Women's Bodies and Wendigo in American Psycho

Women’s bodies also become landscapes captured by Bateman and his video camera in several scenes in American Psycho, as upper-class sex objects or disenfranchised female prey. Bates’s fiancé Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon) is the most prominent of the upper-class women Bates exploits in the film. Evelyn seems powerless in voiceovers Bates provides, declaring with annoyance, “I'm trying to listen to the new George Michael tape, but Evelyn – my supposed fiancée-keeps buzzing in my ear.” 

Although Evelyn rejects Bateman’s sexual advances, choosing to watch the Home Shopping Network instead, in the end he tells her “You're just not terribly important to me” and leaves her alone to “return videotapes.” As a rich daughter of a prominent family, Evelyn could provide the status symbol Bates at least initially craves, but ultimately, Bates chooses a more literal form of Wendigo/wetiko, not only consuming resources and identities, but bodies as well.

Even though women’s bodies become territories for Bateman in the film, as Stephen Holden of The New York Times asserts, “compared with … robotic cobras [such as Bateman], the women are almost poignantly human.” Christie (Cara Seymour), a streetwalker Bateman hires, and Jean, Bateman’s secretary, most explicitly highlight this connection between women’s bodies and landscapes. Bateman hires Christie to participate in videotaped sessions. She survives the first, leaving badly bruised and bleeding after an off-screen offensive that includes a coat hanger stored in an armoire drawer. She initially refuses a second encounter, but when he waves a huge wad of bills out the car window, she relents in desperation. 

Back at his apartment, Bates videotapes himself with Christie and a second woman, a model socialite, Elizabeth (Guinevere Turner). Christie shuts her eyes and grimly concentrates on her performance, turning her head every so often to check the progress of her partners promoting David Eldridge’s suggestion that the “camera … delivers a ‘moral gaze.’” Although Eldridge asserts that “the only object in the film that could be described as pornographic is Bateman himself, fetishized in the display of Christian Bale’s buff body” (24), the rest of the scene responds explicitly to Bateman’s viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.