My Favorite Movie of 2000: American Psycho

2000 was what I like to call The Year of the Comedy. Even serious movies like American Psycho had a humorous tone, something that made it really stand out to me. American Psycho is the story of Patrick Bateman, a business executive in the middle of the 1980s. Bateman is absolutely obsessed with his public image, waking up extremely early every morning to exercise, take "exfoliating" showers, shave as close to his skin as possible, pluck his eyebrows, and planning his day and evening wear for the day. The film is narrated by Bateman, never once admitting that his daily routine is insane, because as we see once he gets to work, all of his co-workers act exactly the same as him.

If the daily routine wasn't insane enough, Bateman and his "friends" start comparing their business cards. Bateman notes how some of his friends have incredibly inferior cards for many reasons, whether it be the color, texture, font, and text placement. Being confident that his business card is the most attractive, Bateman whips it out and is pleased when he gets the response he expected. Right as his card has been observed with everyone, an executive named Paul Allen that Patrick hates with a passion, mainly for constantly being confused for him, walks into their meeting and whips out his business card. While Patrick and the others have mild reactions acknowledging that Paul's is clearly the best card of all, Patrick's narration goes absolutely crazy over how much better Paul's card is than his. He notes every single intricate detail about the card and how his own card cannot even begin to compare. To the audience, this entire sequence has been evidence that Patrick Bateman is absolutely insane because everyone's cards are almost identical to each other.

Bateman eventually invites Paul Allen over to his apartment after a night on the town with their "friends" where Patrick plans to kill Paul. He is tired of constantly being confused with and compared to Paul, noting that he works hard on his image so he doesn't get confused with anyone else and stands out. Patrick begins his prep to killing Paul in what is probably one of the most hilarious ways I've ever seen someone get killed. I can't spoil the entire process because it's one of the most iconic moments in film of the past decade. I will leave this image however, probably one of the most remembered frames of the entire movie.

One of the defining moments of the '00 decade in cinema

After killing Paul, Patrick steals his apartment and tells everyone that Paul is on vacation in Europe. No one seems to care that he's gone, noting how unlikeable he is. Bateman proceeds through the rest of the movie taking advantage of people confusing him with Paul Allen by impersonating him to get into exclusive restaurants and buying hookers using Paul's name. Eventually, Patrick realizes that his frumpy secretary is in love with him, so he takes her out as well. While he debates killing her, he can't bring himself to do it. One night, he invites his secretary and a hooker he frequents over to his apartment in order to have a threesome. At the end of the night, he becomes very physical with them and is (off-camera) a very aggressive practitioner of S&M. Later on, Patrick invites back the same prostitute along with a new one and decides to kill them both in a pretty gruesome, yet hilarious way that I can't spoil.

Patrick begins killing people left and right, stuffing a stray cat into an ATM, and tries to escape to his apartment while on the run from the police. Meanwhile, his secretary discovers his calendar/day-planner is full of doodles immortalizing his kills of Paul Allen and the prostitutes, imagining killing his secretary and having sex with her decapitated head, and other fantasies. Patrick calls his lawyer and confesses to killing Paul Allen. His lawyer says that that's impossible because he just had dinner with Paul in London last night. After Patrick rushes back to Paul's apartment, he finds it for sale and the bodies of the hookers he killed missing. Patrick goes to work the next day and everything appears to be normal, but the movie ends before we see if Paul Allen showed up to work that day or not.

The big question of the movie is whether or not Patrick hallucinated killing people. The big moral question of the story though, is the behavior of yuppies and business executives in the 80s, when the original novel was written. Although we see Patrick Bateman is clearly psychotic, aren't his friends and fellow employees just as psychotic for having the same behavior as him? One of the other themes of the film is identity. Patrick goes to incredible lengths to be as unique as possible, but he is constantly being confused with Paul Allen, despite working hard to not be like him.

The reason I liked American Psycho so much compared to the other movies that came out in 2000 was because it seemed that year was filled with nothing but comedies and/or trash movies like Dracula 2000, Mission to Mars, and What Lies Beneath. 2000 was also infamous for featuring one of the worst movies of all time, Battlefield Earth. Probably a close second for my favorite movie of 2000 was Traffic, a film starring Michael Douglas as the Drug Czar of the U.S. fighting drug trafficking while dealing with his own junkie daughter. The film will probably be most remembered as being the film that won Best Supporting Actor for Benecio del Toro at the Oscars. Today, American Psycho has become a cult classic for its open-ended ending, the manner in which Bateman kills people, and the theme of identity. This movie and The Machinist would help Christian Bale eventually win the starring role in Batman Begins.