“Do you know what Ed Gein said about women? ‘When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part wants me to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet. And the other part wonders what her head would look like on a stick.'”
Released on April 14, 2000, and directed by Mary Harron for Lions Gate Films, American Psycho is an American satirical horror film starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Manhattan investment banker whose immaculate surface of designer clothes, expensive restaurants, and social performance conceals, or perhaps expresses, a psychology of murderous violence. Based on Bret Easton Ellis‘s 1991 novel of the same name, the film navigates the razor’s edge between horror and satire with a control that eluded many of its initial critics, presenting Bateman’s world of competitive consumption and status anxiety with a deadpan precision that makes it simultaneously repellent and comic. Harron’s direction refuses to adjudicate between readings: whether Bateman’s violence is literal or purely fantasized remains productively unresolved throughout, and the film’s central concern is less the horror of what Bateman does than the horror of the social system that produced him and that, in its relentless prioritization of surface over substance, is functionally indistinguishable from his own pathology. The film grossed over 34 million dollars worldwide against a production budget of approximately 7 million and has grown steadily in critical estimation since its release, its portrait of 1980s yuppie culture as a milieu of competitive narcissism and moral vacancy reading with increasing rather than diminishing relevance in the decades since.
Behind the Scenes. The production was shadowed throughout its development by controversy over the source novel, whose graphic violence had provoked calls for boycott on its original publication and whose adaptation for the screen required navigating a cultural climate still sensitive to its content. Mary Harron was replaced during pre-production by Oliver Stone, who had a substantially different vision for the material, before being reinstated when Stone’s casting of Leonardo DiCaprio fell through and the project reverted to its original creative team. Christian Bale’s physical transformation for the role — the sculpted physique displayed in the film’s most discussed scenes, was achieved through a training regimen of extraordinary rigor, and his performance of Bateman’s affectless, menu-reciting, business-card-comparing social terror is among the most precisely calibrated in American horror cinema of the decade. The business card scene, in which Bateman and his colleagues compete over the typographic qualities of their respective cards with an intensity of feeling that the film implies is the closest any of them comes to genuine emotion, became one of the most quoted and parodied sequences in contemporary cinema, its satirical compression of status anxiety into a rectangle of cardstock achieving an economy that the novel’s longer treatment of the same material does not surpass. The costume designer Isis Mussenden was responsible for assembling the wardrobe that makes Bateman’s surface so precisely legible as a period document of a particular stratum of 1980s male ambition.
The Watch. The watch worn by Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman throughout American Psycho is a Seiko SNXJ90, reference 7S26-0500, a piece whose presence on Bateman’s wrist is the product of one of the more remarkable behind-the-scenes stories in the history of screen horology and one whose thematic implications, once understood, enrich the film’s satire in ways that its makers may not entirely have anticipated. The SNXJ90 belongs to Seiko’s 5 series, housing the workhorse caliber 7S26 automatic movement, 21 jewels, running at 21,600 beats per hour, with a 41-hour power reserve and no hand-winding or stop-seconds function — within a two-tone gold and stainless steel case fitted with a Jubilee-style bracelet and presenting a silver sunburst dial with a day-date display at three o’clock and the crown positioned at four. The overall visual impression, at the resolution available to cinema audiences of 2000, is of a Rolex Datejust in its two-tone Rolesor configuration, the jubilee bracelet and fluted bezel echoing the Swiss prestige piece with a fidelity sufficient to sustain the illusion through all but the closest inspection. This resemblance was not accidental but entirely deliberate: costume designer Isis Mussenden had sought permission from Rolex to dress Bateman in a Datejust, the watch that the character would unambiguously have worn given his position, his income, and his obsessive attention to the signifiers of status. Rolex declined, willing to supply watches for any other character in the film but unwilling to have their most iconic reference associated with a serial killer, a refusal that required the production to find a substitute capable of conveying Datejust-level status at screen resolution without being a Datejust. The SNXJ90’s two-tone jubilee configuration achieved this with remarkable precision, and for nearly two decades the watch on Bateman’s wrist was assumed by audiences and critics alike to be the Rolex the character’s worldview demanded. It was only when Blu-ray transfers made sufficiently high-resolution frame examination possible that the crown at four o’clock — the giveaway detail that no Datejust shares — allowed the watch community to establish definitively that Bateman had been wearing a Seiko throughout, a discovery confirmed subsequently by IMDb Pro. The irony embedded in this substitution is so perfectly calibrated to the film’s themes as to seem almost authored: a character whose entire existence is the performance of a status he experiences rather than possesses, whose violence is directed against people whose business cards are thicker and whose dinner reservations are more exclusive, wears throughout the film a watch that performs Rolex without being one, a simulacrum of aspiration on the wrist of a man who is himself nothing but simulacrum. The SNXJ90’s secondary market has been transformed by its screen association, the piece now commanding prices that place it far above its original positioning as an accessible entry point in the Seiko 5 range, its collector identity inseparable from the character whose wrist it adorned and from the extraordinary story of a luxury brand’s refusal that produced, inadvertently, one of the most thematically resonant watch choices in the history of cinema.
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Marketplace Price
€500
Movie Year:
2000
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