Psycho Killer: Asami in 'Audition' and Patrick Bateman in 'American Psycho'
Today, I watched Takashi Miike's Audition for the first time. As anybody who's seen it will attest, it's an incredibly intense, unpredictable, complex and emotionally involving piece. Like many of the best horror films out there, it actively defies its own categorisation by virtue of being so much more than horror.
Asami is an enigmatic and hugely sympathetic character. It's testament to the quality of this film's script that she can be cutting off an arguably innocent man's feet, and not totally lose the viewer's sympathy.
A Western counterpart to Asami could be Patrick Bateman, the psychopath who fakes what society expects of them in order to achieve their hidden goals. However, a couple of things seem to distinguish these two characters: Bateman's comparative incapability to appear normal, and his complete lack of a real-world anchor or backstory (in American Psycho, we hear Bateman proclaim he 'simply [does] not exist'. Audition, on the other hand, is all about Asami's past).
While Bateman is considerably less sympathetic, and less 'real', I think both films are successful in their portrayal of psychopathic characters. Interestingly, they both seem to have a reputation in some circles as sexist. A similar thing happened when The Wolf of Wall Street was released, and faced an angry trashing by audiences who seemed unable to separate the protagonist's feelings and morals from their own.
I'd like to hear some opinions on a few things. Did you consider either Audition or American Psycho to be sexist or misogynistic? Or does the reading of a film rely on the audience's ability to decipher its intent? Did you find Asami or Patrick Bateman sympathetic? Are these responsible portrayals of mental illness, or Victorian freak-shows? Are either characters even mentally ill?
Posted Dec 11, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC
I don't think either film is sexist, but I also think they do a lot of button-pushing with regards to gender and sexuality to make a point about it. It's been a while since I've watched American Psycho but I remember feeling like the film had much more of a feminist message than a sexist one.
Both of these films and the Wolf of Wall Street intend to challenge their audience - but the portion of that audience that isn't even interested in digging into a film to understand its ideas are going to react to surface level visual stimulus, and nothing else.
Back to the movies themselves, though. I apologize for my vagueness but it's been a little while since I've watched either one (Audition definitely ranks among my favorites, though). The one thing I'm inclined to disagree with you about is the mental illness angle. I don't think the goal of either film is to accurately portray mental illness. I saw the characters and their mental conditions as almost being devices, or symbolic, rather than realistic.
I'm mainly drawing from the ending to American Psycho for this interpretation - I always thought Bateman's internal monologue in the final scene - about how his "confession meant nothing" - was implying Bateman's condition to be more or less a product of his environment - and an integral part of it.
I don't think I have as much of a handle on Audition (and like I said, it's been a while since I've seen either film), I just know what kind of feelings it left me with. But I do believe Asami's actions are even less psychopathic than Bateman's in a way - in the sense that she is simply reacting to the protagonist's choices, and not driven by a thirst for blood (though she obviously seems to enjoy the bloodletting).
I get a feminist vibe from both films, and would definitely agree with you there. It's no mistake that American Psycho had a female writer/director, which is as good a way of avoiding the 'male gaze' problem as any, and picking out the parts of Easton Ellis' novel that reflected its intent, rather than its more exploitative and upsetting passages.
It's interesting what you said about the mental illnesses in these films being symbolic. Both films are set in a sort-of uncanny, hyper-real world where it's never clear what's actually happening and what isn't. It's like trying to see the bottom of the ocean; every single person alive is this infinite, black pool that you're never going to be able to dive anywhere near the bottom of. It's a really relatable, human sense of confusion.
Audition seems to avoid cues that allow audiences more interested in 'surface level visual' aspects of films to understand what they're supposed to be feeling, like scary music when the scary thing happens, or sad music when the sad thing happens. I haven't seen American Psycho in a little while either, but I vaguely remember it treating them in a similar way to Wolf of Wall Street (and pretty much all of Scorsese's work); using these cues in a very bland, rote manner and allowing the audience's personal outrage to act as a meta-textual moral center for the film.
Couldn't have said it better. I think to rephrase what I was trying to say about the films' depiction of mental illness - they're not message movies, or "topic" movies like most of the films that take the pains to portray mental illness accurately.
Overall I think they're a little too sensational to take them as accurate depictions of mental illness - but at the same time they do have that "relatable, human sense of confusion" that you mention - keeping the emotional/psychological components of the film grounded in real feelings.
This is solely in regards to Audition . I really try to stay away from drawing any gender-related interpretations from films (it's become so dry since the 1970s) but I'm positive the film explicitly made to draw a feminist/sex reading from it. I originally came to Audition for its reputation as a horror classic of ultra violent proportions. As the end credits rolled I found myself disappointed. But judging the film in this light alone is totally missing the point of Miike's film because really, as its core, Audition is a testament of revenge against patriarchy made in a country which was and from what I've heard still a very male-oriented one. Audition is an explosive retaliation against the selfish, sex-oriented, dehumanising attitudes men hold towards women - typified by Aoyama's deceitful plot to find himself a wife. Yes Asami appears to be the antagonist when considering her character within the framework of the genre but it is the fascistic way men have treated her (the childhood rape, Aoyama) it is actually the men, not Asami, that are the menaces and who have driven this character cookie crazy. One not-so-subtle scene early on springs to mind which justifies such a reading when Aoyama and son are trying to figure out the gender of the fish they are eating for dinner - "Didn't you see the ovaries when we cut it" "That's right. I don't know much about ovaries."