Killing Paul Allen, from "American Psycho" (2000), directed by Mary Harron

We embark now on what I'm calling the "Pariah Club" of classics. And finally we have a woman director -- Mary Harron, who took on the unenviable task of adapting Bret Easton Ellis's supposedly unfilmable novel, vilified as misogynist, shallow, and ridiculously excessive in its violence. (I thought it was brilliant.) In doing so, Harron created a cult hit that has only grown in stature over the years. Here we have the infamous scene where the titular Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) spouts his pearls of wisdom about Huey Lewis & the News (hilariously spoofed by Huey with Weird Al -- see video below), as he prepares to take an axe to his colleague Paul Allen (Jared Leto), who has committed the unpardonable sin of getting a reservation to a restaurant that's rejected Patric. In the light of their subsequent careers, as a couple of commentators on this clip point out, we have the old Batman/Bateman (Bale) killing the new Joker (Leto) -- unless you buy the theory that these are Bateman's fantasies, rather than acts. Discussing the scene, Harron told Vanity Fair: "I felt the audience could handle this scene being quite comic. Usually, we kept the lighting in the apartment moody -- but when it came to filming this scene, I insisted we have all the lights on bright. I wanted it to be harsh and jarring; I was also thinking Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange. In the very last take, there was one of those lucky accidents that make filming worthwhile: Bateman had just finished killing Paul Allen in a frenzy, and he sits down on the couch and lights a cigar. As he did so, I saw that the blood had only spattered one-half of Christian’s face. In profile, he looked almost normal -- but when you cut to another angle, you saw the bloody side." She adds of her creation: "When it came out, the movie was loved and hated in about equal measure. It was only after a few years that its reputation grew in a way I can't explain. I think the mixture of black comedy and horror and satire was unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and maybe that very nightmarish portrait of society and Wall Street felt more relevant as time went on."

Huey Lewis and "Weird Al" Yankovic, American Psycho Parody

"There Is an Idea of an American Psycho" - Video Appreciation

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