Did the murders really happen, or did Bateman just imagine it all?
This is the most frequently asked question in relation to the film,
and the answer remains ambiguous. As with the questions of why Allen's
apartment is empty, how did Carnes see Allen in London, and why people
ignore Bateman's outbursts, there are two basic theories:
the murders are very real and Bateman is simply being ignored when he tries to confess
everything happened in his imagination
Much of the discussion regarding the possibility of everything being
in his mind focuses on the sequence which begins when the ATM asks him
to feed it a stray cat. From this point up to the moment he rings
Carnes and leaves his confession on the answering machine, there is a
question regarding the reality of the film; is what we are seeing
really happening, or is it purely the product of a disturbed mind? An
important aspect of this question is Bateman's destruction of the
police car, which explodes after he fires a single shot, causing even
himself to look incredulously at his gun; many argue that this
incident proves that what is happening is not real, and therefore,
nothing that has gone before can be verified as being real either. Of
this sequence, Mary Harron comments "You should not trust anything
that you see. Trying to feed the cat into the ATM is sort of a
giveaway. The ATM speaking to Bateman certainly indicates that things
have taken a more hallucinatory turn." As such, if this scene is an
hallucination, the question must be are all of his murders
hallucinatory? Interestingly enough, in the corresponding scene in the
novel, the narrative switches from 1st person present to 3rd person
present mid-sentence (341) at the beginning of the sequence, and then
back to 1st person present (again mid-sentence) at the end (352). This
is a highly unusual narrative technique, suggestive of a sizable shift
in consciousness and focalization, and an altogether different
narrative perspective. This lends credence to the theory that the
entire sequence is a hallucination, which in turn lends credence to
the suggestion that much of what we see in the film is also an
hallucination.
However, if this is the case, and if this sequence does represent pure
fantasy, Harron ultimately came to feel that she had gone too far with
the hallucinatory approach. In an interview with Charlie Rose, she
stated that she felt she had failed with the end of the film because
she led audiences to believe the murders were only in his imagination,
which was not what she wanted. Instead, she wanted ambiguity;
One thing I think is a failure on my part is people keep coming out of
the film thinking that its all a dream, and I never intended that. All
I wanted was to be ambiguous in the way that the book was. I think
it's a failure of mine in the final scene because I just got the
emphasis wrong. I should have left it more open ended. It makes it
look like it was all in his head, and as far as I'm concerned, it's
not (the complete interview can be found here).
Guinevere Turner instämmer med Harron vid denna punkt;
It's ambiguous in the novel whether or not it's real, or how much of
it is real, and we decided, right off the bat, first conversation
about the book, that we hate movies, books, stories that ended and 'it
was all a dream' or 'it was all in his head'. Like Boxing Helena,
there's just a lot of stuff like that. [...] And so we really set out,
and we failed, and we've acknowledged this to each other, we really
set out to make it really clear that he was really killing these
people, that this was really happening. What's funny is that I've had
endless conversations with people who know that I wrote this script
saying "So, me and my friends were arguing, cause I know it was all a
dream", or "I know it really happened". And I always tell them, in our
minds it really happened. What starts to happen as the movie
progresses is that what you're seeing is what's going on in his head.
So when he shoots a car and it explodes, even he for a second is like
"Huh?" because even he is starting to believe that his perception of
reality cannot be right. As he goes more crazy, what you actually see
becomes more distorted and harder to figure out, but it's meant to be
that he is really killing all these people, it's just that he's
probably not as nicely dressed, it probably didn't go as smoothly as
he is perceiving it to go, the hookers probably weren't as hot etc etc
etc It's just Bateman's fantasy world. And I've turned to Mary many
times and said "We've failed, we didn't write the script that we
intended to write".
I linje med vad både Harron och Turner känner till frågan om
huruvida morden är verkliga, har Bret Easton Ellis påpekat
att om ingen av morden faktiskt hände, hela punkten av
roman skulle göras moot. Som med de praktiska teorierna om
Carnes konversation, utbrotten och den tomma lägenheten,
tolka morden som verklig är en del av filmens sociala satir.
Ellis har sagt att romanen var avsedd att satirisera den grunda,
opersonlig tänkesätt av yuppie America i slutet av 1980-talet, och en del av
denna kritik är det även när en kallblodig seriemördare
bekänner, ingen bryr sig, ingen lyssnar och ingen tror. Faktumet
den Bateman är aldrig fångad och att ingen tror på hans bekännelse
förstärker bara grundlöshet, självabsorption och brist på moral
som de alla har. Ingen av dem bryr sig om att han bara har erkänt
att vara en seriemördare eftersom det bara spelar ingen roll de har mer
viktiga saker att oroa dig för. I Bateman ytliga högklassiga
samhället, det faktum att även hans öppna bekännelse till flera mord är
ignoreras tjänar till att förstärka tanken på en vakuum, självbesatt,
materialistisk värld där empati har ersatts av apati. Av
förlängning då kan detta läsas som en fördömande av företag
i allmänhet; De är också vana att komma undan med mord (i figurativ mening)
och de flesta väljer bara att ignorera det, liksom Bateman
associerar. I den meningen fungerar Bateman som en metafor, liksom
de mycket riktiga morden. Om morden var rent i hans huvud, så
stark social kommentar skulle bli underminerad och filmen skulle bli
en psykologisk studie av ett avskräckt sinne snarare än en social satir.
Och medan det är en helt giltig tolkning, som Harron
indikerar ovan är det inte helt vad filmskaparna var
försöker uppnå.