Stefan Sereda – Bitch Flicks

The Sister as Revenant in Brian De Palma’s ‘Sisters’

‘Sisters’ displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Sisterhood. | Spoilers ahead.

Classical Hollywood horror cinema often positioned its monsters as threats to a conservative social order represented on film through family and the home. King Kong snatches Ann Darrow away from Jack Driscoll’s apartment and Dracula lures women from their intended husbands. In Cat People (directed by Jacques Tourner, 1942), a woman fails to consummate her marriage because sexual arousal turns her into a ferocious feline, and an adopted child brings a killer’s instincts to roost in The Bad Seed (directed by Mervyn LeRoy, 1956).

In the 1960s and 1970s, Women’s Liberation and the Sexual Revolution provoked a swell of reactionary horror films that reframe domestication as a potential trap that can destroy women and cause social fragmentation. Nightmarish expressions of Second Wave feminist sentiments abound. In Rosemary’s Baby (directed by Roman Polanski, 1968), a newlywed (Mia Farrow) suffers spousal rape in a plot to breed the Antichrist. The Stepford Wives (directed by Bryan Forbes, 1975) depicts husbands replacing their wives with obedient fembots. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (directed by Tobe Hooper, 1974) locates its horror in a disturbing symbolic inversion of the American family homestead.

Brian De Palma’s 1973 film Sisters is a post-Psycho (directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), pre-Halloween (directed by John Carpenter, 1978) proto-slasher that belongs to this loose cycle of liberationist horror cinema. For an early-1970s film directed and co-written by a man, according to journalist and film critic Julie Salamon some critics deemed a “perverse misogynist,” Sisters displays an early concern with women’s liberation in mainstream American film (De Palma’s collaborator on the screenplay was Louisa Rose). Many of the film’s social complaints remain liberal talking points today: that police can be motivated by racism, that the legal institution can subject women to excessive scrutiny, and that the medical-psychiatric institution remains patriarchal and sexist in its diagnosing and treatment of women. Yet the film’s intersections with disability are more complicated.

De Palma’s films have inspired protests from anti-porn feminists, but critics also champion his depictions of women and illustrate that his films are “about misogyny.” For example, Carrie (1976), a film feminist scholars both attack and defend, is a film about women’s internalized misogyny from its opening scene onward: it nonetheless passes the Bechdel Test, privileges a woman’s perspective in almost every scene, and represents a broad range of women characters, including career women.

A rote observation about De Palma is that he takes up the mantle of Hitchcockian themes and motifs: guilt, suspicion, repression, voyeurism, psychoanalytic critique, and sexualized violence. Sisters maintains this trend in De Palma’s Hitchcockian oeuvre. De Palma hired Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann to compose the nerve-wracking score. Moreover, Sisters rewrites Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the pseudo-gothic thriller, Psycho, from a post-counterculture historical context.

Sisters grounds its thematic appraisal of domesticity within literal and metaphorical depictions of sisterhood, wherein the sisters are foils for one another. Margot Kidder plays twin Quebecois sisters Danielle and Dominique. As the plot unravels, Danielle and Dominique are conceived as Canada’s first conjoined twins, who are now separated. The film introduces the viewer to Danielle, the seemingly “sweet” sister with whom De Palma aligns our sympathies: Danielle is pleasant, flirtatious, and cast as the survivor of past trauma and an aggressive ex-husband. As an immigrant from French Canada, she is also positioned as an ambiguous “other” in a narrative that film critic and producer Steven Jay Schneider describes in The Horror Film as a “powerful depiction of monstrous female sexuality.” In this respect, the film is a sister-narrative to Psycho. The only way to conduct a proper post-mortem on Sisters — a deliberately nonsensical film — is to spoil its plot twists, so this would be a good time to pause and watch the film online.

The film frames women’s expected domestication, reified through decades of Hollywood cinema, as a concern from the opening sequence onward. Model/actress Danielle meets Phillip (Lisle Wilson), an African-American man, on the set of an exploitative Candid Camera-style television game show, Peeping Toms. The exploitative show’s stereotyping attitudes are cemented when the host gives Danielle a set of cutlery for her participation, and Phillip, dinner for two at New York’s African Room. Phillip grimaces, but agrees to bring Danielle along at her behest.

Over dinner, Danielle insists she is not a Women’s Liberationist. Soon after, her stalker ex-husband, Emil (William Finley), pleads with her to leave with him. Emil is dragged away, and Danielle, now inebriated, convinces Phillip to escort her to her Staten Island apartment, where she seduces him (it is worth noting here that interracial sexual relationships, though becoming more frequent in independent films such as Sisters, were still seldom depicted in Hollywood films in 1973). As Phillip caresses his way up Danielle’s leg, Herrmann’s soundtrack escalates to a grating cacophony and the camera zooms in to reveal a large scar on Danielle’s hip. The soundtrack suggests this scar is a source of anxiety and monstrosity. What follows is a narrative about trauma and ability, or disability, both physical and psychological. At its root is Danielle’s desire for normalcy, which she interprets as heteronormativity and motherhood.

After Danielle and Phillip sleep together, she awakens from a dream that produces moans both tormented and orgasmic. She proceeds to the bathroom, where she grips her womb in pain and places two red tablets on the sink’s basin. The pills provide a stark contrast to the apartment’s virginal, all-white color scheme (Danielle typically wears white, as well). Since these pills keep Danielle functioning and therefore —as it is later revealed — liberated, they are somewhat analogous to the contemporaneous emergence of birth control technology and its role in the Sexual Revolution. Before Danielle can take the pills, she hears a woman’s voice calling her name and enters the corridor, where she argues with her sister, Dominique, off-screen. The argument, wherein Dominique labels Danielle “disgusting” for bringing a man home, wakes up Phillip, who proceeds to the bathroom and inadvertently knocks Danielle’s pills down the sink without realizing this blunder. Danielle assures Phillip her sister only stopped by because it is their birthday, and sends him out to renew her prescription. While Phillip stops to buy Dominique and Danielle a birthday cake, Danielle realizes she is out of medication, and, panicking, calls Emil for help.

When Phillip returns, he grabs a knife from Danielle’s new cutlery set and brings her the cake while she is asleep under some blankets. Phillip’s last words are benevolently patronizing, uttered after Danielle grasps the knife: “Now you know you’re not supposed to cut the cake until you blow out the candles.” Danielle, in a moment of rage, pounces on Phillip and stabs him to death.

In this first split screen sequence, Danielle’s neighbor, Grace (Jennifer Salt), a liberal investigative journalist, witnesses the murder through her window and phones the police. The detectives predictably bungle the investigation, preferring to waste critical time railing against Grace for writing an op-ed where she called police racist “pigs.” The senior detective immediately assumes Grace is imagining things, while his partner reveals his racism when he tells her, “Take it easy, lady, these people are always stabbing each other.” The police are only motivated to investigate because they fear Grace will give them more bad press. Meanwhile, the viewer watches in split screen as Danielle wakes up and Emil arrives. Emil promptly discovers the murder, but Danielle has no memory of the event. Instead, she whispers, “Dominique, what have you done?” Emil appears shocked by Dominique’s presence, but he exerts a patriarchal control over the situation, shaking Danielle out of her catatonia and telling her, significantly, “Put on some makeup. It must look as though nothing has happened.” In a scene reminiscent of Norman cleaning up after “Mother” commits murder in Psycho, Emil helps Danielle clean the apartment and stash the corpse in a fold-out sofa (if that sounds implausible, De Palma films this action in one shot to demonstrate it is possible to hide a body this way). He avoids running into the police with a garbage bag full of blood-soaked rags by seconds.

Casual and institutional sexism repeatedly thwart Grace’s attempts at investigation. When Grace and the detectives confront Danielle, the police sympathize with Danielle, and the viewer can appreciate why they would: Danielle is charming, demure, beautiful but modest — a traditionally feminine woman who represents herself as a victim, the lonely divorcee. Grace, on the other hand, is anything but her namesake: shrill-voiced, abrasive, accusatory, and clumsy enough to drop the cake she discovers, destroying a key piece of evidence. The police threaten to charge Grace unless she drops the matter.

Grace stubbornly refuses to abandon the investigation, and viewers can assume this is partly an act of rebellion against her mother, who belittles her journalism career and berates her about finding a husband. Eventually, Grace confirms her suspicion that Danielle had a sister, about whom she is lying. While watching a documentary, Grace hears a psychiatrist in patriarchal clergy robes describe Dominique as “disturbed” and Danielle “sweet” and “so responsive,” but says the latter can only be that way because of her sister. After, Dominique is said to have died during an emergency surgery that separated the conjoined twins.

De Palma once responded to accusations of misogyny with a quip: “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach — chopping up women, putting them in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?” (Caputi 92). While this blasé attitude might not have won him more feminist fans, Sisters’ tragic denouement has a Brechtian pedagogy meant to gall and galvanize liberal viewers.

When Grace raids the psychiatric hospital where Emil conceals Danielle, the investigation falls apart. After an encounter with a patient who shrieks because Grace asks to use the telephone (the incident presents another metaphor for women obsessively seeking false security in a domestic space), Emil easily convinces his staff that Grace is another deluded patient who needs sedating. Grace is dosed (as in Rosemary’s Baby, wherein Rosemary is restrained on a bed before being penetrated and drugged with a needle, the incident plays out like rape), and Emil begins to use hypnosis to convince her there was no murder.

The sequence that follows is metacinematic, unreliably narrated, and only logical in a surrealist sense: Grace imagines herself as Dominique, attached to Danielle, in the documentary she had viewed on the sisters. Therein, it is revealed that Danielle was traumatized as a child when others called her “freak.” Later, in the context of an inappropriate relationship with her doctor, Emil, she developed a strong desire to have a baby. Unfortunately, Dominique was always there to observe Danielle’s sexual relationship with Emil. In a surgery scene that plays out like a black mass attended by a host of spectators, Emil separates the sisters using a cleaver from the cutlery set Danielle was given at the beginning of the film. The film’s metaphor imagines Danielle and Grace as sisters, with women’s domestication and innate urges for procreation being to blame for career women’s suffering. For Danielle to have the “normal” life she desires, it is necessary to excise less “feminine” qualities and pursuits, as represented through Grace and Dominique.

After this sequence, Danielle is provoked by traumatic memories. Emil assures her he loves her and kisses her, which of course triggers her to murder him. Since the police now know Danielle is a murderess, they are ready to believe Grace. Unfortunately, Grace has been brainwashed by a patriarchal representative of the psychiatric establishment and she refuses to cooperate. She tells the police “there was no murder” from what looks like a teenager’s bedroom at her mother’s house, having regressed to a childish state where she now depends on domestication.

As with Rosemary’s Baby, Danielle’s desire for motherhood becomes a site of horror. Similar to Irena (Simone Simon) in Cat People and Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Repulsion (directed by Roman Polanski, 1965), Danielle’s murderous tendencies erupt when she is sexually aroused or confronted. And like Norman Bates, she dissociates herself from the act of murder by adopting the persona of a dead female family member that once kept her bound in place. Sisters is, perhaps, ableist in how it associates congenital disability with horror. Yet Danielle’s monstrosity is located more in the discrepancy between her desire to fulfill a “normal” feminine role by denying her disability and the mental illness this provokes after her sister’s death. In De Palma’s film, the sister is the revenant reminding Danielle of the expense paid for her traditionally feminine identity, her liberated actions, and her domestic desires. Since Danielle’s desire for a child preempts Dominique’s accidental death (or murder), the opening credit sequence is more harrowing in retrospect: twin sisters, developing in utero.

References: Caputi, Jane (June 15, 1987). The Age of Sex Crime. Popular Press. p. 92.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

‘Videodrome’ and the Pornographic Femme Fatale

David Cronenberg’s sci-fi-horror-noir ‘Videodrome’ updated the femme fatale as a response to media-saturated late twentieth-century culture. …The femme fatale is reborn and unleashed to warn of contemporary dangers, including how women’s media representation as sex objects is connected to capitalist propaganda, often with the intent of making a violent agenda seem pleasurable.

This guest post written by Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Ladies of the 1980s.

“The beams become my dream
My dream is on the screen.”
— Blondie, “Fade Away and Radiate”

In Paul Schrader’s 1972 article, “Notes on Film Noir,” the soon-to-be screenwriter-director predicted with accuracy that the noir style would experience a revival in the decade ahead. While the list of New Hollywood noir films is too extensive to list here, encompassing everything from Point Blank (1967) to Blade Runner (1982) and several of Schrader’s own efforts, the Hollywood Renaissance is also known for genre revisionism, and one film noir convention that all but disappeared in the 1970s was the femme fatale.

Critics and audiences argue about whether classical femme fatales were “progressive” representations of American womanhood. From one perspective, fatales such as Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) in The Killers (1946) and Kathie (Jane Greer) in Out of the Past (1947) embodied paranoia about crime, urban decay, family collapse, capitalist competition, and the sexual promiscuity associated with mid-century American womanhood. Of course, the villainous femme fatale archetype gained popularity in a decade wherein men found themselves competing with women in the workplace. On the other hand, femme fatales exercised agency and autonomy, unlike women found in most classical genres and especially in contrast to their domesticated “good girl” foils in noir. Although femme fatales were always destructive manipulators punished for their transgressions, these bad girls were resourceful and ambitious drivers of their own agenda who weaponized their sexuality.*

In the 1970s, film noir’s women were recast as social victims. The most glaring example of the femme fatale’s reformation takes place in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), where Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a false suspect who only lies to protect her daughter, the offspring of an abusive, incestuous relationship with her father. Deadly women lurked off to horror films such as Brian De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and Carrie (1976). By 1981, the femme fatale came sauntering back wearing ironic virgin white when Kathleen Turner appeared as Matty Walker in Body Heat (1981). Blade Runner (1982) featured two fembots-turned-fatale (and another faux–fatale) whereas David Cronenberg’s sci-fi-horror-noir Videodrome (1983) updated the femme fatale as a response to media-saturated late twentieth-century culture.

A Postmodern Fatale

Andy Warhol hailed Videodrome as “A Clockwork Orange of the 80s.” The Canadian film stars James Wood as Max Wren, a television producer-turned-amateur detective looking for “something that will break through,” until he finds “Videodrome,” a pirate broadcast showing only detached scenes of torture and murder. Max is captivated, but “who would want to watch a scum show like Videodrome?” Max’s casual girlfriend, Nicki Brand, played by Deborah “Debbie” Harry of Blondie fame, is certainly an enthusiast.

Max first meets Nicki on a talk show, where they debate mediated sex and violence. Nicki bemoans contemporary Western existence as “overstimulating times,” but Max challenges her for wearing red (it’s worth noting the famous blonde appears with red hair in Cronenberg’s film), suggesting, “You know what Freud would say about that dress?” Nicki confesses Max is right about her — she also hosts the “Emotional Rescue” show, a talk radio advice program where she blithely addresses her callers as “lover,” signaling her detached post-sexual revolution approach to intercourse and personal attachment, if not her listeners’ attitudes as well. Nicki is a forward first date: the scene cuts to Max’s apartment, where she flippantly inquires, “Got any porno?” Nicki finds a copy of “Videodrome,” which she admits is a turn-on, despite it having no ostensibly sexual content. Max quips, it’s “torture, murder… not exactly sex,” but Nicki answers, “Says who?” She also reveals a history of S&M with “a friend” who she let cut her, and encourages Max to pierce her ear as foreplay while “Videodrome” plays in the background.

It soon becomes apparent Nicki is more sexually versed than Max and beyond his containment, as she progressively seems less naïve than she first appeared in each of her scenes. When Nicki announces she’s going to audition for “Videodrome,” Max warns her “these mondo weirdo video guys… they play rough… rougher than even Nicki Brand wants to play.” Nicki responds with a fatale’s obstinacy, extinguishing a cigarette on her breast. The next time Max sees Nicki, she’s performing on “Videodrome.”

Besides what Freud might call the subconscious “death drive” apparent in her masochism, Nicki shares superficial characteristics with the archetypal fatale. Her makeup and dresses recall the 1940s. As with many fatales, and Harry in real life, Nicki is self-aware of her status as a sex object, to the point where she craves objectification. In a screenplay loaded with double entendres, the name “Nicki” sounds sharp, but also resounding with the false innocence of fatale names like Kathie, Kitty, and Matty. “Brand,” on the other hand, connotes medieval torture and image commodities. Eventually, Max learns a corporate brand, Spectacular Optical, developed “Videodrome” as a mass brainwashing device in preparation for global warfare. Through “Videodrome,” Nicki — or, at the very least, the fatale’s simulacrum — ensnares, tortures, and directs Max.

Moreover, Cronenberg casts Harry to perfection. Before appearing in Videodrome, Harry was already a postmodern shapeshifter, the only woman to be a Playboy Playmate, a punk rock phenom, a pop star, and a household name big enough for The Muppet Show. A New Yorker up on the trends, she was even rapping as early as 1980. Blondie sprinted along a razor line between punk and pop, attracting Andy Warhol’s attention: his likeness of Harry graces the cover of Phaidon’s Andry Warhol Portraits.

Several Blondie songs, some with Harry-penned lyrics, demonstrate what made Harry an ideal choice for the role of a thrill-seeking sex obsessed woman adrift in a consumer-capitalist landscape. On the BDSM-themed debut album opener, “X-Offender,” she plays a sex worker who threatens to “perpetrate love” with her cop crush after he slaps the cuffs on her. “One Way or Another” relates post-sexual revolution mores to consumer excess, with Harry in stalker-mode, ready to pounce on a love-object in the supermarket and discard him thereafter like any other replaceable commodity. Of course, the song title, “Die Young, Stay Pretty,” offers a paradox that parallels Nicki’s early demise and uncanny life thereafter as a televisual seductress. “Fade Away and Radiate” is more specifically about screen performers surviving death as image commodities, with bandmate Chris Stein’s lyrics beating both David Cronenberg and Jean Baudrillard to the punch with regard to commenting on the hyperreal. Despite their sneering punk credentials, several Blondie songs are about gleeful abandonment to the consumer culture landscape of postmodernity — “Platinum Blonde,” “I’m on E,” “Rapture,” and the American Gigolo theme, “Call Me.” “Roll me in designer sheets,” Harry purrs, “I’ll never get enough.”

Pornography and Propaganda

Cronenberg’s techno-horror film is partially a response to porno chic, released a little more than a decade after Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat (1972) broke through to mainstream audiences. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, Toronto television station Citytv — the basis for Videodrome’s CIVIC TV — broadcast softcore adult films. Nicki becomes the film’s personification of pornography’s seductive and desensitizing potential.

Unlike the majority of horror films, Cronenberg’s ouevre torments male protagonists (by contrast, horror auteur Dario Argento made the sexist, objectifying remark, “I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man.”). In Videodrome, much of the terror results from Max discovering his capacity for sadism. Yet the narrative and its iconography also interpret the media as a penetrative force. Max eventually learns “Videodrome” is not fiction but snuff, and that the violent imagery is meant to lubricate the brain to be more receptive to a signal that causes hallucinations. The film refuses to distinguish between these hallucinations and the narrative proper. Soon Max hallucinates/grows “new flesh”: a vaginal wound in his stomach that conspirators use as a tape player to remold him as an assassin. In other words, Videodrome also locates its horror in a man discovering in himself “feminine” traits such as openness and vulnerability for mass media to exploit. Cronenberg, the so-called “Baron of Blood,” likens violent media’s propagandist assault on the senses to rape when various parties forcibly penetrate Max with videotapes.

Nikki’s first appearance on Videodrome marks what Federico Fellini would call the film’s volta: its pivot-point between a narrative “reality” and the surrealist (or hyperreal) events that follow where “reality” becomes an outmoded concept. Soon after McLuhan-esque figure Dr. Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley) finishes telling Max via video, “Television is reality, and reality is less than television,” Nicki is strangling him, and then seducing Max to consummate with his writhing tv set. Later, she appears to him via a VR headpiece, handing him a whip to encourage his penchant for violence in a dreamlike S&M scenario.

Similar to many fatales, Nicki has a “good girl” foil in Brian O’Blivion’s daughter, Bianca O’Blivion (Somja Smits), who runs a “Cathode Ray Mission” to give derelicts their fix of time in front of a television screen. Yet Bianca is as ruthless as Videodrome’s creators when it comes to brainwashing Max, and she turns him against the conspirators who sent him to kill her. Before Bianca sends Max off to kill while reciting the dictum, “Long live the new flesh,” she shows him an image of Nicki being strangled, insisting the “Videodrome” people killed her and used her image to seduce him, not unlike what she herself is doing to Max. It would seem Videodrome’s femme fatale is indeed punished for her transgressions.

Yet after Max believes he has put an end to “Videodrome,” he wanders to an “abandoned vessel.” There, he finds a television showing Nicki’s image. Nicki tells Max that to become “the new flesh” he must leave “the old flesh” and displays a scene of him shooting himself in the head. The film ends with Max saying, “Long live the new flesh,” and a cut to black synced with the sound of a gunshot.

The finale is ambiguous: is Bianca behind Max’s suicide or is “Videodrome,” and how much of what transpired was “real” or hallucinatory? Will Max have a second life preserved as a simulacral image? Regardless, in Cronenberg’s prophetic film, the femme fatale is reborn and unleashed to warn of contemporary dangers, including how women’s media representation as sex objects is connected to capitalist propaganda, often with the intent of making a violent agenda seem pleasurable.

References:

*For a more thorough academic reading of the classical femme fatale and “nurturing woman,” see: Janey Place, “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 2001.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

Mary Harron’s ‘American Psycho’: Rogue Feminism

When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet ‘American Psycho’ espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

This guest post written by Dr. Stefan Sereda appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors.

American Psycho fails the Bechdel Test. Tammy Bruce, coordinator of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), called for boycotting the film’s source material. Gloria Steinem allegedly protested the film in advance of its release. The script, co-written by Guinevere Turner and Mary Harron, eschews any appeal to women’s empowerment. The film’s actresses play a milieu of secretaries, sex workers, and spaced-out, self-centered socialites. When the leading man isn’t laughing at remarks from serial killers about decapitating girls, he’s coming after sex workers with chainsaws (at least in his head). Yet American Psycho espouses a feminist perspective that fillets the values held by capitalist men.

Released in March 2000, American Psycho was possibly the first major film release of the new millennium written and directed by women. Director Mary Harron’s previous 1996 film, I Shot Andy Warhol, cast Lili Taylor as Valerie Solanas, a sex worker-turned-failed assassin, whose SCUM Manifesto influenced radical feminism. Harron’s exploration of feminist history includes people who are poor, struggle with mental illness, and advocate for genocide against men. In other words, Harron’s is the not the palatable, feel-good, mass market, go-girl feminism of Legally Blonde (2001).

With American Psycho, Harron shot and co-wrote a runaway hit that converted the film’s $7 million budget into $34.3 million international gross. A 5:1 profit ratio is a decent investment return in Hollywood: Harron’s 2006 follow-up, The Notorious Bettie Page, earned less than $2 million. Therein, Harron uses the biopic to transform a sex icon into a voice for women’s issues. Harron might be situated within Camille Paglia’s gladiatorial school of feminism, rather than Steinem’s arguably censorial feminist view.

American Psycho is also one of the new millennium’s first major film releases to express a feminist agenda. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), the film’s Wall Street protagonist, is Harron’s portrait of what Valerie Solanas said men contributed to society: mental illness (Patrick’s dissociation from reality), conformity (his obsession with “fitting in”), suppression of individuality (“I’m going to call you Sabrina,” he tells a call girl), prevention of conversation, friendship, and love (arguing about the importance of friends before axing a colleague), and the monetary system (“feed me a stray cat,” an ATM machine tells Bateman). “You’re inhuman,” Bateman’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) argues when he drops her. “I’m in touch with humanity, ” Bateman responds in defense of his extreme personification of neoliberal values. From Syriana to There Will Be Blood, the decade that followed would be rife with films about corrupt people winning at capitalism — usually Machiavellian men, but sometimes women, as it happens in Pretty Persuasion and Black Swan.

American Psycho’s runaway popularity, razor sharp satire, and ontologically vague ending have provoked extensive discussion of the film, but little has been said regarding a subtle but important reference that positions Harron’s work as a feminist response to Hollywood’s entrenched neoliberalism.

In an interview with BlackBook, Harron reported that while Christian Bale was preparing for the Bateman role, he came across Tom Cruise giving a televised interview. Bale was struck by what he thought was Cruise’s “intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes,” which shaped Bale’s interpretation of Bateman. Harron neglected to explain how her 1980s-set film corresponds with the film that made Cruise a superstar, 1983’s Risky Business.

Partway through American Psycho, Patrick, posing as murdered colleague Paul Allen, brings a sex worker to his apartment; she sports the same hairstyle Rebecca DeMornay wore in Risky Business for the role of the sex worker, Lana. Risky Business is a pro-capitalist, product placement-laden coming-of-age fable about a teenager, Joel Goodson (Cruise), who succeeds at getting accepted to Princeton rather than floundering at life through risk-taking: specifically, by enterprising as a pimp. Early in the film, when Joel first meets Lana, she tells him, “You’ve got a really nice place, here, Joel.” In American Psycho, Christie echoes this phrase with the same inflection: “You’ve got a nice place here, Paul.” The haircut and the dialogue add a further uncanny dimension to the film reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), wherein the protagonist becomes obsessed with recreating his memory of a woman who never existed.

As with American Psycho, several have argued, however loosely, that Risky Business satirizes capitalism, but its product placements, soundtrack full of then-hot recording artists and upbeat ending inevitably put forward a contrasting statement. Harron references Risky Business to uncover the misogyny the latter film attempts to suppress in its teen-romp approach to sex work. Elsewhere, Bateman works out with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) or pornography droning in the background. Later, Bateman will make his own pornographic videos as an exercise in self-directed obsession and take on an identity similar to the cannibal villain Leatherface as he chases Christie and bites her before killing her with a chainsaw. Whereas Bateman can wax poetic about Whitney Houston songs and argue in favor of equal rights for women, behind his admitted “mask of sanity” is the Bateman who says to a bartender, “I want to stab you to death and play around with your blood.” Many of the film’s other characters seem to overlook Bateman’s mental illness, or to misinterpret or ignore his statements, in a setting where everyone — women and men included — seemingly want to pretend his psychosis away. As Bateman’s misogyny and hyper-competitive attitude erupt until he’s literally crying for help, Harron calls attention to a world that would rather deny Bateman’s existence than learn from him as a case study in socially entrenched misogyny, consumer-capitalist psychosis, and the Reaganite ideals returning to fashion this election season.

Dr. Stefan Sereda is a writer/researcher with a PhD in English and Film Studies and an MA in Literature with a focus on gender and genre. His publications on American cinema and global media have appeared in A Companion to Martin Scorsese, The Memory Effect, Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century, the Directory of World Cinema: Africa, and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.