American Psychosis.

WRITER-DIRECTOR Mary Harron's rendering of Bret Easton Ellis' hypercontroversial novel American Psycho may be less interesting as a movie than as a cultural event, which seems to be the fate of a number of films in the age of Hollywood's intellectual bankruptcy. The picture continues the fascination over the past two decades with the cinema of serial murder, and more than a few reviewers have suggested that this movie is little more than the latest addition to the genre. Obviously, "American Psycho" isn't marketed as such. Like the book, it has expansive ambitions, foremost of which is the association of serial murder with the predatory 1980s, when corporate capital and the Age of the Yuppie seemed to scrap all humane values. The point is explicit in everything from killer Patrick Bateman's obsessive-compulsive acquisitions to Pres. Ronald Reagan's appearance on the TV set in a toney restaurant, trying to rationalize his cover-up of the Iran-contra affair.

The political moralism of "American Psycho" makes it seem a bit more than a slasher film, but its relationship to the genre is clear enough, so much so that we need to reflect on the centrality of this form of horror to the contemporary cinema. In the lead role, Christian Bale is an athletic, less anemic-looking Anthony Perkins, and the link of "American Psycho" to director Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960) goes far beyond the similarity of the titles and the names Norman Bates and Patrick Bateman. Perkins once referred to the demented character he helped Hitchcock create as "the Hamlet of the horror film." The remark now seems very prescient. "Psycho" marked a change in the horror genre, as emphasis slowly shifted from vampires and laboratory experiments gone awry to monstrosities created by the ordinary middle-class family. Today, Leatherface, from "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," and Jason, from the endless "Friday the 13th" series, have a far greater iconic place in the popular imagination than Frankenstein or Dracula. After "Psycho," the "monster" no longer could be seen as a grotesque aberration within an otherwise normal society, but the representation of a serious crisis within American life, one illuminated by an emphasis on psychoanalysis. This new sense of the monstrous brought a different consciousness about the nature of evil, with pluses and minuses for the spectator.

The centrality of the image of the serial killer and his motivations raised questions about the valorization of death in American myth, history, and popular culture. What, after all, differentiated the Charles Mansons and Ted Bundys from the seemingly (in retrospect) bloodthirsty gunfighters of the Old West, many of whom were made heroic by the pop culture of postwar America? This nation's fascination with freelance bloodletting took on a new dimension when the killers no longer had fangs, were products of wacky radiation experiments, or had the justification of being a "fast gun." Norman Bates, then Leatherface, Jason, Freddy Krueger ("Nightmare on Elm Street"), and Michael Myers ("Halloween") joined a new pantheon that seemed very much part of the U.S.'s historical legacy. These movie maniacs were unstoppable, unrelenting in their quest for blood revenge for past grievances--in short, not a lot different from Wyatt Earp or Dirty Harry in their essential ethic.

Yet, the historical lessons in the valorization of the serial killer are probably less apparent than the sheer celebration of Jason, Freddy, and all the other sons of Norman Bates. The popularity of these figures suggests a deep rage within the audience, especially in younger viewers who seem to have fewer and fewer avenues of resistance to authority that constitutes a counterculture, a coming-together of collective outrage such as occurred in the oft-maligned turbulent 1960s. Norman Bates was indeed the Hamlet of the horror film, especially as the character is seen within the context of "Psycho" and its position in film history. He is a tormented figure, and, although hardly self-aware, we can't help but see him as buffeted by forces beyond his control. His story recalls the terrible cries of rage of the greatest modernist art, such as Eduard Munch's "The Scream," but the post-"Psycho" mass murderers and cinematic stalkers seem increasingly affectless. They are all blind violence, with no need for human interchange (with the exception of Freddy's wisecracks). They can be read as the nightmares emanating from the bad consciousness of the nation, figures whose bloody forays are the logical culmination of several centuries of blithe violence in the name of questionable high-minded principles, which now look like rationales covering the most antisocial impulses.

After Vietnam and Watergate, it made sense that the slasher/stalker should be the cinema's embodiment of rage, as many witnessed the collapse of the social contract, with many American institutions seen as bankrupt and figures of high office suddenly figures for derision. Richard Nixon pronounced Charles Manson guilty before the verdict came in at the time that the President authorized massive destruction in Cambodia. Is there any irony in Nixon becoming a Halloween mask faster than Manson and his motives now being judged by many as no more mentally stable than those of the social miscreants Nixon and much of the Silent Majority enjoyed demonizing?

The arrival of Patrick Bateman, then, seems the logical culmination at the end of the century to a tradition within recent popular art. Bateman, the monster, is no longer the challenge to the norm, but the emblem of it. His disgust with people, focus on them solely as objects of his satisfaction, and impulse toward consumption and destruction are shared by his business card-swapping Wall Street buddies, all of whom resemble Brooks Brothers mannequins and whose conversation reflect their cynicism and self-absorption.

At various points, Harron's film is too restrained, deleting important aspects of Ellis' novel for obvious commercial reasons, but in so doing misses some of the books basic concerns. Bateman's incessant account of his dutiful consumption of all the latest au courant consumer goods has as much privilege in the book as his sexual adventures and gruesome murders of his various prey. The accumulation of detail in the novel, the emphasis on personal excess to the exclusion of all other values, makes the book, as difficult as it often is in its barbarism, one of the key social testaments of our age.

Christopher Sharrett, Associate Mass Media Editor of USA Today, is professor of communication, Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.