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 concorda com Harron neste ponto;
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".
De acordo com o que Harron e Turner sentem sobre a questão de
se os assassinatos são reais ou não, Bret Easton Ellis apontou
que se nenhum dos assassinatos realmente aconteceu, o ponto inteiro do
romance seria tornado irrelevante. Tal como acontece com as teorias práticas sobre
a conversa de Carnes, as explosões e o apartamento vazio,
interpretar os assassinatos como reais faz parte da sátira social do filme.
Ellis afirmou que o romance foi destinado a satirizar o superficial,
mentalidade impessoal da América yuppie no final de 1980, e parte de
esta crítica é que, mesmo quando um serial killer de sangue frio
confessa, ninguém se importa, ninguém ouve e ninguém acredita. O fato
que Bateman nunca é pego e que ninguém acredita em sua confissão
apenas reforça a superficialidade, auto-absorção e falta de moralidade
que todos eles têm. Nenhum deles se importa que ele acabou de confessar
ser um serial killer porque isso não importa; eles têm mais
coisas importantes para se preocupar. Na alta classe superficial de Bateman
sociedade, o fato de que até mesmo sua confissão aberta a múltiplos assassinatos é
ignorado serve para reforçar a ideia de um vazio, auto-obcecado,
mundo materialista onde a empatia foi substituída pela apatia. Por
extensão, então, isso poderia ser lido como uma condenação de corporações
em geral; eles também tendem a se safar do assassinato (no sentido figurado)
e a maioria das pessoas simplesmente decide ignorá-lo, assim como Bateman
associados. Nesse sentido, então, Bateman serve como uma metáfora, assim como
os assassinatos muito reais. Se os assassinatos foram puramente em sua cabeça, o
comentários sociais strongs seriam minados e o filme se tornaria
um estudo psicológico de uma mente perturbada em vez de uma sátira social.
E enquanto isso é uma interpretação perfeitamente válida, como Harron
indica acima, não é inteiramente o que os cineastas
tentando alcançar.