Start Your Day With an "American Psycho" Quiz

Answer:

Based on Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel of the same name, "American Psycho" released to film in 2000, having taken the decade to develop as an adaptation. What resulted, at the darkly comic hand of Mary Harron, was a film that not only satirized the concept of the 1980s Wall Street yuppie, but pushed the character type to the edge of sanity, allowing Christian Bale to portray a caricature of a madman, a slimeball, and a pretentious New Yorker.

The monologue in question appears early in the film and encapsulates the Patrick Bateman modus operandi. He narrates to the viewer that all of these activities must be done to start his day-- every day-- and it's an extensive laundry list of to-dos. Applying countless consumer products to his face for the sake of appearances and 'health' (lotion before the shower, naturally), Bateman's routine is meant to highlight not only the meticulousness of his actions, but the absurdity and extremity of them. Bateman puts himself out to the viewer as a guy who not only has to keep up the appearance, but thrives on it. In other scenes, he fawns over the crispness of a business card; he talks up the impossible reservations at a popular restaurant; moments before killing a man, he prattles on about Huey Lewis and the News' discography before swinging an axe. He straddles the lines of excess and banality, always teetering on the edge of bursting into a murderous frenzy.

But "American Psycho" wasn't alone. Alongside other films of the era, like "Fight Club" (based on a book by Chuck Palahniuk) and "Pulp Fiction" and "Natural Born Killers" before it, this brand of edginess characterized a type of film that would be popularized by, especially, high school and college-aged men, sometimes for the wrong reasons. Characters like Bateman (and Tyler Durden, in "Fight Club") were never really meant to be idolized; they were deeply flawed to the point of no return. In both cases, they should have met satisfyingly bad ends (Durden did!). The catch is that Bateman really doesn't. The end of "American Psycho" has him unsure if the murders he committed were even real. And if they were, he might've gotten away with them.

Nonetheless, it's monologues like this one that became popular, especially with the advent of the internet era. The routine monologue, along with both his closing narration and the "Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?" scene, has become somewhat of a meme for a generation of copypasta message board users. It's the type of thing to appear on a 4chan board with a sense of irony, but in enough volume over the decades that it winds back around to seriousness. It somehow manages to help the anonymous and the trying-to-be-edgy eternally-online types form an identity-- the same type that was proliferated by Heath Ledger's Joker and Evan Peters' Tate (from "American Horror Story").

Is it problematic? Absolutely, but it's a snapshot into the state of mind of that demographic at that time in history. With "American Psycho" debuting in theatres in 2000 and the world changing as a result of the events of 9/11, a clear shift in cinema occurred-- especially the action, thriller, and horror genres. The latter two of these moved away from the solo, siloed serial killer story and into the "Saws" and the "Hostels". Rob Zombie would make "House of 1000 Corpses" while Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes" would push brutality on the innocent. Michael Haneke would, shot-for-shot, remake "Funny Games". We would see brutality and senseless violence in "The Strangers" and "The Purge" in the years after that. Hyper-violence would shock a desensitized filmgoer, and it would all have resulted from a morning routine. It helps to take care of yourself.