Happy 4th of July to all you bat
shit crazy Americans out there. It's time to take a long, hard look at
the excess, violence, and insanity lurking under the surface of American Psycho.
>> Based on Bret Easton Ellis' graphic as hell novel from 1991,
the story of Patrick Bateman and the drug-fueled Wall Street
of the 80s is psychotic. Psychotic and violent, so so violent. We'll try to do our best to include what
we can but we want to keep this thing monetizable, I mean a fellow's got to eat.
>> So with no restraint on spoilers but a fair warning that something gross
might sneak through the happy filter, it's time to ask what's the difference? (Music) American Psycho takes all of its
scenes from some part of the book. Some of them are rearranged or
truncated but pretty much every stitch of dialog in the film comes straight
from the source material. The simple fact that it's 400 pages worth
of book in just 97 minutes of movie means that Brett Easton Ellis' novel is
just more detailed, more violent, more racist and
more pornographic across the board. The differences here are more about
what the movie didn't include instead of how anything was changed.
>> Even the more innocuous of Patrick Bateman's obsessions are taken to
the excess in the book, while the movie gives us a detailed description of his
morning routine, we only really get one. In the book, we get an even a more
detailed description as well as a hyper-specific list of what
everybody's wearing in nearly every scene in the book to the point where
it's near impossible to tell anyone apart. While this is a key part of
the narrative in both mediums, it's on a whole other level in the book. You really get the sense that everybody
literally looks the same, literally, like real literally.
>> American Psycho is all about a guy who kills people, violently and
for insane reasons. Let's talk about the psycho himself. Movie Bateman is cold and postured,
clearly living behind a mask. In both the book and the movie,
he's a stand-in for the greed and excess of the 80s, an extreme example
of how insane the whole era was. His sterile, super-modern apartment in
the film is really the biggest difference. His apartment in the book features
more furniture, more color, a jukebox, even a painting of a naked woman watching
MTV in a Martian desert, a far cry from the spartan white space in the movie.
>> Other than the stuff in his apartment, book and
movie Patrick are largely the same. The vast majority of the movie's dialogue
comes directly from the source material even if it's rearranged a bit. But again, the novel has way
more time to spend with him. >> Movie Bateman is a shark hiding in plain sight. A rogue, crazy person who
just kind of is who he is. It's more a case of a psycho being in
the right place at the right time, than a psycho who is
a product of his environment. (Music) >> Sorbet.
>> Even though we do get narration in the movie, we have much more
access to book Bateman's inner workings. >> In the opening chapters, we see his fiance, Evelyn, feeding
insecurities about his hair thinning or weight that he may or may not be gaining. Further into the story,
we even see his mother. A drug-addled permanent
resident of a hospital who can still only talk to her son about who was
at what party, and how long did they stay. All of this adds up to a more fleshed
out version of Patrick Bateman. (Sound) See? Look at all that flesh.
>> In the film, we get a much more direct
path to all the killing. It's easy to track how one
thing leads to the other. For example,
the iconic business card scene. One minute Bateman can't handle how
a tool like Paul Allen has the classiest business card at the table. So angry and worked up, in the very next
scene, he murders a random homeless man. >> In the book, however, Bateman's blood lust is
much more spaced out. Paul Owen in the book has
a predictably shitty business card. Bateman freaks about the business card
of some rich guy who everybody hates but has to put up with because he's
supposedly worth $800 million. But we only get to meet him once in
a restaurant, he's not important. The attack on the homeless man
comes after a party that Bateman is just not that interested in. So he leaves early and
he finds the homeless man and his dog after some aimless wandering. He then pulls out a knife from
his briefcase you see and then he,
>> Happy filter on this part, I think.
>> Right. So Patrick makes a new
friend in an alleyway. And after teasing him with some cash and
then being a real nudge about getting a job, Patrick pulls a, let's call it
a magical wand out of his briefcase. He just starts tickling
his new friend with it. He tickles his new friend until
his eyes pop out of their sockets. And then Patrick breaks the dog's legs.
>> Jesus! That's the happy filter version?
>> In the movie, we get this wide shot in some yelping, and that's hard enough to watch.
>> In the book, this chapter is called Tuesday and it's followed up by an entire
chapter about Genesis and Phil Collins. >> Anyway, after the homeless guy scene, Bateman is laser focused on killing
Paul Owen, luring him out to dinner. Getting him drunk and back up to his
apartment before monologuing about Huey Lewis and axing Paul to death.
>> The book takes a much longer route to Paul Owen's death, showing Bateman and his
friends and colleagues out at a handful of bars and restaurants before he
finally gets around to killing him. Which he does in the same way,
except for two differences. One, there's no Huey Lewis monologue. Like Phil Collins,
that gets its very own chapter later on. And instead of simple blood splatter, the ax actually hits Paul
straight in the funny bone. (Laugh) Silly old Patrick plays
hide the ax with his friend, Paul. Patrick thinks Paul can't fit the whole
axe in his mouth without his entire head falling apart. And wouldn't you know it? He can't.
>> I think the point the happy filter is making here is that because
the novel is able to take its time, book Patrick's outbursts seem more random,
less motivated that movie Patrick's. The film actually moves straight into
private eye Donald Kimball showing up to ask about Paul Owen's disappearance. In the book,
it's like 60 pages before Kimball shows up.
>> In that time, Bateman has lunch with his
ex from college, and he's so nervous and antsy,
he literally can't think straight. He writes her a poem and seems legitimately afraid
this woman will reject it. Ultimately though, he convinces her to come back to his
apartment where crazy old Patrick asks Bethany to keep her hands on this two
blocks of wood, he just asks her to do it. Certainly doesn't do it for
her with a nail gun one finger at a time. Then they play with all kinds of toys for
two days. Toys like scissors,
pepper spray, chainsaws. (Sound) Ultimately,
she gets tuckered out and goes down for a forever nap.
>> I think we get the point. Look movie Bateman's journey is a much
straighter line of cause and effect. Kimball questions him about Paul Owen. He blows off steam by
torturing a few prostitutes. Lewis Carruthers hits
on him in the bathroom, then gets another visit from Kimball. He takes a model home,
kills her off screen, then keeps a lock of her hair as a trophy. In the book, all of this gets rearranged. The movie's two separate Kimball
interviews are derived from the same scene in the book, when the detective
first interviews Patrick and the Carruthers incident in
the bathroom happens much earlier. We see Lewis's obsession with Patrick
escalate past Bateman threatening him with a knife to a full on meltdown at Barney's, where Bateman kicks Carruthers in
the face to get him to let go of his leg. Plus killing the model is
fully in the novel and sees Patrick play make-believe
with his new blonde friend. This time, they're pretending
the model's eyes are birthday candles. Happy birthday.
>> It's more of the same ingredients, but in a different order, giving Bateman's
MO a more random feel in the book. But by the time we arrive at
the end of the movie, and we get to Bateman's
insane action sequence. We find him attempting to feed a cat
to an ATM, killing an old woman, in a shootout with the cops, then offing
an unsuspecting doorman and janitor before making it back to his office.
>> The book version is kicked off by murdering a street saxophonist,
then stealing a cop car, and crashing it into a Korean deli. But more or less, it plays out the same.
>> The film's action sequence is so sudden and so bonkers that it seems
like it may be all in his head. In fact, the brazenness with which he
commits his murders, the height of which is leaving a trail of blood across
his building's lobby before stuffing Paul Owen's body into the trunk of a cab,
all seems too strange to be real. The way Patrick frequently says out loud
that he's a murderer only to not be heard plays like it's in his head as well.
>> The book, however, makes it feel real. Every time he tells
somebody he's murdered, there's a reason they don't hear him. His more elaborate killings are confined
in his or Paul's apartment and do not include him running through
the apartment building naked and screaming with a chainsaw. Because the book takes its time and we live with Patrick Moor
through the endless parties and inane bickering with his friends about
mineral water and pocket squares. Through a summer in the Hampton's
with Evelyn where restless, he ends up eating sand and
microwaving jellyfish. We know exactly how insane Patrick is,
so his atrocities feel real. >> They feel so real in fact that after he kills a kid at
the zoo, even eight pages dedicated to Whitney Houston's entire oeuvre
starts to feel equally disgusting. Murder and mayhem and
unspeakable brutality get rolled into long passages about nothing more than
deciding where to eat that night and packaged into chapters that are as
likely to be titled, Another Nigh, as they are,Tries to Cook and Eat Girl. But seeing them play out on
screen with much less access to Bateman's inner monologue
leaves us with room to doubt. Maybe the things we’ve been
seeing didn’t really happen. Or maybe they did and
the lesson is that the hip and modern yuppies perhaps,
a new breed of monster altogether, are just going to get away with it.
>> Bateman’s closing monologue from the film is pulled from a passage towards
the end of the book but not the very end. The novel does end with a little
more closure than the movie. What we're left with is the experience
of living with an American psycho for 400 pages, and the knowledge
that he's never going to stop or be stopped.
>> That's it for American Psycho. I'm going to go find
a friend in the bad part of town that can give me some
magical candy to help me go to sleep after reading this book.
>> Hey, you remember when that rat eats its way through the-
>> Nope, we're done, Casey. Be sure to subscribe to Cinefix for
more What's the Difference and I may actually come back from this one.
>> That rat was so hungry.
