Super Hans
Posts: 2291
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: Watford
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jobloffski
No mega huge problem with this. The period of the original story was selected for being an iconic time of greed at the top of the tree, with irony free rich people loving Les Miserables while despising the real poor/homeless, and having no empathy with the less well off and not enough individual identity to be particularly distinguishable from each other.
That is not something limited to the Yuppie period Ellis selected as the setting of his story, and IMO this stuff is more important than the period setting. The vacuous, product obsessed empty headed and emotionally empty lifestyle of the Yuppies has run rampant since that period, become the norm for many even not in the wealthy lifestyle zone of the Yuppies and many, many, many people express incredibly violent rage at strangers/type out ludicrously horrible things they believe should happen to celebrities/victims of crime/etc via the internet.
Judged by the internet alone, you;d think empathy for the situation/feelings of another (the absence of which is what defines psychopathic tendencies/behaviour) was on it;s way out the door, never to return.
It's a world teeming with Batemans now, maybe it always was, and modern technology maybe allows the 'psycho' in many people out to play...The bankers are still the bad guys, but their heartless lack of human empathy trickled down into society at large, and nobody is safe from the collective wrath of the net users who feel so absolutely free to put online what they would never say to people face to face, but the very fact it;s all being 'put out there' via the net has perhaps changed how humanity views itself, because much of what goes on in peoples heads that might have just been passing bullshit (or jottings in journal like in AP) gets spewed out into the ether and stays there, forever.
Okay, playing Devil's advocate to a very large degree there, but couched in such terms, I think it's perfectly fine to both update AP for the cyber age AND focus it on a proto-typical Bateman who would have far more freedom to spew his inner delusions/rages into blogs/social networking sites, and by setting it in the modern age rather than casting back into an earlier period, it could actually make for a quite terrifying satire of the world we know, right now, and more than the earlier film could do, convey the feeling in the book that ANYONE could be that crazy under their polished surface.
And a new Bateman would be more of an everyman figure in such a scenario, given that once upon a time, Yuppies were considered dicks for their obsession with latest gadgetry, etc. But such ways of thinking have long since become much more accepted as the norm.
And couched in these terms, it makes a great deal of sense that someone connected with the 'Facebook movie' should at least consider exploiting for a movie the kind of absolute fucking nutjobs that will post anything that enters their head on such sites.
Essentially, imagine AP updated, with a Fight Club level of evisceration of the world we live in now, It would be a very different film to the first AP adaptation, and approached as a genuinely adult proposition might convey the harsher elements of what Ellis wrote more effectively, and perhaps ram home a little harder the 'question yourself and how you see poor people/the homeless' than the Bale version did.
Perhaps by being so extreme in it's content, Ellis's parody of his own country's basic psychology (rich = good, poor people = human waste) may have been lost on the very people he targeted his satire at (and make no mistake, he was satirising attitudes he saw in the present when he wrote, not just taking the piss out of the past, that was just artistic licence helping him to actually get away with writing such a story at all). Bankers 'ruined the world' because the have it all, have it now mentality became a drug few people were immune to. Why not parody the world the bankers have created from a Bateman type POV? And if that sort of thing is going to happen, why not update Bateman rather than create a character thet would be him in all but name anyway?
Just got nostalgic for the days when I used to trash EVERYTHING. Looking for the upside works so much better for me
All good points, especially about the way people behave online, but I'd still rather see such ideas in something original, rather than retooling an existing piece and just blagging on it's succesful name.
I know really that all such things are just different takes on similar tales but the way they're doing this just seems like another lazy remake. I know that many will argue that it's a remake, and other will argue that it's, not, it's just a perfectly valid new adaption of the novel, but I'm personally not entirely sure that another adaption within a decade of a barely 20 year old book is justifiable as anything other than a cash in.
Edit - just realised it's now been over 10 years since American Psycho was released (where did that go?!) but you know what I mean
< Message edited by Super Hans -- 12/12/2011 9:49:01 PM >
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