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One may not immediately think of Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel American Psycho as a "food film." However, from its opening frames, the film foregrounds food in provocative ways. As the film begins, drops of a red substance fall against a white background. Low-pitched, ominous-sounding music pulsates on the soundtrack, and the viewer may immediately suspect that this red substance is blood and that the murder and mayhem so gruesomely detailed in Ellis's novel has already begun. However, as the red drops fall and splat upon a white surface, they begin to look more like jelly than blood. The next shot presents the red substance pouring and then subsiding to a drizzle. Then a hand raises a stainless steel chef's knife that descends, not into the neck of a screaming victim, but into a piece of rare beef. At this point, it is obvious that these are shots from an upscale restaurant, not a murder scene, but as the film's narrative proceeds, behaviors linked to the two locales - the restaurant and the murder scene - begin to mirror each other in ways that, when examined, reveal a great deal about how Harron (and co-screenwriter Guinevere Turner) use food and food behaviors to depict the failure of masculinity in this film.
Food prominently figures in the film, set in New York City in the late 1980s, as the main character and narrator, 27-year-old Wall Street up-and-comer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), and his fellow Wall Street power players talk shop over meals and obsess over obtaining reservations at the city's most trendy and upscale restaurants. It is against this milieu that Bateman begins to lose his mind and devote his evenings to brutal acts of torture and murder. Given the importance of food in Bateman's life, it is not surprising that his nefarious activities, mostly directed toward women, are inextricably linked with food and consumption, and eventually leads him to cannibalism. Bateman attempts to exert his masculinity through both his murderous activities and his food behaviors, but he ultimately fails. Tellingly, he tries in vain throughout the film to make an ever-elusive reservation at Dorsia, and it is through her depiction of Bateman's food-related failures that Harron skewers notions of...