Lionsgate
Mary Harron, the director of the seminal Christian Bale-starring satirical horror thriller American Psycho, has clowned on the ‘Wall Street bros’ who have embraced and idolized Patrick Bateman, the lead character in the film. According to Harron, the entire movie is a mockery of those very people.
Released in the year 2000 and based on the 1991 novel of the same name, American Psycho stars Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a deranged New York City investment banker who leads a double life as a serial killer and is slowly loosing grasp on reality.
American Psycho wound up being a star-making role for Christian Bale, whose career exploded from there, as he’d go on to star as Batman in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy and win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
In the film, Bateman is seen obsessively maintaining his physique, which Harron says is “very, very gay.” The original American Psycho novel was written by Bret Easton Ellis, who is a Gay man.
“[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 thin. There’s something very, very gay about the way they’re fetishizing looks and the gym,” Harron told Letterboxd, describing the film as a ‘gay man’s satire on masculinity.’
“I’m always so mystified by it. 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.”
According to recent reports, a remake of American Psycho is in the works from filmmaker Luca Guadagnino, director of films such as Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, Bones and All, Challengers, Queer, and his upcoming film After the Hunter.
Content shared from brobible.com.