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'Psycho' Babble

PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.

And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.

Today's case study: American Psycho.

Folks who've seen the movie but haven't read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.

Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn't end; it just stopped.

Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman's crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.

And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book's psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.

Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who'd apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel's chief character isn't always a "hero." The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).

When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.

But Ellis's thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:

1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.

2. Bateman hangs out with his "friends;" chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.

3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he's previously known (an ex or a recent date).

4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.

Repeat step 1.

The movie's director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book's explicit violence, both to ensure an "R" rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.

She's made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.

Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.

TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?

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