that “Wall Street bros” actually missed the overall point of the film, which follows Patrick Bateman, a wealthy New York City investment banking executive who hides his alternate psychopathic ego from his co-workers and friends as he delves deeper into his violent, hedonistic fantasies.
“It was very clear to me and Guinevere, who is gay, that we saw it as a gay man’s satire on masculinity,” Harron explained. “[American Psycho author Bret Easton 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.”
In Ellis’ novel, Patrick Bateman also idolizes Donald Trump, who is currently serving his second term as the U.S. president. While American Psycho is set during the Reagan era in the ’80s, when the AIDS Epidemic hit the LGBTQ community, the filmmaker was taken aback at how the story has aged over time, as transgender rights are now under attack by the Trump administration.
“It was about a predatory society, and now the society is actually, 25 years later, much worse. The rich are much richer, the poor are poorer,” she said. “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.”
As American Psycho celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, Luca Guadagnino is set to helm a new film adaptation for Lionsgate.
