American Psycho | Literally Me

have nothing to say about American Psycho whatever you think I could say whatever new revelation you'd imagine I'd present to you has already been said a thousand times over I am no different than any other film YouTubers I'm merely a replication the newest replication but still a clone a copy of a copy I want no one to learn but even after admitting this there is no catharsis My Punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of this film no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling this confession has meant nothing [Music] foreign [Music] psycho the video you all have been asking for it's a movie that has been a major influence on internet meme culture since at least 2009 when images of Patrick Bateman pointing to a stereo were used on 4chan to check their dubs a slang term for when the post numbers last two digits are the same since then it's morphed into something else now traces of American Psycho occupy almost every corner of the internet memes video edits YouTube videos cosplays parodies and more it feels like every scene has become some kind of joke or a meme which led me to realize that we live in an age where there are probably people out there who have never seen American Psycho traditionally but have experienced the film through its disparate Parts scattered across the web what a time to be alive but let's go back in time to the movie or maybe even farther back all the way back to 1991 the year the novel released you like British Nellis yeah he's okay I thought his early work less than zero was all too new way for my taste but when the rules of attraction came out in 87 I thought he really came into his own commercially and artistically the new novel has a clear concise satirical vision and a new Sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives it social commentary a big boost he's been compared to Chuck Palma but I think that Ellis has a far more bitter cynical sense of humor a helper strand yes Alan why do you have a copy of solo on your coffee table are you some kind of sicko or something no Alan is that a raincoat yes it is in 91 he released his most accomplished novel to date American Psycho an Undisputed Masterpiece it's a book with a story so fun and engrossing that people often don't listen to the message but they should because it's not just about the pleasures of Conformity and the importance of Trends it's also a personal statement about Ellis himself hey Paul by the time Brett Easton Ellis released his Landmark novel American Psycho in 1991. he had already established himself as a prominent American satirist with his novels less than zero in Rules of Attraction however for as dark as those two books were American Psycho was on another level the novel reads like Patrick Bateman's Personal Diary he details the clubs he attends the lunch reservations he makes the suits and dresses that everyone wears the music he listens to the movies he rents the videotapes he returns conversations he has dates he goes on and the people he kills the novel immerses Us in his world through his eyes and most of the book is quite hilarious though his insane attention to detail about people's clothes can be tedious in Parts though I suppose that's part of the point however the violence is incredibly graphic like you might lose your appetite kind of graphic the violence takes up a pretty small percentage of the actual novel but it is quite disturbing he puts live rats in people tortures people through very creative means engages in necrophilia and more I'd go into more detail but I know that a lot of you are probably eating something while watching this video this portrayal of violence and in particular violence against women as most of the people Bateman details his murders of are women or at least the most gruesome of the deaths are women anyways this caused a major outcry from feminists who believed the book to be grossly misogynistic people who oppose the book pressured Simon and Schuster into dropping the release of the novel three months before its scheduled release adding to that Brett eastonellis was receiving death threats because of the salacious material in his new book The Publisher vintage picked up his novel and released it but forced Ellis to sign a declaration that he had read all 13 death threats sent to him that way his parents couldn't sue the publisher should somebody kill him because of the book needless to say American Psycho struck a nerve as shocking as it was and is Ellis has continued to stand by every word of it he argued that portrayal of misogyny in art is not equal to misogyny and that American Psycho was in fact a critique of men or a certain kind of Yuppie man in the 80s fortunately many feminists were on Ellis's side and understood what he was going for in the book which led to Guinevere Turner and Mary Herron both avowed feminists adapting the novel into a screenplay and later a feature film what do you want money food yeah I'm so hungry what's your name Toby Toby get a goddamn job Toby I lost my job they banned my channel why'd you lose your last one drink too much insider trading it's a joke I don't know it was blank and it won't let me make another one it's against her service that I can help you you see fudo is now accepting applications for its spring 2023 fellows program if you have an open source project you can get up to eighty thousand dollars accommodation and office space here in Austin all you have to do is send an application to the Futo fellows program and I'll provide a link to that in the description below you're a kind man Mr you're a kind of man thank you thank you Toby do you have an open source project Toby well I prefer proprietary software I don't think we have much in common we all know Christian Bale is Patrick Bateman it's hard to imagine Bateman as anyone else bail was just so perfect but believe it or not Leonardo DiCaprio was briefly set to Star the director Mary Herron wanted bail and rightfully didn't think that DiCaprio was right for the role though he would be perfect a decade or so later as Jordan Belfort because of this Heron was let go from the project for a short time while DiCaprio courted Oliver Stone to direct that all fell through though and Heron re-entered the project and got her wish with the casting what was funny about casting Bale was that his stepmother Gloria Steinem was a vocal protester of the book upon its release in 1991 but she married Bales dad in 2000 so I doubt it really had any bearing on Bill's decision to take the role a better fun fact is that Bale wanted Brett eastonellis to approve of his casting so he got lunch with Ellison LA but get this he was completely in character it freaked Ellis out so much that after five minutes he told Bill to stop I like to imagine that he didn't stop the movie version of American Psycho in my opinion condensed down the story and the characters of the book very well it tells the story in a more cinematic way which calls for some characters to be merged some events to be switched around and fused together and for a lot of things to be cut for pacing and time constraints nonetheless it maintains the spirit of the novel and Bale's transformative turn as a story's psychotic anti-hero elevates the film to the rank of modern classic one of the big differences between the book and the movie is the amount of violence the movie toned it way down from the novel with a lot of the violence in the film being relatively short and sometimes off-screen near the end of the movie Bateman admits to many more acts of violence referencing some sections of the novel but we never see him do any of it I think that toning down the violence brought the comedy to the Forefront the book is obviously funny but the graphic nature of the violence might have overshadowed the satire and wit of the text for a lot of people that barrier or filter doesn't exist in the film as the blood and gore really is on par with any normal slasher film that even young teens can handle speaking of the vile that brings us to possibly the biggest question that audiences have about the movie did Patrick kill all those people some people think that it's all real While others swear that all the violence is merely in his head but what do I think I honestly don't care I think that it doesn't matter whether or not he actually did the killings it's interesting either way if he did do the killings then the story highlights how the Yuppie Community is so self-obsessed that they either don't notice the deaths or they simply do not care on top of that perhaps they don't notice a disappearance as a deaths because everyone is interchangeable Bateman often gets mistaken for halberstrand and his lawyer isn't even sure of who he is when Bateman confronts his lawyer about his criminal confession his lawyer mixes him up with other people how are we to trust this guy saying that he had lunch with Paul Allen was he just mixing some other guy up with Paul Allen think about it they're all white dudes in their late 20s who all wear very similar suits get the same haircuts hang out at the same bars and clubs went to the same schools and work similar jobs they're like worker ants indistinguishable from each other to most observers if one two or even three go missing who will notice this is perfectly encapsulated in the famous business card scene every business card looks virtually identical there might be minute differences but those differences are insignificant Bateman might even be hallucinating some differences oh my God it even has a watermark did anyone else actually see a watermark on Paul Allen's card Bateman like all the other people around him is alone and isolated he's not in a steady relationship well okay he's got something going on with Evelyn but he and Evelyn are also seeing other people in his world relationships are way more malleable Lewis and Courtney are together but Courtney's sleeping with Patrick and Lewis wants to sleep with Patrick or are they together in some capacity and we don't know and the rules of attraction Sean Bateman supposedly gets into a gay relationship with another student but he never talks about it we only hear about it from the other guy is this also happening here and we don't know anything about his family his brother Sean appears in the book briefly and takes him to eat at dorsia but that scene isn't in the film the film separates him from any real human connection or backstory what are his parents like we don't know but Bateman surrogate parasocial father is certainly Donald Trump trump is the man that he holds with the utmost reverence love him hate him or neither you have to agree that Trump is not a man of fine or hip and cool taste and one could argue that he's the epitome of the Nouveau riche which makes Bateman's worship of him kind of funny now if Bateman didn't do any of the killings if it was indeed all in his head then that leads us down a different path but a path that's just as interesting why does he imagine himself viciously killing so many people perhaps these fantasy stem from a deeply repressed hate for everyone around him does he hate the culture to which he also wants to conform or is the culture what brings him to want to inflict pain and suffering on those around him maybe both the movie opens with Bateman going on a long spiel about the woes of the world hitting all the Yuppie good boy points but we know that he doesn't seriously care about any of this stuff he's merely saying all the right things to be seen as a good safe person by the people around him after it how thought-provoked I think this critique of 80s yuppies extends to the yuppies of the 2020s take for example this recently chat between Kelsey Piper and sand bankman freed you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers yeah he he I had to be it's what reputations are made of to some extent I feel bad for those who get by it by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so Everyone likes us as King Solomon famously said there is nothing new Under the Sun Bateman especially in the book reduces everyone to their clothes to him they're not people but entities occupying the spaces between the fabric he feels Hollow empty and emotionless yet expresses emotions towards music the music how could I leave out the music who are his favorite artists Huey Lewis and the News Phil Collins Whitney Houston popular 80s artist and let's not kid ourselves also kind of lame he describes her music and careers like pretentious YouTube culture critics if he existed today and did YouTube music reviews he'd be Anthony fantano if he reviewed movies he'd be me listen to my crooked voice if you think his monologues about the artists are long in the movie just read the book Ellis dedicated whole chapters to each musician the chapter about Huey Lewis is several pages long detailing their entire 80s career but it tells us more about Bateman than about the band he likes them the more and more they jettison their bad boy anti-establishment in anti-conformist Roots he notes that he likes that they start wearing suits at some point so basically the more corporate they are the better they are in his eyes there's a reason why the song he plays is hip to be square oh and when talking about the album Sports Bateman notes the song Honky Tonk Blues is a cover by some guy named Hank Williams let that sink in the guy that spends pages and Pages reviewing music artists doesn't even know who Hank Williams is I don't think I even need to point out how he uses the music to justify his own sociopathy but it's hilarious when talking about Whitney Houston he claims the message of the song is that it's impossible in this world we live in to empathize with others but we can always empathize with ourselves what does that even mean also I think that Ellis's voice really comes to the Forefront in Patrick's reviews it does feel like in these sequences Ellis is parodying himself giving a psychopath his voice leading to Bateman's absurdly detailed monologues Bateman isn't just into music he's all around a media Hound he's always renting and returning videotapes which mostly are just copies of Brian De Palma's body double he watches quite a lot of porn he never misses an episode of The Paddy winter show and he's always reading magazines to see what's considered cool and hip his world is oversaturated with media and he continues to saturate it with his own Creations by filming some of his sexual encounters and in the book he films many of his murders so why am I going on about his media Obsession when I should be talking about why he didn't do the murders I want to posit a theory that what he consumes greatly influences his potential fantasies in the book he describes his sexual encounters as if he's writing smut and in the movies it kind of looks like porn his murders are over the top and sometimes times they don't feel like they possibly could have happened and he remarks at least a few times how things feel like a movie or the situation would be better if it played out like a movie is he living in the real world or is he living in some kind of simulation caused by mass media in his own disassociation from reality through the media Bateman can simulate emotion what's stopping him from simulating sex and violence how many of his sexual encounters he thought he had were just pornos he watched how many of his acts of violence were things he saw on TV or film is he doing any of this or is he just imagining himself as an action star horror villain or porno actor so why am I going on about his media Obsession when I should be talking about why he didn't do the murders the whole chasing near the end plays out in such a Tropic action film kind of way he runs through the streets of New York killing left and right he blows up the cop car with a few shots from his handgun and it all ends with a police helicopter hunting him down only for nothing to come of it it feels like a movie not like real life yes I know American Psycho is a movie but the logic of the sequence doesn't add up with the rest of the film unless we understand it as being a hallucination or a dream or something in the book it's the only chapter in which Bateman refers to himself in the third person which I think solidifies it as something not real but does that mean that everything in the film is not real is Bateman like what one of my friends believes a loser who can't do anything to harm anyone but just imagines all this stuff is he really just actually a beta with impotent rage as I said earlier I like the fact that the film and book remain ambiguous it makes thinking and talking about them more fun and it paints a more complex picture of Bateman what I personally think is that some kills are real and some are not I completely believe the killing of the homeless man but the murder of Paul Allen might not be real but then again it might be what's really important is that Patrick thinks they're real I killed Paul Allen and I liked it so let's think about who the character Patrick Bateman is through one lens he's a psychotic serial killer through another lens he's a total Normie loser albeit with a good job through a third lens he's both so why is he the face of the literally me genre what do people see in him check it out new personality what do you think whoa look at that very nice picked it up from the video store yesterday the director is Joel Schumacher and the actors Michael Douglas it's really nice Bateman but that's nothing [Music] that's David Fincher with Brad Pitt and Ed Norton Jesus wow really super how to knit would like you get so tasteful I can't believe Bryce prefers van patten's personality to mine but wait You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet impressive very nice let's see Paul Allen's personality look at the all-star cast the tasteful satire of it oh my God it's even in 4k how and why do they relate to him so much for one I think it's just funny to say that you're just like him it's a character that for the longest time was seen as completely evil and a total villain so there's a kind of edginess or there was a kind of edginess to comparing yourself to him it's like saying yeah I'm evil yeah I'm a psycho or I'm a total NPC so what it defies social norms and for a while it was kind of funny but now it's so popular that it is a bit played out the memes and posts are still sometimes funny even though they were ruined for me the moment a friend of mine said they're just minion memes for dudes on Fortune and Twitter but I think there's a darker reason why Bateman is such an attractive character for one he's physically fit successful Hanson dresses well is good at attracting women according to him and he generally acts very cool at least to us but on the other hand he's maniacal full of bloodlust and rage he's Primal an unquenchable predator in a city full of prey at once he represents a young man's ideal and that same young man's dark interior here this contrast gives him a certain allure in a way he feels mythical if we're being honest with ourselves we often imagine committing all sorts of terrible crimes when we feel angry frustrated or powerless I think we imagine these crimes a lot more during rush hour I Really Wanna I got some bad ideas in my head I just the reality is everyone has quite a bit of Darkness within them most of us just live by a code of morals and I would hope that most of us have enough empathy to not ever want to inflict needless harm on anyone Patrick Bateman though is a man of no morals and he is a man devoid of empathy so when we see Patrick killing somewhat senselessly it's a cinematic release through him through this work of fiction we're able to feel like we're gaining control of our world mastering control of death while also condemning his actions and worrying for the victims at the same time well except for Paul Allen that guy's an I think that the audiences also just love vape and slip into Insanity I know that people joke about being crazy or not living in reality but the world we live in is much more media saturated than Bateman's our world and thus our reality is defined by what we see on screens screens that follow us wherever we go and the programs we use know just how to manipulate us their algorithms show us what they want us to see the YouTube algorithm probably knows better than you know yourself and when it knows what you like so well it can also easily manipulate you other apps like Instagram and Twitter give us dopamine hits when our posts give interaction oh man that little buzz your phone makes when somebody likes your posts so awesome but they can take it away say things to the big tech people don't like and you'll find yourself deep boosted or suspended no longer able to get a good hit and forcing you to act like an electronic junkie revert to the mainstream and you can get your fix and sometimes they just de-boost you to with you or they run experiments on you to make you happy or depressed or they try to change your behavior to get you to buy whatever newest product is paying them a lot of money so as I see it we're all kind of collectively losing our minds the dimensional merge between the real world and the internet world has happened and the result is well a YouTube personality called Chris Chan has just been arrested in Virginia on of all things incest charges Bateman in his Mania acts as a kind of force of nature against a world afraid of death but devoid of Life a world in which everyone fights against aging against death and strives for Eternal youth a world in which people want to be as beautiful and Immortal as Hollywood actors on The Silver Screen or models and swimsuit editions of Sports Illustrated Bateman exists to remind them of their own mortality his vacant animalistic Persona wants nothing more than to eat have sex and kill he's the Supreme version of the ID wearing a skin suit of the ego at one he's the embodiment of so much wrong in our consumerist society while also being a force against it he brings barbarism and savagery to 80s Manhattan but just like how the characters in the book dismiss the AIDS epidemic they also turn a blind eye to his killings they can't accept death even if it's staring them in their faces it has no place in their worldview truly the people around Bateman are just as soulless as he and lastly Patrick Bateman has stood the test of time and has become a cultural icon simply because he's funny his Antics whether he's inappropriately talking about serial killers with his friends or he's freaking out over business cards are funny oh Africa Brave Africa was a laugh Riot Christian Bale is also just super charismatic that Charisma charm and dry humor may not have wowed critics and audiences on its initial release but American Psycho has proved to be one of the internet's favorite movies practically every scene from the film has been turned into a meme of some kind at one point the memes in the video edits were related to the film but now it's mostly just photos and short gifs of Patrick Bateman with text overlays almost completely divorced from The Source material in a fashion Bateman has been stripped of his humanity and he has thus been reduced to a mere image signifying almost nothing and you know what I think that's what he would have wanted I want to conjecture a little bit now if Patrick Bateman was a 27 year old professional in 2022 what would he be would he still work on Wall Street I took to Twitter to ask all of you what you thought here are some of your responses twitch streamer Tech sales pm at meta movie reviewer podcaster crypto bro the same so mergers and Acquisitions at Pearson Pierce or just general Wall Street person influencer and why are you asking this as a hypothetical when germa exists the answers were all over the place but I can see how they're all spiritually similar most of these jobs are jobs that self-obsessed people who care about status wealth and power gravitate to of course it doesn't mean that every influencer or Tech salesperson or crypto bro is some crazed narcissist just that the modern maintenance would be more drawn to these careers rather than to other choices Ellis himself stated some years ago that the modern Bateman would be in Silicon Valley I'm sure that many people in Wall Street still act just like Bateman in fact I'm sure many of them model themselves after Bateman but I think that American Psycho 2022 would fit better in Silicon Valley just because of how Tech has influenced or outright controlled the culture over the last decade it's a prime setting for a satire but Ellis thinks that my judges show Silicon Valley already did a pretty good job at making fun of all that I like to think that a modern Bateman would work at a venture capital firm in the valley investing in whatever flavor of the month the other VCS like or maybe he'd be a twitch streamer or a YouTuber who shamelessly engages in crypto pump and dumps maybe he'd be a tech worker who makes tick tocks about his days at work that show that you know he really doesn't do that much actual work he also might be some super woke Twitter personality who gets me-tooed for the worst possible offenses the possibilities are endless we live in such a wonderful world before you guys go I just wanted to say that there is actually an American Psycho Musical on Broadway sadly it flopped I really wanted to see it so hopefully it comes back in some way shape or form in the future well that's about it I'm the keynote corner and I will see you all in the next video and have a Merry Christmas [Music] thank you

Channel: The Kino Corner

Views: 205,894

Keywords: american psycho, bret easton ellis, the rules of attraction, less than zero, paul allen, literally me, the kino corner, patrick bateman, cinema, kino, art, movies, film, christmas, taxi driver, joker, falling down, turkey tom, sbf, ftx, yuppies, new york, horror, comedy, analysis, video essay, parody, satire, futo, halberstram, huey lewis, phil collins, sweet release, sigma, mary harron, christian bale, controversy, 80s, de palma, scorsese, big tech, simulation, thoughtful, fun, epic, hugo boss

Id: x69_9emzJKk

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022