One of Christian Bale’s winning traits as an actor is his inability to deliver a bad role. Whether as the lead or the supporting character, Bale’s filmography has a rare combination of iconic performances that keep the audience falling only deeper in love with him, his irrefutable talent, and his magnetic on-screen presence.
Sadly, however, despite being one of the best actors in the world, Christian Bale did not have such a smooth sailing start to his career. After trying (and failing) to rebel against the Hollywood studio system and his heartbreaking realization about the importance of fitting into a mold behind the scenes, the actor finally let up and danced to the tune of the studios for the sake of his art.
In 2000, a director put two and two together, recognized the wild, untapped, ingenious potential hidden beneath the layers of his put-together personality, and came to the conclusion that none other than Christian Bale could do justice to the role of her American Psycho. And therein, a legend was born.
Christian Bale Redefined Hitchcock’s Classic Psycho
Of all the literary or cinematic adaptations of sociopaths and socially dysfunctional individuals, Psycho is perhaps the closest representation of the psychological inner workings of a troubled maniac. There is no questioning the mastery of Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins in bringing alive the horror and iconography of Norman Bates to the big screen.
But nearly half a century later, Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner granted a revolutionary new angle to the classically established version of Hitchcock’s psychopath. No longer was Bates an isolated, neck-of-the-woods, anti-social, motel owner. Patrick Bateman represented everything antithetical to Norman Bates and yet, chose to walk down the same path as his cinematic predecessor.
Christian Bale‘s American psycho was ’80s capitalism and the yuppie culture personified. In every move, word, emotion, desire, and deviant tendency, Patrick Bateman reeks of social status, class, money, power, and image. Despite being overexposed to the fast-talking, fast-paced world of Wall Street and being surrounded by an abundance of characters – pseudo-intellectual or otherwise – Bale still manages to convince the audience of Bateman’s utterly anti-social, alienated, sociopathic nature without any exposition required.
American Psycho Brings Something New to the Table
After fighting tooth and nail for the film’s titular role, Christian Bale was ready to nail down Mary Harron’s American Psycho. But the director had one final note to give to her lead in order to get the character just right. She believed that Bateman wasn’t simply a tragically flawed by-product of a bad childhood or generational trauma. Instead, he is “a symptom; he’s emblematic.”
Christian and I often talked about how not to think about the character in terms of psychology but rather as a collection of impulses and modes.
When he picks up Christie, the prostitute, and the escort girl comes over—he is dressed like James Bond doing his smooth romantic-seducer thing. And everything, of course, goes wrong because women never do the right thing. In fact, he even plays as if Christie were his girlfriend, saying things in front of the escort, like, ‘Christie, our guests have arrived.’
I would tell Christian early on to think of Bateman as a Martian who is trying to be a human being but keeps getting it wrong and ends up killing people.
In essence, Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman is a classic model of the Monkey See, Monkey Do psychology. He is an outsider who has been “acting out roles for himself” in the hopes of securing his seat at the table, so to speak. Moreover, Bateman is a representation of “status anxiety” that haunts modern society and the detachment, alienation, and sociopathy that guides Bale’s character is an extension of his nature wherein he perceives everything he sees and yet, never quite seems to understand the meaning or purpose behind it.
The satire comes full circle when in a moment of untold panic and mania, Bateman resorts to the human trait of confessing his crimes to his lawyer only to find out that the person never existed, making him question reality and the very fabric of society that he has been basing his entire life and identity upon.
American Psycho is currently streaming on Netflix.
