Throughout American Psycho, I found myself wanting to get up and leave, because it was so graphically disturbing and degrading to women. Now that I have thought about it, maybe it was so disturbing because it was something I could relate to. What do I mean by this? The jealousy, the greed, and the lust – every human being experiences it at some point in their lifetime. At first, I thought that Bateman was just a purely sick and twisted individual, with an uncanny ability to succumb to these emotions so willingly, almost as if he had no self-control. Furthermore, why should a man so physically intriguing and pulsating with sexual energy such as himself feel the need to engage with prostitutes and other off-color sexual scenarios, while he has a fiancé? Why does he yearn to kill so readily, as if he can't survive without the warm sticky human blood of his victim in his mouth or under his fingertips? Why does it all seem so realistic? Because it is – in his head, that is. None o!
             f this is physically real – it's all played out in his subconscious. Whenever someone seems to become superior to him in reality – whether it be they have a better business card, apartment, or girl, he needs to deal with his outrages. He does so through every mental, sexual, or murder scenario that he congeals in his brain. As far as the detective goes, he is also a figment of Bateman's imagination – he puts him there to play the part of his conscience, to keep himself in check, to make the scenario that much more interesting and keep it from actually becoming a reality. But the catcher here is that no matter how weird this all seems, we all have experienced it at some point in our lives.
             This is the exact reason why I think that this movie was so shocking to me. It's in-your-face way of exposing the human psyche bothers people more than the actually killing and maiming, because it is so horrifying ...