E-Mail This Article to a Friend Kill joy American Psycho on DVD BY PETER KEOUGH
	American Psycho Directed by Mary Harron. Written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. With Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, and Chloë Sevigny. A Lions Gate Home Entertainment release.

This Saturday, June 18, director Mary Harron will receive the Provincetown Film Festival’s "Filmmaker on the Edge Award," joining such past winners as John Waters, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, and Todd Haynes. Harron is invited into this pantheon of conspicuous indies after making only two feature films, both of them about homicidal crazy people. I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) explored the world of Valerie Solanas, the paranoid revolutionary feminist; it established her as an uncompromising, talented filmmaker prepared to address tough issues. Then came American Psycho, her adaptation of one of the most despised novels of the past 20 years, a film that Roger Ebert deemed "the most loathed movie at the Sundance Film Festival."

At least he saw it (maybe twice — he ended up giving it a thumbs up). Gloria Steinem never did and yet condemned it for its hyperbolic violence against women. People booed the trailer when it appeared in Cambridge cinemas. Even Harry Knowles hated it — for him it wasn’t violent enough.

The controversy has abated over the past five years, and the film’s release in a special Lions Gate Home Entertainment "Killer" DVD edition (it includes the 10 seconds or so deleted to avoid an NC-17 rating and about 90 minutes or so of uneven extras) has aroused little notice. Too bad, because if anything the film is more relevant today than when it first came out. The story of Patrick Bateman, a tony Wall Street cipher by day and a serial killer by night, feels right at home in today’s world of Enron and corporate carte blanche. You could compare this child of privilege and indulgence driven to justify himself through violence and mass murder with our current president, and critic Amy Taubin does in an "essay" that’s one of the DVD’s more illuminating extras. How odd, too, that Christian Bale, so brilliant as Bateman, a powerful businessman with a secret identity as a criminal, should return this summer as Batman, a powerful businessman with a secret identity as a crimefighter. In both cases, the hypocrisy of surface normality compels a confrontation with evil.

Does the film itself sustain such analysis? Although I put it on my Top 10 list in 2000, I don’t know whether I would do so now after another viewing. The whole point of the movie and the novel is stated in the film’s opening title sequence. Drops of red liquid — blood? — blob onto a white surface. It’s raspberry sauce, impeccably filigreed onto a plate to garnish some ornate and eldritch entrée at some evanescent trend spot in 1987 Manhattan.

Bateman hungers for the naked lunch under these trappings. He notes in voiceover that "there is an idea of Patrick Bateman but no real me," no essence beneath the emotions of "greed and disgust." So he kills a homeless man and his dog. Then he kills a fellow stockbroker, a man almost identical to him in every way, who had the fatal audacity to produce a business card — an "identity" — of slightly better quality than his own. Various call girls follow, done in with nail gun and chain saw. Bateman shoots an old lady, some policemen — who knows how many victims, or whether they’re real or imagined?

The problem, of course, is repetition. Or maybe that’s the intention. As critic Holly Willis notes in her essay "The Pornography of Killing" ("performed" in the DVD by some blonde woman in sunglasses; these features are crudely produced, but they are of interest), repetition is the key to such transgressive artists as the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille, who compel insight into truth through disgust and boredom. American Psycho achieves neither of those states; it remains a flawed, funny exquisitely surfaced portrait of a void that will never be filled.