Was Paul Allen actually murdered by Bateman?
The black comedy horror movie American Psycho’s final moments has generated a lot of contentious discussion among movie fans. American Psycho, a movie starring Christian Bale and helmed by Mary Harron, is adapted from the 1991 Bret Easton Ellis book of the same name. The film tells the story of Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, a well-to-do NYC investment banker by day and a sociopathic spree murderer with a wide-ranging music taste by night. The moment Patrick gets to an ATM, it surprisingly requests him, “Feed me a stray cat,” marking the moment things begin to become bizarre after Bateman goes on a violent rampage throughout the duration of the film.
What transpires at American Psycho’s conclusion?
In the end, since American Psycho is some sort of sarcasm, we can hang up our incredulity that Patrick escaped from his heinous actions in some way, up until this moment in the movie. But the movie itself begins to twist right at this time, causing viewers to wonder how many of Patrick’s misdeeds have really happened until the time he picks up a stray cat off the ground and prepares to throw it into the ATM slot. The narrative is recounted from Patrick’s point of view, and within this important final half an hour of the movie, Patrick rapidly loses his credibility as a storyteller. A bystander, who is understandably appalled by the action he is prepared to conduct, asks him what he is doing as he raises the miserable, defenseless cat to the ATM slot. Without pausing for a second, Patrick hits the woman with his pistol and flees, with the police now chasing behind him. In a surprise shootout, Patrick manages to kill a couple police officers and destroy a police car after finding himself amidst an alley that has been shut off by officers. As evidenced by the perplexed expression on Patrick’s face, the unexpected twist has both of us astounded.
Patrick then seeks refuge at a place he believes to be Pierce & Pierce. Becoming aware of his error, Patrick murders the security officer and the curator before running frantically into the right construction, where he registers himself at the front desk, while also perspiring from nerves and physical effort. The 2 constructions are eerily identical, and Patrick becomes anxious in his office in the meantime. He hysterically contacts Stephen Bogaert’s Harold, his attorney-at-law, and admits to his misdeeds over the phone while laughing and crying. He claims he has massacred 20 to 40 individuals, yet he can’t remember how many. He acknowledges videotaping many of his murders, consuming some of his sufferers’ brains, and even attempting to cook them. He admits to murdering Jared Leto’s Paul Allen by striking him in the head using his ax, and he tells his lawyer that Allen’s remains are currently disintegrating in a bathtub in Hell’s Kitchen. He intends to have a meeting with Harold at Harry’s Bar when he returns tomorrow.
Patrick gets out of bed the next morning and dons one of his numerous immaculately dry-cleaned suits. Patrick gets into Allen’s flat while wearing a veil over his lips and nose. He is absolutely taken aback to see that the apartment is vacant and up for sale after hoping to relocate the dismembered remains he had kept inside. Patrick is approached by a real estate agent while posing as a prospective client. The realtor informs him that he’s wrong and requests him to get out and to never return when Patrick questions her whether this is Paul Allen’s residence, while also giving him an expression that resembles mistrust.
Patrick then quickly departs and makes a call to Chloe Sevigny’s Jean, his secretary, hysterically and insanely from a phone booth, to inform her that he believes he won’t make it to the workplace this afternoon. Jean takes out Patrick’s appointment notebook from his drawer and starts to leaf through it, clearly worried about the strange phone call from her employer, a guy she has been secretly crushing on. She was horrified to find that the pages were full of graphic illustrations of naked ladies being killed and dismembered. It appears that you avoided a serious danger, Jean.
Patrick travels to Harry’s Bar in the interim. He approaches Harold, who, mistaking him for somebody called “Davis,” informs Patrick that the message he left for his lawyer on his phone was completely amusing. It’s obvious that Harold believes the entire situation to be a joke, describing “Patrick Bateman” as a “boring, spineless lightweight” who is incapable of homicide. Patrick begs him to believe that he is Patrick Bateman and that he actually did murder all of those individualswhile seeming terribly perplexed. He did not just murder Allen, but he also enjoyed it. Harold explains to him that it’s impossible since he recently ate dinner with Paul in London.
Patrick, puzzled and uneasy, goes back to his table where his pals are discussing if Ronald Reagan is a “harmless old codger” or a deceitful sociopath while they see his speech on TV. Patrick makes his terrifying ultimate speech as a voiceover as the camera gradually pans into his eyes, in which he laments the fact that his atrocities have gone unpunished and his admittance has been for nothing.
Thus, was it all Patrick Bateman’s imagination? Numerous explanations have been proposed in response to the film’s finale. Is Patrick Bateman a real spree murderer or just a banker with unfulfilled sadistic desires? Popular belief holds that Patrick killed everybody he admitted to killing in his message to Harold, including all those we personally witnessed, with the exception of Paul Allen. When we consider Paul Allen’s empty flat and the fact that no evidence of Patrick’s violent rampage can be uncovered, this argument is probably the one that is nearest to the reality. This explanation may also clarify Harold’s assertion that Bateman could not have murdered Paul Allen because they had just had meal together.
A different hypothesis, on the other hand, contends that Patrick murdered everybody, even Paul Allen. We are aware that Allen is an affected yuppie with a superior business card to Patrick, and is someone who Patrick holds a grudge against. It’s also plausible that Harold dined with somebody whom he mistook for Allen; it seems normal for people in Patrick’s superficial circle to occasionally mistake someone for another. Patrick himself informs us that Marcus Halberstram, who is also an employee at P&P, conducting exactly the same business that he completes daily, is wrongly referred to by Paul Allen as Marcus Halberstram when we first meet him and during the rest of his appearances in the film. They visit the same barbershop and wear identical clothing. After that, Harold, Patrick’s attorney, indeed speaks to him on the phone frequently, but Harold refers to him as “Davis” and refers to the person he thinks is Bateman as “such a nerd.” The extreme sarcasm of American Psycho must be fully accepted in order for this idea to make sense: Patrick can escape from his murder because he is so undetectable amid a world of yuppies and fakes.
How do the movie writers respond to this? Guinevere Turner, the film co-writer, shares in a 20th anniversary interview with Moviemaker, “To me and Mary, the book left it up in the air, too, what was real and what was not real. We didn’t think that everything was real because some of it is literally surreal. But we just decided, together, that we both really disliked movies where the big reveal is that it was all in someone’s head or it was all a dream . . . We just both find that annoying. We just said we’re going to make a really conscious effort to have it be real, and then at some point… he’s sort of perceiving things differently, but they’re really happening.”
She continues by pointing out that the scene in the movie where the ATM orders Patrick to feed it a stray cat is the pivotal one. She claims: “He shoots at a cop car, and it just bursts into flames, and she just directs him to look at the gun like, Hmmm, how did that happen? But we did want it to be, at the end, that you really did think that he did these things.” Turner doesn’t provide a clear explanation for how the movie ends; this is certainly done on purpose to keep things mysterious. What is evident is that Patrick Bateman is definitely mad, and if he hasn’t already murdered anybody, there is a significant likelihood that he will do so very soon, despite whether he killed Paul Allen or any of the 20 to 40 individuals he thinks he’s done.
