There is an idea of Next Play, some superficial notion. But behind these cold dead eyes, if you look closely, I am simply not there.
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That last paragraph paraphrases a movie from the year 2000, which humanity, and thereby the entirety of known intelligent life in the universe, crashed into without a whisper of the catastrophe heralded by prophesy, when the internal clocks of our micro-processors would get confused like they just got punched in the millennia by Mike Tyson. There are those non-believers, skeptics even, who think there never was a danger, that the wolf cries were paranoid fantasies of lazier minds -and for sure that is where we wound up eventually- but way back then enough precautions were taken in heed to the weirdos jumping up and down flapping their useless wings like demented penguins that a calamity was averted, and we could undertake new ones, currently underway and functioning as well as man-made disasters could reasonably be expected to. When we’re all watching the indiscriminate bombing of children, there’s not much room for growth in the man-made disaster dept.
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The movie the paraphrase paraphrases is American Psycho, and owing to circumstances so byzantine and complex they would be impossible to flowchart here (ok fine, I didn’t want to do anything, and my attorney was preparing a brief for the Secret World Global Order Cabal something something) I was indulging in old movies from a prized collection of DVDs, a physical medium becoming increasingly pointless and thereby extremely desirable (maybe even to those cute little Gen Zs who fetishize our old stuff). I inserted the DVD into the player and suffice to say that through the sips of my icy Americano cocktails (that’s Campari, vermouth and soda water with a slice of orange, it takes about 6 seconds to prepare and thereby meets the criteria of the hopelessly lazy as a perfect summer beverage which, like tires you should not buy, also functions all-season) I was quite blown away. I remark upon blown away because it takes a lot to stimulate the few remaining neurons of this savagely diminished brain.
I knew the movie well but it had been a long time. I used to watch it through a haze of strong marijuana while chugging endless lime-stuffed Coronas with Stu, marvelling at this scathing satire of the 80s.
I did not find the time to read Bret Easton Ellis’s celebrated and notorious book (reading can be so tedious, as you are doubtless experiencing right the fuck now) from which the premise for the film is borrowed. I don’t think he liked it, the movie with the title of his book directed by Canadian Mary Harron, daughter of Canadian, um, legend, Don Harron.
If Next Play understands correctly (and let’s face it, we probably don’t, this is not some fucking research facility or AI Chatbot scouring the known universe for whatever humans said about something one time, synthesizing it, and then, obsequiously, vomiting it back wrong) Mary Harron took Easton Ellis’ grand work of epic misogyny (and hey, misogyny epics surely have their place in the canon) and turned it around on itself into a flamethrower at the 80s and maybe even the book itself. I don’t know, I just work here and for free, basically.
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And as we are free to move around this deranged literary cabin, let’s do some star-fucking shall we. (Next Play doesn’t believe in question marks for rhetorical questions, making us an outlier and the object of several lawsuits).
The star of this mini-masterpiece is Christian Bale, Gen X’s greatest fucking actor, way before he put on Christopher Nolan’s intellectual batsuit and way after he ran around as a kid in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. Bale plays the now eternal anti-hero Easton Ellis sleazily named Patrick Bateman, the name a cultural invocation as potent and relevant as Coupland’s Gen X moniker, which Next Play might have leaned into once, a little.
The cast is totally back from the future: Justin Theroux (surely Gen X’s greatest “I know that guy” actor), Reese Witherspoon, Jared Leto, Chloë Sevigny, and the adult in the room, Willem Dafoe, who died Christlike for the sins of American psychotics in Platoon, a movie by Oliver Stone who, let’s just do this here, is a failed satirist compared to Harron.
The actor to single out is Cara Seymour (see Adaptation for more sly, shy brilliance) who plays the avatar for a generation made desperate by the abject robbery in the 80s from the poor to the rich (a political event only superseded in history by… now!) literally whoring to her death at the hands (ok chainsaw) of the empty creature, Bateman.
American Psycho is a look back in anger but holy flying lizards, Bateman, it reaches right into today and gently strangles.
Patrick Bateman just wants to fit in. We know this because he says so in the back of the limo while his girlfriend Witherspoon calculates the advantages of them getting married, but he doesn’t have time, he is too busy at work, which, you know, isn’t true. His job as some kind of investment banker on Wall Street has no actual work attached to it and he spends his days asking his secretary Sevigny to make reservations at preposterously named restaurants that anyway have no availabilities that night. In his ennui, he turns, as might be expected, to killing people.
The vacancy of his profession (described pithily by Michael Douglas in The Game, the send up of Stone’s Gordon Gekko: “I move money from one place to another”) is herein illustrated in one of cinema’s greatest scenes, built around (a house of) business cards. Bale is exquisitely anguished as he compares his new card to those of his friends and colleagues (“look at the subtle offsetting… so tasteful…”) he literally sweats the words out. This scene is the fucking Rushmore of status-seeking.
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I can be seen seeking status, loping down the street with my ridiculous oversized headphones turning my head into a dance floor and the world into a film sequence with a soundtrack.
Patrick Bateman also has a soundtrack. American Psycho duly notes the arrival of the Walkman and those fabulous foamy orange earphones. Patrick just wants to fit in, and his musical choices are extremely middle of the roadkill. As he cheerfully prepares to murder Jared Leto with an axe (who among us doesn’t want to see this), slipping into a transparent raincoat for protection from the inevitable blood, he inserts his new CD Fore by Huey Lewis and the News into the CD player and launches into a critical summary of the recording, framing it in the context of Lewis’s previous works, ascribing as much unearned gravitas to this musical wallpaper as he receives for being a white rich guy. Phil Collins and Whitney Houston receive the same treatment in subsequent bloody scenes. Here’s to violence on screen in service to something much larger and emptier.
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Next Play is aware of the boys to men problem in our current socio-politics. There’s nowhere to fit in. Our abased Batemans are looking for a home in an economy that drives their attention to information delivery systems where realties are manufactured and truth is becoming really fucking expensive. We don’t even have business cards anymore, to tell them who they are.
2000 BUGS
· Whenever Patrick is asked to commit to something, he says he has to return some videos. Next Play uses this all the time.
· Yup, Bale played Bateman and Batman. Endlessly fascinating, this life.
· Someone made Patrick Bateman’s Walkman playlist.