The Indy Film Club: American Psycho was a canary in the coalmine for the Trump era

The next pick in our new weekly film social is Mary Harron’s ‘American Psycho’, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary. Clarisse Loughrey explains why it still resonates

Christian Bale worked out relentlessly, ate nothing but chicken, and studied the practised mannerisms of Tom Cruise for the role of Patrick Bateman (Rex)

Donald Trump’s shadow looms over American Psycho. In Mary Harron’s razor-sharp satire, released 20 years ago, finance bro-cum-psychopathic killer Patrick Bateman worships the man. His eyes always dart nervously around the streets and high-end restaurants of New York City, on the lookout for him or his then-wife Ivana (the story is set in the late 1980s). He’s an even greater feature of Bret Easton Ellis’s original novel. Bateman keeps a copy of The Art of the Deal on his desk and craves an invitation onto the Trump yacht.

Would he still be Trump’s most ardent supporter today? When Rolling Stone posed the question to Ellis in 2016, he wasn’t so sure. Six company bankruptcies later, Trump has lost much of the elitist lustre that made him such an aspirational figure to wannabe billionaires. But it’s altogether futile to imagine a Bateman of 2020. As the film’s screenwriter Guinevere Turner has pointed out, the character “is less a person and more a phenomenon. He is the personification of his environment.” He’s the comprehensive manifestation of every narcissistic, capitalist, supremacist impulse that drives Trump and his ilk. It’s why American Psycho still fascinates us today – funny, frightening and furious in every blood-soaked turn.

Looking at Trump’s rise to power, you’ll find it hard not to think of Ellis’s book as a kind of canary in the coal mine. But, back in 1991, when the book was published, it all seemed too repulsive to bear. American Psycho’s tale of a fat-cat investment banker who splits his time equally between fetishising consumer goods (from Eighties pop stars to designer suits) and committing sadistic, elaborate murders sparked instant controversy. The book was met with boycotts, bans, scathing reviews and death threats. The New York Times decried it as “a contemptible piece of pornography, the literary equivalent of a snuff flick”.