In the final scene of American Psycho, serial killer Patrick Bateman returns to Paul Allen’s apartment, the location of some of his worst crimes, and finds it to be clean and free of bodies. Rather than being confronted with the expected bloodbath, he finds a mysterious realtor attempting to sell an immaculate property. If anything untoward has occurred there, somebody has gone to great lengths to remove any evidence. The question of what really happened in the American Psycho apartment scene is what ends the movie.
The riddle of the American Psycho apartment scene may not present a binary choice between a conspiratorial clean-up and the murders not having taken place. There is no way of trusting that what happens in Bateman’s head is an accurate interpretation of events. Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman Tom-Cruise-inspired character becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as the movie unfolds. His inability to say whether he has killed twenty people or forty points to a man who has become incapable of differentiating fantasy from reality. Paul Allen’s apartment is best explained with an answer that falls somewhere between the two.
The Director Confirmed At Least Some American Psycho Murders Were Real
The notion that nothing happened at all in the American Psycho apartment scene seems inadequate. Director, Mary Harron, describes her frustration with this particular view on Paul Allen’s apartment. “Everyone keeps coming out of the film thinking that it’s all a dream, and I never intended that,” she explains (via The Take).
Co-writer Guinevere Turner makes the point more emphatically (via IMDB), “We decided, right off the bat […] that we hate movies, books, stories that ended and ‘it was all a dream.’” Such an explanation for Paul Allen’s apartment would render the entire movie somewhat pointless. The idea that Bateman’s (who was nearly played by Leonardo DiCaprio) capacity for self-delusion renders him harmless is antithetical to a film that focuses on the dangers of male narcissism and toxic masculinity.
Mrs. Wolfe Probably Helped Clean Up After Patrick Bateman
The theory that Mrs. Wolfe, possibly with the help of others, has erased the history of the crimes in Paul Allen’s apartment certainly chimes better with the dark satire of the movie. Faced with the prospect of an expensive property losing value through its association with a string of gruesome crimes, it’s conceivable that a firm of realtors would be so cold and calculating as to conceal everything that has happened there.
If so, it places the heinous actions of Patrick Bateman throughout 2000’s American Psycho movie in the context of a similarly self-obsessed and uncaring world. It’s a deliciously dark interpretation that adds yet another element to the cocktail of evil, but it’s an explanation that is, like Paul Allen’s apartment itself, a little too tidy. Harron says of the two interpretations (via IMDB), “It should slip between the two. I don’t think you can find the meaning in one answer.“
The American Psycho Ending Is Ambiguous To Reflect Bateman’s Mental State
Perhaps it is the return to Paul Allen’s apartment that is purely a figment of Bateman’s imagination. There is a possibility that he fabricates the scene to dismiss the reality of his orgy of violence. Mrs. Wolfe could be a nod to Pulp Fiction‘s Winston Wolf, the legendary crime-scene cleaner who can wave a magic wand and make it all go away.
An ability to convince himself that a series of horrendous events did not occur by imagining the depravity of others makes Bateman, who was cut from Rules of Attraction, an even more terrifying character. Ambiguity is an essential component in American Psycho and Paul Allen’s apartment. Lines between the real and the imaginary are intentionally blurred. While it is never clear what is real and what is sordid fantasy, not knowing serves to deepen disgust rather than mitigate Bateman’s actions.
The American Psycho Sequel Nearly Ruined The Perfect Ending
There is, in fact, a little-known sequel to American Psycho, titled American Psycho 2 — and it almost ruined the first movie’s ending and the Paul Allen’s apartment issue. The second film follows Mila Kunis’ Rachael Newman, a college student studying criminology, and chronicles her descent into madness as she becomes a serial killer herself. Why? Because she witnessed Patrick Bateman murder her babysitter and killed him with an ice pick in a flashback.
Christian Bale isn’t Bateman for American Psycho 2, with Michael Kremko taking over for the brief appearance. The movie wasn’t originally supposed to be involved with American Psycho. Rather, it was tacked on to the film, and the plot was changed to fit. The beauty of the original movie’s satirical ending is that audiences walk away from the film unsure if the murders were real or not, but American Psycho 2 basically takes the wind out of its sails when it shows that Patrick Bateman was indeed a serial killer and that Paul Allen’s apartment scene was a part of that.
This kills the mystery that the first movie created, including the perplexing American Psycho apartment scene. By killing off Bateman, it also ruins the sickly fear that’s created when audiences believe that he could keep killing without facing consequences due to his white male privilege. All in all, the only thing that saves American Psycho‘s ending from American Psycho 2‘s mistakes is the fact that most people don’t know about the sequel.
For Christian Bale, The Most Unsettling Thing About American Psycho Isn’t The Violence
Patrick Bateman’s violence depicted in Paul Allen’s apartment wasn’t the thing that freaked out actor Christian Bale, rather, it was the attitude of real Wall Street bankers’ view of his character. In an interview with GQ, Bale discussed some of the most iconic characters he has played to date, including American Psycho‘s Patrick Bateman. To prepare for the role, Bale visited the NY stock exchange trading room floor and spoke with a few Wall Street bankers to gain an understanding of Bateman’s mindset in his career. These conversations, however, Thor 4 actor Christian Bale found unsettling, stating:
When there still was the Wall Street trading floors and everything, I went and visited, you know, all different levels of people at Wall Street. But the guys on the trading floor, when I arrived there before making the film… I got there and a bunch of ’em were going, “Oh, Patrick Bateman!” and patted me on the back and going, “Oh yeah, we love him!” And I was like… yeah, ironically, right?
Apparently, the men on the trading room floor did not like him ironically, responding to Bale’s prompt with, “What do you mean?” The actor understandably found these responses to be worrying, as it suggested that these affluent and powerful men respected and venerated a psychopathic killer. It speaks to a larger problem in society when people in power hold anything but revulsion for a character like Patrick Bateman, as he was never intended to be someone who is idolized. American Psycho is certainly a troubling movie, but the Wall Street trader’s attitude surrounding the main character is even more horrific.
