ÖNEMLİ OLAN DIŞ GÜZELLİK | American Psycho Felsefesi

When we see a psychopath, we usually have certain questions in our minds. Why is this man behaving like this? Is the crime entirely in him or is it his own society that turned him into such a person? And this psychopath is not noticed by the people around him.

The movie, which is a very controversial book and a adaptation of it, criticizes many topics and even makes it a parody. Among them are topics such as consumption culture, masculinity and people's desire to be liked. These topics are better understood by sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who has at least as much controversial ideas as this work, and the subject of this video is the philosophy of the American Psycho movie.

In this story that is passing in the 80s, our main character Patrick Bateman is a rich, educated and handsome man working in Wall Street. At the same time, this Patrick character, which is extremely well-kept and on a level that we can call elite, despite having such a decent image, actually has a completely dark personality.

This man is a complete psychopath, even a sadistic serial killer. It is very easy to see that this man, who brutally killed his homeless, unloved business friends and the girls around him, has a troubled mind, but the people around him are not different from him in some issues. And they are so insensitive that they do not realize that Patrick has problems with his mental health. And the first part we need to stop in this movie is the situation in which Patrick and almost all the characters in the movie have.

IMAGE FITNESS We can understand that Patrick is someone who has liked himself to the fullest and is trying to impress others in the first minutes of the movie. His life consists of luxury places, expensive clothes and social meetings. And while doing this, he does not refuse to show off around him.

He focuses on his image, how he looks from the outside, while doing all kinds of activities that come to his mind. When someone who has a more valuable team dress than his own team dress comes out, or his business friends' card visits look more aesthetic than his card visit, he goes into a severe jealousy crisis in such situations. Because he should always be better, more expensive and more valuable than those around him.

And here we have to stop at the fact that Patrick values ​​the items he has so much. A person values ​​the items he has so much and using these items while doing a statue race with other people is a subject that Baudrillard works on in the concept of "the value of a sign". For example, let's take a item. What makes this item valuable?

According to the point value concept, what determines the actual value of a product is the prestige it has among people rather than the process or production quality of that product. For example, let's think of two t-shirts. These t-shirts are a complete copy of each other. And let's put a brand on them. And let this brand write in a small way in a place of the t-shirt.

One brand is LC Waikiki, the other is Armani. Even if people know that these two shirts are exactly the same, the Armani brand T-shirt will be more valuable than the other. Even if the T-shirt of LC Waikiki had a better quality fabric, the situation would not change. Because Armani's mark value, that is, the status and prestige it has among people, is higher than LC Waikiki. Thus, the name of that brand is above the process or production quality of the T-shirt.

When we return to the movie, we can see that Patrick and his surroundings are quite in line with this concept. Especially Patrick, with the images of his business friends, he compares his own image and analyzes who has a higher mark value, that is, who prefers the goods or brands that people pay attention to. He also has a pension for Valentino suits and Oliver Peoples glasses. Marcus and I even go to the same barber. Although I have a slightly better haircut.

But the best example I can give from this movie is the famous card visit scene. On this scene, his friends show their own card visits. And when Patrick sees their own card visits better, he gets jealous. -Look at that subtle off-white coloring. -A tasteful thickness of it. -Oh my God. It even has a watermark.

So is it normal to put so much meaning into a simple card visit? After all, the process of a card visit is very simple. It gives information about the role a person has in the company. Patrick's simple card visit is so meaningful, even the small visual details in the card visit are so noticeable, we see that his signage place concept, that is, the process of the items he owns, is extremely important to see how it looks by other people.

In fact, all these people are just like the card visit they have, when we look from the outside, they are people who are in shape and not very practical. We can't see them working so hard throughout the movie anyway. Patrick usually listens to music and thinks about where he's going in the evening. Other business friends also drink something in the middle scenes and gossip.

We can make the following conclusion from here that the image wear of these people is that these people are cut out of reality and turned into impetuous people. And the next concept we need to talk about is hyper-reality.

Let's imagine we play a game we love so much. If we play this game without getting up for a long time, the universe of the game takes us so deep that we experience a short period of delusion when we close the game and return to real life. The reality the game offers us is so passionate and intense that the reality of real life begins to get confusing. Here, Baudrillard defines this style as hyper-reality, which draws us to its own reality and separates us from the real world.

and the fact that a person is exposed to hyper-reality for a long time makes him feel insensitive. I showed a video game as an example of this. But Baudrillard shows the example of television, the most popular media agency of his time. According to Baudrillard, a viewer watches the war news on television with the same insensitivity as any toilet paper advertisement.

Even if the war continues in the news after the television is turned off, this war is over for the viewer when the television is turned off. This relationship that the viewer has with the television is a hyper-reality. In this universe, everything is just images and lifeless.

If we go back to the movie, we can see that hyper-reality and the insensitivity it brings are being processed intensively. Patrick's character is like Baudrillard's television example, he is a person who is just an image and lifeless. He has such an insincere and artificial style when he talks to his friends that it is obvious that he has memorized what he is going to say before. "We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless."

Other characters are not very different from Patrick. Throughout the story, they often forget each other's names. But the insensitivity is not only with these examples. In one scene, Patrick puts the body he killed in a bag and meets a business partner while placing the bag in the trunk. However, because of the blood flowing from this bag and taking the shape of a human body,

It is very easy to make a guess that there is a body in this bag. But this business partner asks the brand of that bag instead of guessing that the bag that Patrick carries is a body. - Where did you get that overnight bag?

The most critical example of dissonance is the attitude of other people to Patrick's confessions. Patrick, aware that there are problems in his mental health, cannot stop the murder of human beings. In fact, sometimes he confesses this to those around him. But people around him do not even take this confession seriously. Either they come from the unheard or they think he is joking. - I need to engage in homicidal behavior on a massive scale.

Can we call this movie realistic? Although it is difficult to understand some scenes, this story is actually a solid cultural criticism.

If we focus on the United States of the 1980s, where the story is passing, we see that this film is a kind of documentary of that period. At this time, the United States has been in decline economically with President Ronald Reagan's policies, taxes have fallen, products have increased in market value and many people have had the chance to be rich. At the same time, this prosperity has increased the addiction to meat that gives pleasure, and drug consumption and sexuality have shown serious increases in lifestyle and in the media.

And at this point, the concept we call "Yuppie" emerges. This term is used for ambitious and young business people who received good education and earned high money in the United States at that time. These people have an idea that loves show. Luxury cars, houses, restaurants, expensive branded goods and parties have become a part of their lifestyle.

And we can say that this film is successful in conveying the lifestyle of that time. For example, Patrick is one of the famous society figures of that time, the Donald Trump flag. When he sees things about Trump around him, he starts to get excited. And we can understand that he wants to be like Trump. This is Patrick's main problem anyway. He always wants to be like someone. One of the reasons for this is to make a step in the environment he is in and not to stay behind others.

But on the one hand, he is struggling with the serial killer, and on the other hand, he is trying to match. It is strange that even if Patrick could be someone like them, he still cannot gain a special identity in society. Because the characters he is missing are an image rather than a individual.

At first, I stated that these characters forgot each other's names because of their insensitivity. In fact, these people are extremely similar to each other, which may be the reason for the confusion of names. It is very difficult to distinguish these people from each other, the same hair, the same clothes, the same speaking styles.

They are all like a product from a single brand and the concepts I mentioned by Baudrillard, such a formation where the value of sign and hyper-reality are intensely experienced, no matter how lively and impressive the Patrick character looks from the outside, he is a lifeless and soulless being in essence and he is aware that he is an image, an illusion, rather than a individual. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction.

We can see that the last parts of the movie leave a question mark in the audience's mind. Patrick confesses to his lawyer that he killed Paul's character. But the lawyer says that he met Paul a few days ago. In fact, throughout the story, this style is really seen in broken scenes.

For example, Patrick's duty to see the bloody body bag never stops him, Patrick's skillful use of weapons against the police, or when he runs the electric test tube in the corridor, no one hears him, when we consider these things, we cannot say without asking, "Is all this actually Patrick's dream product?"

But the author of the book does not give a clear answer to the question whether Patrick had these murders in his head. Instead of giving the purpose of these experiences as real or not, the reader states that it is to create uncertainty and doubt. The director of the film also says that the purpose of the conversation scene with the lawyer is to leave an open ending to the viewer instead of the idea that Patrick had everything in his head.

The center of this story is not to question whether Patrick's actions are real or not, but what this story wants to show us. Besides the fact that a psychopathic character like Patrick can easily exist in such a society, people around him are so insensitive that they cannot notice this psychopath next to them. Because if the reality is so broken, even if a killer confessed his crime openly in a world where brands are ahead of human identity,

has meant nothing.