Le petit soldat (1/1/01)
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American Psycho. [Mary Harron, 1999. Screenplay by Harron and Guinevere Turner, after a story by, etc.]
The long-delayed (if not exactly long-awaited) screen adaptation of the novel of Bret Easton Ellis — a guy whose fifteen minutes of literary fame derived from his intimate acquaintance with the fashion statements and mating rituals of preppie snots in the midEighties (not a moment earlier; not a moment later): the possibly-ambiguous saga of alltooperfect upperclass drone Christian Bale, a polished but functionless cipher who seems somehow to have negotiated the rapids of Harvard and its business school and taken his place at the conferencetable of a nebulously-defined financial firm in Manhattan beside his fellow networked-since-prepschool Vice-President-for-nothing-of-consequence trustfund babies without ever having learned a fucking thing; though, nonetheless, his grasp of the particulars of dress, grooming, and hygiene appropriate to his station is impressive, his manner with his subordinates and those he deems his social inferiors is appropriately obnoxious and overbearing, his apartment commands a really nice view of the park, and, should he deserve it or not, his starstruck secretary (Chloë Sevigny) adores him, his drugaddled society-babe-zombie fiancee (Reese Witherspoon) embraces him as her destiny, and his fellow vicepresidents (none of whom seem to do much more than deciding where to have lunch and watching
Wheel Of Fortune on their office televisions either) apparently respect him as an Übermensch among Übermenschen.
Actually not quite everything is perfect: Bale’s taste in music is execrably bourgeois; his colleagues don’t seem to share his love of slasher movies and respond unappreciatively to his allusions to the wit and wisdom of the great serial killers; when he takes prostitutes home and beats them up the incompetents at the Chinese laundry don’t seem to be able to remove the bloodstains from those handwoven cotton sheets he can only get in Sante Fe; try though he may he can’t get a table at the most exclusive restaurant in town (indeed, the maitre-d laughs at him); and, unkindest cut of all, his rival and nemesis (of course, a Yale man) Jared Leto has much nicer business cards than he does. — It is this last which precipitates the crisis: confronted with the evidence, contrasting it with his own now-inadequate selfadvertisements, Bale turns pale and breaks out in a sweat. “Look at that subtle offwhite coloring,” he exclaims to himself, turning the card over in his trembling hand. “The tasteful thickness of it...Oh my God: it even has a watermark... .” Leto’s superiority is unbearable. Naturally he must die.
Or not. The killing spree upon which Bale embarks is probably just going on in his head; though, in truth, it didn’t seem to be worth the trouble to go back and review the evidence to be sure. Like the Hollywood version of
The Wizard of Oz — or, to make reference to something at a more appropriate artistic level, like that season of
Dallas that was revealed after the fact to be a figment of Victoria Principal’s imagination — this is all only a dream.
This means (to follow the argument of the authors) that the movie is intended as a joke; that Bale is meant as a figure of fun; and that we’re not laughing with Bale, but rather at him. Thus it is all-too-heavily underscored that Bale is a cipher, a void, a zero; a creature composed entirely of his appearances; another manifestation of the postmodern mystery of the disappearance of the noumenon — or, to phrase the matter in the terms which seemed to many at the time to define the puzzle, another version of the phenomenon of Reagan, who managed to be President (indeed, at times managed admirably) simply by acting the role; that Bale is a creature without a soul; that there is no there there; that his fantasies have no substance; and that the sleep of reason breeds monsters.
This might be more convincing if I didn’t have vivid and unpleasant memories of the Eighties — an era that thought it worshipped Darwinism, but whose theological presuppositions derived, actually, from an older and more primitive conception: the idea that a great Chain of Being extended link by link from the bottom of the animal kingdom to the apogee of human economic activity, each creature in the hierarchy feeding upon the creatures below it and in turn being fed upon by the creatures that lay above; and that atop this ontological ladder, luxuriating in their penthouses, fawned upon by their servants and retainers, absolutely secure in their consciousness of privilege, dwelt the corporate raiders of Manhattan — financial sharks who devoured entire industries for their sustenance; the selfstyled lords of creation, who seemed to have been genetically programmed with the assumption that all the world had been made for no purpose other than to serve them.
Which is to say that I met those people. I didn’t think they were funny then, and I don’t think they’re funny now.
Moreover there’s something very odd, indeed almost pathological, about the precision of the scenario’s focus on a particular time and place — what a cinematographer would call the restriction of its depth of field. The story is set in 1987; and somehow nothing about it could be transplanted to, say, 1986-and-a-half, or the first quarter of 1988.
In consequence, even if you accept the premise that the narrative details are intended as jokes, of necessity they’re rather stale jokes: Bale’s ongoing failure to get a table at the trendiest restaurant in New York is now at best a pale reprise of Steve Martin’s risible discomfiture in
LA Story (“With a financial statement like this, he expects to be able to order the duck?”); the absurdly elaborate care with which he dons a plastic raincoat to protect his precious designer clothing from blood splatters can only recall Michelle Bauer carefully hanging a sheet of plastic over her prized Elvis-painted-on-velvet before hacking a hapless customer to pieces in Fred Olen Ray’s
Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers; and the practice of hamming it up for the video camera while engaging in sexual intercourse is now so universal an entertainment that you can make fun of it in television commercials.
Moreover though it would introduce anachronism to have it otherwise, it seems very strange even at this slight historical remove that a VCR is supposed to be a status symbol, MTV is still avantgarde and interesting, and nobody has a computer or a cellular phone: how quickly dulls the cutting edge; could it have been so keen?
Finally, though admittedly it’s amusing to learn, e.g., that in the course of his morning shower Mr. Bale makes use of an icepack, a deep-pore cleanser lotion, a water activated gel cleanser, a honey-almond body scrub, an exfoliating gel scrub on the face, and an herbal facial mask (this last rather severely laden with metaphor), one cannot help but recall the trenchant wisecracks about grooming and accessorization in another black comedy of the late Eighties,
Heathers; and register the opinion that the teenaged Christian Slater would have dusted the lot of these bozos in the first reel. And then blown up Manhattan all around them.
As for Ellis: like his contemporary Jay McInerney (
Bright Lights, Big City), he aspired to the title and the stature of the Scott Fitzgerald of the Eighties. Both fell pathetically short; for wherever else in the postmodern landscape the ding-an-sich may seem to disappear, there remains a basic ontological difference between being a writer and merely acting like one. Poseurs like Ellis and McInerney seemed to want to become writers not out of some innate urge to describe or express something about the world, but rather because they thought a reputation as a writer could get you into the good restaurants, allow you to hang out with the idle rich, and rock and roll all night and party every day. This, as Darwin would have been happy to explain, is to aspire to the status of a remora: the little sluglike suckerfish that rides around on the shark and eats its leavings. — Fitzgerald, obviously, was more than that: whatever his failures of purpose and weaknesses for drink and dissipation, he had an immense and immeasurable talent, and wrote a couple of the finest novels in English. One simply cannot compare someone like Ellis to Scott Fitzgerald.
Nor though there would be more reasonable grounds for comparison was Ellis Tom Wolfe; whose
Bonfire Of The Vanities shared with this scenario similarities of time, place, and characters (and, to be fair, made an even worse motion picture.) For Wolfe, though he is not (as per his own advertising claims) the equal of Dickens or Balzac, is nonetheless a wonderful stylist, has unmatched powers of observation and analysis, and is motivated (as persons like Ellis are not) by the enormous universal curiosity that is characteristic of a real novelistic intelligence: an interest in the entire spectrum of humanity — in all types and all classes — in Balzac’s neoDantean phrase, in the whole of the human comedy.
Thus Wolfe’s protagonist thought himself one of the Masters of the Universe, and this really was funny; Ellis’s protagonist thought the rest of mankind lower animals he could butcher for meat and keep on ice in the freezer compartment of his upscale refrigerator, and this was not.
But to conclude (with far more generality than the matter deserves): what has thus far miraculously saved the American empire from extinction is that, though at any given moment there is inevitably some decadent aristocracy which thinks it’s running the country into the ground (and a retinue of campfollowers and celebrity journalists who buy into their myth), fortunately, they are never as important as they think they are; indeed, even the people who are actually supposed to be running the country rarely direct its destiny. The real life of the nation lies elsewhere. In a hundred years no one will remember who Ellis was, or where he got his handwoven cotton sheets; no one will remember Michael Milken or his alterego Gordon Gekko, and they’ll have to look Reagan up in a book. What they’ll remember about the nineteen-eighties will be the invention of the Internet; and what they’ll remember about 1987 is that this was the year that Edward Witten sat down in Princeton and wrote his paper on quantum field theory and the Jones polynomial, which explained the quantum theory of gravitation (at least in two-plus-one dimensions) in terms of the topology of knots — one of the most striking intellectual accomplishments of the century, and something all the preppie brats in all the world will never equal, never approach, and never, lower animals that they are, understand.
____________Greek translation (12/24/00)
