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Oct. 1, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:00
1759 Freedomain Radio Movie Review - American Psycho
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Movie review, American Psycho.
This is a movie I saw, I don't know, I guess shortly after it came to DVD in 01 or 02, and never really thought too much of it, but somebody posted some scenes on the FDR message board, and while I was idly churning away on the...
Dull backstory nonsense of FDR. XML files or some exciting stuff like that.
I played a scene or two.
And I was immediately struck.
And I watched the movie again.
Twice. I skipped the violent scenes because they're not particularly interesting to me.
But I think the movie has really been churning around in my brain.
Now, one of the things that is, I think, the most important about the film is that...
And this is going to be spoiler city, so if you haven't seen the film, you might want to watch it before you listen to this, but I'm going to assume you've watched it, or...
I don't know. I've started reading the book, but it's pretty heavy-going.
I don't think it's particularly well-written, but...
So I'll just talk about the movie.
One of the things that's most essential about the movie is that the protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is...
Consistently and repeatedly telling people that he is a murderer.
He tells people that he's insane.
He tells people that he likes to dissect girls.
He tells people all of this stuff that they don't listen to.
In one scene, he's breaking up with his fiancée and drawing a gruesome murder on the tablecloth right by her elbow.
And none of this is being transmitted to the people.
In another scene, where he seems to have murdered a woman in his bed, and he's dropping off the dark red blood-soaked bedsheets to the cleaners.
And a friend of his comes in and he asks her to deal with the cleaners.
And she says, what are those stains?
And he says, they're cranberry juice.
And of course, they're clearly not. And the reality is that they would smell like blood.
They wouldn't smell like cranberry juice.
So he hands over the blood-soaked sheets to someone, a friend of his, who of course does nothing with them or about them.
At another scene, he's dragging the body of one of his victims, leaving a blood-soaked trail through...
The main lobby of an apartment building with a security guard.
He's putting this body in the back of his car, and this couple stops and says, wow, where did you get that great overnight bag?
And that is another sort of instance of where he's murdering in clear-eyed sight, like he's wide open in his murderers.
And nobody ever comments.
Nobody ever interrupts him.
Nobody ever asks him what's really going on.
Now, in terms of child abuse, the effects of child abuse are all around us.
We can see them in skittish people, nervous people, frightened people, raging people, angry people, trolls.
I mean, you name it.
Drug users or drug addicts in particular, alcoholics.
We can see it in people addicted to shallow materialistic values.
We can see it in pompous jerks, in self-important windbags.
We can see the effects of child abuse all over us, in the cops, in the soldiers, in the prison guards.
I mean, all of these people come from chaotic or violent or verbally or physically or sexually abusive childhoods, and so we see it everywhere.
The movies that people say that they're into, the TV shows, the comics, everything.
I remember when I was a kid going over to my friend's place after school and he had a chalkboard and I would regularly draw on his chalkboard mutilated heads with the eyeballs falling out and nails through the cheeks and all the clear indications of child abuse at home.
I drew these pictures repetitively.
I drew them at school. Nobody ever commented or said a thing about it.
I was into shock attacks.
I would show graphic pictures of shock attack victims with their insides hanging out or half their legs chewed off.
I remember carrying around a doll's leg.
Which I had painted with blood, and so it had become a severed doll's leg.
I mean, the violence that I was experiencing at home, I was very clearly communicating it to everyone around me, and nobody said a thing.
Not my friends, my brother, of course, since he was not going to say anything, of course, but nobody said anything.
Nobody commented, nobody stopped and said, why are you drawing these gruesome, tortured pictures, and so on.
On a milder level, I was really into fantasy when I was a kid.
Fantasy novels, you know, Lord of the Rings and Sword of Channera and so on.
And nobody asked me why I needed this kind of escape.
Why did I want to live in a world of pure fiction so removed from the world that was?
And so, I think that this is clear.
Everyone knows this all the time.
Everybody is confessing the crimes that they've been subjected to or, in this case, the crimes that they're committing all the time and nobody says anything about it.
And I think that's one of the things that is really, really important.
So it works at that level.
That he's confessing his crimes and his madness and his torture and his violence and his homicidality to everyone around him and nobody listens.
But that is society.
That is what happens all the time.
So that's at one level.
Now at another level, I did a bit of research and I don't claim to know.
Brett Easton Ellis is the writer.
Now his father... Was a violent alcoholic who Brett openly admits to hating.
And he died in 91. I think the novel was written in the late 80s, early 90s.
So just as his father was dying, he was writing this novel.
And he said he based the character of this sociopathic murderous psycho on his father.
He openly states this in interviews.
I based the character of this murderer on my father.
In other words, I was raised by a murderer.
I mean, not a literal murderer.
Who knows? I mean, it's possible, right?
But certainly a psychological or spiritual murderer.
I think he said a violent alcoholic of the worst kind, and that is something which we can only imagine.
So that's how he's able to get inside the head of this guy so deeply and so persistently.
And that's really important.
And I've read and listened to a number of interviews with the author, and not one of them, not one of them has ever delved into his history with his father.
So, just as Patrick Bateman says, I'm insane and I kill people to everyone, nobody listens.
The author is saying to everyone openly, I was raised by a physical or spiritual murderer.
And an abuser, and nobody registers it.
Nobody asks him about it.
Nobody processes it. They all go, oh, it's a critique of 80s materialism.
It's a critique of consumerism.
Oh, bullshit. What complete and utter nonsense.
So, just as the character talks about his violence and nobody listens, the author is talking about his violence and nobody listens.
Nobody listens to the real source of it.
Now, The character in American Psycho, Patrick Bateman, works at Pierce and Pierce.
Aha! Pierce, right?
Like stabbing. But his father runs the company, which is why he doesn't really have to do much or work or anything like that.
So this guy's father runs the company.
So he lives inside his father's creation, right?
So this is the family, right?
The business is the family. We've got siblings, and we have a father who runs the company, who is a shadowy distant presence.
Now, imagine what a different...
It would have been if we had seen even one scene with Patrick Bateman with his father.
Because Patrick Bateman is this incomprehensible sociopath, like this just psycho murderer.
And we don't have any sense of how he came to be that way.
No sense of the genealogy or etymology of his father.
Violence and shallowness and brutality and coldness and rapey, lusty ugliness.
But if he'd had even one scene with his father, then there would have been some understanding of where he may have come from.
Not sympathy. Sorry.
Yeah, empathy but not sympathy.
We would have understood, but it doesn't mean we would have...
Approved or empathized in a truly positive way.
But we would have understood.
So this guy's murderousness comes from his relationship with his father.
But his father and his mother, his caregivers, his family, they never show up in the movie.
Because they are the movie.
They don't show up in the movie because they are the movie.
Because the sociopathic personality has dominated the environment to the point where it has become the environment.
He lives in his father's mind.
And there is a blurring of identities between the writer, the character, the writer's father and the character's father.
And what I mean by that is that at points, the writer said that the killer is based on his father and at points he says the killer is based on his own self.
So there's this blurring of identity.
In other words, there's been a full infection of the murderous sociopathy from the father to the son.
And also, in the movie, he's called the vice president...
And that is the son role.
And another point, his fiancé leaves him a message calling him Mr.
Big Time CEO. In other words, he is also running the company.
But his father is the one running the company.
So, he is himself and his father.
And that is true of the writer in terms of talking about the inspiration.
The character is based on my father and the character is based on me.
And the character in the novel, who is both the employee and the employer.
In other words, the child and the parent.
And that is fascinating, right?
Now, in terms of the details in the movie, there is, of course, the ambiguous ending of whether the murders were real or not, because he confesses.
He actually openly confesses to killing up to 40 people and gives details and says he has videotapes and so on.
He confesses this to his lawyer, and his lawyer doesn't believe him because his lawyer believes he's had dinner with one of his victims, although there's repeated cases of mistaken identity, and so who knows for sure and all that.
But there is this confession which changes nothing.
So even a direct and open confession repeated in an answering machine which somebody has to listen to, can re-listen to, is to a lawyer about legal matters, and so will get somebody's attention, that still is perceived to have not happened.
Now, as to whether the murders are real or not, well, I think that some of them are real or some of them are not.
I think some of the ones that are not real are the ones where he just would have been caught, right?
So dropping a chainsaw down a stairway to kill a prostitute who's been banging on the door of an apartment building and so on.
But, I mean, that's also a metaphor too, right?
Because a child screams, and I remember this very clearly as a child, the child screams in an apartment building, don't get answered.
So this prostitute who's running up and down the hallways, banging and screaming at the top of her lungs and pounding on doors to get help, nobody answers.
But that's the experience of a child being abused in an apartment building.
I can guarantee you that, because that's...
That's the way it happened for me and that's the way it happened for other people that I know.
So, I mean, you can be pounding on the door all you want.
But that one where, you know, there's a chainsaw, there's blood, there's pounding on the door, I mean, that would have been...
He would have been caught for that.
And leaving a trail of blood, I just don't believe that's the case.
But some of the ones where he's murdering more anonymous prostitutes and at one point he's got a lock of hair...
In his father's, like when he's in his office at his father's company, he's got a lock of hair that he is stroking his cheek with.
I mean, that seems pretty real. That doesn't seem like a delusion.
And at one point he kills a homeless guy and the homeless guy's dog.
And that, you know, I can believe that's pretty real.
That's an anonymous crime that he wouldn't have been caught for.
It would be unlikely to be caught for. It's sort of so random.
But he's on medication. And I did pause the movie.
It doesn't say what kind of medication he's on, but he takes his medication, or the medication is referred to just before he performs the slaughter of his friend, a colleague at work who's got the better business card or who got a better restaurant reservation than he could or whatever.
And Paul Allen is his name.
And... So he's got medication there.
He's shaking medication down his throat during his psychotic break where he thinks he's blown up cop cars and all that kind of stuff.
So we can only assume that this is some sort of psychotropic medication.
And as such, he's clearly got mental illness, and he does hallucinate that an ATM is telling him to feed it a stray cat, so we know that he's subject to hallucinations, and he's on these medications.
Now, these medications do increase homicidal tendencies, and of course, a lot of the school shootings and so on that have gone on have been associated with these kinds of just ghastly, brain-frying, psychotropic meds.
And so, I don't know whether the author was on medication.
He seems to have experienced a lot of depression, and he seems to be very dissociated, but I don't know if he's been on any medication.
If you know, please let me know. But, of course, the medication may have been fueling the violent fantasies that the author himself had.
Experienced in the writing of the book.
And, of course, since the medication is shown prominently in the movie at times of great stress and murder, it seems to me fairly possible that the medication is at the root of some of these violent fantasies, which, again, I think is also very interesting and not mentioned in any of the reviews that I've read.
Now, of course, if he's on medication and he's mentally ill, and that does seem to be the case, like his father seems to have set him up in an office and he has no work, right, because his secretary looks in his date book and there's nothing there except lunches, so he doesn't actually have any work, and every time he talks about business...
he's so maddeningly, it's so nebulous that there is nothing that's going on for him in the business world.
And he says, hey, I'm in murders and executions.
I'm in murders and executions.
Oh, no, I mean murders and acquisitions, which is kind of clever.
But he clearly is mentally ill.
He's on medication. His father has set him up in an office so that he has something to do, some way to feel useful, but he just sits there listening to music and going to lunch.
And so, of course, the family lawyer would know about this, of course, right?
And so, when the family lawyer gets a confession of murders from the mentally ill son who's on medication, who he knows about, then he understands that he doesn't take it.
Too seriously. And that's why he pretends that it's a joke.
So anyway, I just wanted to point out that that's another argument for the fact that at least some of the murders are illusory, are psychotic fantasies.
Now, there's another layer that shows up at the very beginning and the very end of the film that I think is really, really important.
Because this idea that there are all these crimes that are being confessed to, that nobody is listening to, is really, really important.
And this does not show up in a larger social sphere in this film, except in two places, at the very beginning and at the very end.
So at the very beginning, they're talking about problems in the world, and the hero, the murderer, he gives a Great speech.
We need to cure AIDS. We need to make sure that people don't become dependent on welfare while at the same time making sure we protect the most needy.
We need to protect the economy while at the same time protecting the environment.
It gives this big, long speech, which is a purely political speech.
I mean, that is purely the speech...
Of a politician.
And I think that's really, really important.
Because it's all about, you know, we need to do this and this and balance this without having any actual content, any specific content in the language.
And I think that's really important, that it is a political speech.
Now, is it a stretch to call it a political speech?
I don't think so. Maybe if I do the video, I'll play it.
But it's a very political speech.
And that's at the very beginning.
That this murderer is very glib with language and has a strong consciousness of what is spoken of in terms of morality.
So, at the very beginning, he's against anti-Semitism.
And he's for healing AIDS and the poor and the environment, and he gives this big political speech about that.
So, he's very manipulative in terms of his language.
He knows what is moral.
He knows what is acceptable.
He knows what is good. But he doesn't...
He acts on the complete opposite, right?
So, to me, that's kind of political, right?
Because politicians will always talk about...
Think of Obama's speech when he got into the White House, right?
In, what, 08 or whatever.
His speech about raising the hopes and the spires and the aspirations of the American dream and opening the gates of opportunity to all comers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The guy's running wars and closing off freedoms and, you know, ordering the slaughter of people.
And making the government less transparent and hoisting up further bastions of totalitarianism.
So this is the same thing.
This is a sociopath who is very glib with language and knows how to play to and appeal to and manipulate his audience, just like this Patrick Bateman fellow.
Now, you may think that this is too much of a stretch, but let me give you the coup de grace, so to speak, which is at the end of the film.
So at the very end of the film, he's confessed to all of these crimes, but nobody believes him.
Even his lawyer who he's confessed to doesn't believe him.
And his mask comes down again inside, but inside doesn't matter.
The inside of yourself doesn't matter.
Only the outside, only the shell, only the externality matters, right?
And, of course, he feels so hollow that his murders, his opening up of other people's bodies, could be seen as a way of trying to find the inside of others, because he's got no inside himself.
But that's obviously a bit more speculative.
But at the very final scene, they're all in a bar.
He and his nasty sociopathic buddies...
And who's on TV but Ronald Reagan?
And Ronald Reagan is talking about the Iran-Contra affair.
And the Iran-Contra affair for the younger people is this big deal where the Iran-Contra affair, just getting this from Wiki, was a scandal in the US that came to light in November 86.
Reagan and other senior US officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo.
At least some US officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow US intelligence agencies to fund the Nicaraguan Contras.
And the affair began as an operation to improve US-Iranian relations.
It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to a relatively moderate, politically influential group of Iranians, and then the US would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment.
The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of six U.S. hostages who were being held by the Lebanese Shia Islamist group Hezbollah, who in turn were unknowingly connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.
The plan deteriorated into an arms for hostages scheme in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.
Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales were diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels or Contras in Nicaragua.
While Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause, no conclusive evidence has been found showing that he authorized the diversion of money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.
Handwritten notes by Caspar Weinberger, Defense Secretary, indicate that Reagan was aware of potential hostage transfers with Iran as well as the sale of Hawken TOW missiles to moderate elements within that country.
Oliver North, one of the central figures in the affair, wrote in a book that, quote, Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on, with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the Contras, and he received regular detailed briefings on both.
After the weapon sales were revealed on November 86, Reagan appeared on television and stated that the weapons transfers had indeed occurred, but that the US did not trade arms for hostages.
The investigation was impeded when large volumes of documents related to the scandal were destroyed or withheld from investigators by Reagan administration officials.
Several investigations ensued, including those by the US Congress and a three-man Reagan-appointed Tower Commission Neither found any evidence that Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs.
In the end, 14 administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Cathper Weinberger.
Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.
The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the George H. W. Bush presidency.
Bush had been vice president at the time of the affair.
And this was a bit of a scandal, a considerable scandal at the time, and it really was exactly the same as what Patrick Bateman was doing, which is confessing to the crimes of murderers.
And that's exactly what Patrick Bateman is doing throughout the film, and nobody hears it.
And isn't this the frustration of the pacifist, the voluntarist, the anarchist?
Is that political leaders are regularly confessing the most atrocious crimes that private criminals in their worst and bloodiest nightmares could never even dream of approaching.
The deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
Those kinds of murders. That these crimes are regularly confessed and openly spoken about by government leaders and nobody sees them for what they are.
In the same way that Patrick Bateman is continually Confessing his violent actions and tendencies, his crimes to others, and nobody listens.
So the fact that the movie ends with a direct parallel, right?
So these guys, who were all manipulators and liars, are looking with admiration at Ronald Reagan talking about the Iran-Contra affair.
The open funding of terrorists who slaughtered enormous numbers of people.
And they're looking at him with admiration like, God, how can he lie so beautifully?
And that, to me, connects the child abuse to the murderous thoughts or potentially murderous actions of the hero.
To the child abuse of the writer and the fact that nobody is listening to any confessions of crimes, that nobody listens to the crimes being committed against children, that nobody deals with or acts on the crimes being committed against children.
One in five women sexually abused as children.
One in ten men sexually abused as children.
That is an appalling, appalling, appalling statistic.
These crimes are regularly to be committed around the world in full view, in full sight, in open view of everyone.
And yet, nobody sees them.
Nobody talks about them.
Nobody examines them.
Nobody opens hearts and minds to them.
Well, almost nobody.
And the evasion of these crimes against children is why people cannot see that taxation is force.
Why people cannot see that the government is violence.
Because when you reject and dissociate from and mentally erase...
Crimes against children that you know of, that you see all around you, that may have happened to you, that certainly among your acquaintanceship there is somebody who experienced abuse as a child, almost certainly significant abuse, and certainly Less brutal abuse.
The fact that people erase these crimes against children in their own minds from the lives of those around them means that they're inevitably going to be led to erase and ignore the crimes of society as a whole.
What starts as the personal becomes the social, and that, I think, is the great layered meaning, which I don't think anyone has seen as yet, of American Psycho.
But let's put all of this together now.
This is the closing monologue of the movie.
Now remember, this is a movie where the writer is acting out incredible rage against a society which will not acknowledge or listen to or sympathize when he openly describes his own abusive childhood through the character of Patrick Bateman.
And his entire book is a confession of rage against a society that will not listen to what he's actually saying.
With that in mind, listen to this closing monologue.
I think you'll see that it makes a horrifying amount of sense.
There are no more barriers to cross.
All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed.
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.
In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others.
I want no one to escape.
But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis.
My punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself.
No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling.
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