■ There was once a question among movie fans as to whether the film's protagonist, Patrick Bateman, actually committed killing Act or just had Fantasy of murder. This is because at the end of the film, Bateman's secretary, Jean, found a notebook in Bateman's desk at work in which the murder was depicted as a doodle. This scene makes the audience believe that the murders committed by Bateman in the previous episodes were nothing more than Fantasy.
■ However, it is already clear from the beginning of the film that such an argument makes no sense. There, it is told that Patrick Bateman is not a concrete character full of substance, but an "Abstract Subject" ( 1~6 ).
■ The more people who do not consider the meaning of the term "Abstract Person" at all, the more they get caught up in the argument of whether Bateman actually killed or not ( was he delusional ? ). Before considering whether or not Bateman actually committed the murder, he does not exist as a concrete human being. We need to start from there.
■ However, some may jump to the conclusion that if he were an abstract entity, he could not commit murder ... therefore, murder is just delusion, and so on. Such a conclusion is mediocre because it overlooks the point that Bateman is Abstract Subject of Evil, or Empty Subject with no concrete attributes introduced into the film only to carry out the formal act of murder.
■ Some people may think, "Why should it be necessary to bother introducing Empty Subject ? Some people may think, "Why not just depict him as a real person? But that would only reveal, at best, that the dark side behind Bateman is scandalous. In other words, it can only make the commonplace opinion that the film depicts the decadent side of the American consumer culture of the 1980s that created the heinous murderer known as Bateman. That is only the perspective of Bret Easton Ellis's original story.
■ The film's director, Mary Harron, and screenwriter, Guinevere Turner, have gone beyond the original depiction of decadent America in the 1980s, and have stepped toward more radical interpretation in the year 2000. They are not focusing on the decadence of capitalism. Rather, they are subconsciously putting forth more radical and hidden message about the relation between "society and evil", in which the appearance of evil is not byproduct of society, on the contrary, Evil itself is one of the elements that make up society.
■ If the social mechanism cannot ignore the psychological aspects of the many people engaging in it, then it is quite possible that inimical desires may also flow into it. In the context of this film, it is clear that Bateman did not have "Desire for murder" in the background of his social success as a businessman, but that he sublimated his "Desire for Murder" to achieve social success, a truly scandalous inner side of his life. Thus, The abstracted figure of the unsublimated Desire for Murder is none other than Patrick Batesman.
■ Then the question that arises here is, if Batesman is Abstract Subject, then there must be an actual person who had the desire to kill that was the source of Absuract Subject, so who is it ( actual person ) ? The answer is Paul Allen, as casually indicated in the film ( 7~14 ).
■ Scenes 7-14 are difficult to understand because they are composed from Bateman's point of view, but if we look at 7-10, Paul Allen and Patrick Bateman are dressed the same ( glasses and haircut ), indicating that they are the same person.
■ The following scenes 15-26 must be interpreted "symbolically" not as the actual Bateman killing Allen, but as Bateman which abstracted from "Allen's Desire for Murder" goes out of control, away from being "Attribute of Allen", or we would not be able to understand what is happening there.
■ At the end of the film, it's as if Bateman's act of murder didn't happen after all. This is not surprising if one understands that Bateman is Empty Subject virtualized to depict evil in society, but what is more weird is that the abstraction of Bateman has moved away from Allen as an individual and into "the Desire for Murder" itself, which is held by unspecified number of people. In other words, Bateman is not only Allen's truest form, but can be someone else's truest form. To put it more simply, anyone can have "the Desire for Murder", and Bateman is "the Name" of symbolic expression of that desire, or "signifiant" of it. It is obvious that the Name of Bateman is derived from Norman Bates, the killer in Hitchcock's "Psycho". In the sense that anyone can have "the Desire for Murder", the Abstract Subject of Bateman can be said to be the Generalized form of Norman Bates ( Bates + man ).
