American Psycho: Why The Apartment Was Clean (What Happened To The Bodies?)
In the final scene of American Psycho, serial killer Patrick Bateman returns to Paul Allen's apartment, the location of some of his worst crimes, and finds it to be clean and free of bodies. Rather than being confronted with the expected bloodbath, he finds a mysterious realtor attempting to sell an immaculate property. If anything untoward has occurred there, somebody has gone to great lengths to remove any evidence. The question of what really happened in American Psycho's ending is left open.
Mrs. Wolfe, the real estate agent, seems to suspect Bateman's connection with the building and asks him to leave. There is, however, no explicit mention of the torture and murders that have taken place. As Bateman scuttles away from an uncomfortable encounter, the audience is left wondering whether the real estate brokers have cynically erased the past or whether the events only occurred in Bateman's fevered imagination.
The riddle of the missing bodies in the flat may not present a binary choice between a conspiratorial clean-up and the murders not having taken place, however. There is no way of trusting that what happens in Bateman's head is an accurate interpretation of events; Christian Bale's character becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator as the movie unfolds. Patrick Bateman's relationship with reality becomes progressively more strained as the story develops. His inability to say whether he has killed twenty people or forty points to a man who has become incapable of differentiating fantasy from reality. As with the best readings of American Psycho, the apartment scene and its missing bodies are best explained with an answer that falls somewhere between the two.
The notion that nothing happened at all seems inadequate. Director, Mary Harron, describes her frustration with this particular view. "Everyone keeps coming out of the film thinking that it's all a dream, and I never intended that," she explains (via The Take). Co-writer Guinevere Turner makes the point more emphatically (via IMDB), "We decided, right off the bat [...] that we hate movies, books, stories that ended and 'it was all a dream.'" Such an ending would render the entire movie somewhat pointless. The idea that Bateman's capacity for self-delusion renders him harmless is antithetical to a film that focuses on the dangers of male narcissism and toxic masculinity.
The theory that Mrs. Wolfe, possibly with the help of others, has erased the history of the crimes certainly chimes better with the dark satire of the movie. Faced with the prospect of an expensive property losing value through its association with a string of gruesome crimes, it's conceivable that a firm of realtors would be so cold and calculating as to conceal everything that has happened there. If so, it places the heinous actions of Patrick Bateman throughout the movie in the context of a similarly self-obsessed and uncaring world. It's a deliciously dark interpretation that adds yet another element to the cocktail of evil but it's an explanation that is, like the apartment itself, a little bit too tidy. Harron says of the two interpretations (via IMDB), "It should slip between the two. I don't think you can find the meaning in one answer."
Perhaps it is the return to Allen's flat that is purely a figment of Bateman's imagination. There is a possibility that he fabricates the scene to dismiss the reality of his orgy of violence. Mrs. Wolfe could be a nod to Pulp Fiction's Winston Wolf, the legendary crime-scene cleaner who can wave a magic wand and make it all go away. An ability to convince himself that a series of horrendous events did not occur by imagining the depravity of others makes Bateman an even more terrifying character. Ambiguity is an essential component in American Psycho. Lines between the real and the imaginary are intentionally blurred. While it is never clear what is real and what is sordid fantasy, not knowing serves to deepen our disgust rather than mitigate Bateman's actions.
American Psycho 2: The Actor Who Replaced Christian Bale As Patrick Bateman
Source: Screenrant
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