Sunday Night Movie

I just finished watching American Psycho, and for a movie about murdering and cutting up women, it's actually pretty good. Parts were extremely biting and funny. I loved the way the movie poked fun at New American restaurant culture--- the opening scene in which falling drops of blood were revealed to be artistic drips of berry sauce adorning a dessert place was a witty visual trick. The ensemble characters' oblivion to Patrick Bateman's increasingly insane behavior was also a frustratingly fantastic indictment of the inanity of yuppie Manhattan.

American Psycho was directed by a woman, and a decent argument exists that the movie's direction and its screenplay (also written by women) effectively culled a feminist film from its source material, Bret Easton Ellis' feminist-derided book by the same title. Critics have contended that the movie version of American Psycho demonstrates the devastating effects of masculinity at its most brutal. An unwarranted sense of entitlement taken to its extreme will result in extraordinary violence, even if such violence doesn't culminate in actual murder (the result of Patrick Bateman's insecurity in his position as a super-man) but in the psychic harm that ensues from treating others as sub-human.

I don't know that I quite buy this argument. Insecurity and competitiveness certainly are not only the domain of men. The claim that women do not experience these traits is untrue, and it relegates women to a position in which they aren't recognized to feel quite natural (albeit unattractive) emotions. Also, that the movie portrays all varieties of female objectification, from pornography, to semi-unwilling sex acts, to graphic murder and dimemberment scenes, complicates the contention that American Psycho is feminist. The movie definitely does not glorify such scenes; they are both uncomfortable and decidedly un-sexy. But can a movie that so insistently showcases violence towards women, even if directed and written by women, and even if such scenes arguably caution against stereotypical masculinity run amok, ever be a "feminist" film?