Mary Harron

I refuse to get into the discussion as to whether or not the events of the movie version of American Psycho happened or not. Everyone has their own opinions, and I’m not convinced it matters. Mary Harron’s own take seems to be that some of it is more real than other bits. She says she was told that the movie would ruin her career and that acting in it would ruin Christian Bale’s. Funnily enough, one of the only things she’d directed to that point was a handful of episodes of the British series The Late Show. Including their Batman special.

Harron is from a show business family. One of her mother’s only credited film roles was in a movie where Shirley Temple was uncredited. Her father had a long and Canadian career including, very late in life, a couple of episodes of The Red Green Show. A stepfather was a Hungarian refugee who wrote novels in English. One stepmother was a popular Canadian performer; another was Jan in the Pan from The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. It might therefore seem surprising that her initial career was as a music journalist, but she considers herself to have grown up in the punk scene, and she was quite successful at it. Among other things, she was the first American journalist to interview the Sex Pistols.

Harron was nearly forty when she made the transition to directing and over forty when she directed her first movie, I Shot Andy Warhol. It’s the only script she wrote and the only feature she made before American Psycho. Clearly it impressed someone. She was approached to direct, looked over the scripts they had at the time, and decided that none of them were right. She read the book herself, contacted her writing partner Guinevere Turner, and co-wrote the script.

Now, I read the book in college and not since, so I’m willing to bet Harron’s script was more immediate to the experience of the book than mine watching her movie was. However, I disagree with what seems to be her premise, that the book is a work of satire. It’s the only Bret Easton Ellis I’ve read, but I’ve read things he’s said as a real person, and I think he’s got a heavy masculinity complex going. He may have been taking things a bit to extreme, and I’m not saying that he thinks you should be emulating Patrick Bateman, but I do think he thinks the culture is acceptable even if it does result in, you know, people like Patrick Bateman. I think it’s a joke that Ellis isn’t in on, and Harron is, which is why her movie is better than his book.

Success is supposed to make future careers in Hollywood easier. Harron says that’s not her experience. She is, sigh, another “I’m not a feminist filmmaker,” and of course she’s entitled to label herself how she wants. However, it’s certainly true that her films tend to center women’s voices and women’s perspectives even when you wouldn’t expect that to be the case. And I mean, it’s not that Christian Bale was a nobody before American Psycho and a star after—hadn’t he played Jesus just the year before? It is, however, true that it did a whole lot more for him than it did for her.