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.