Blog Assignment 3: Relationships Between Shots

The clip I chose is from the 2000 film American Psycho directed by Mary Harron. This scene is made up of 8 shots and follows the protocol for continuity editing. It depicts a short interaction between protagonist Patrick Bateman and his fiancée Evelyn while riding in the backseat of a car. The first shot is a two-shot showing both characters from the front, but the camera angle favors Bateman slightly by being on his side of the vehicle. The angle is as if the cameraman is turned around in the passenger seat at the front of the car. Bateman is turned away from Evelyn while she is speaking her ideas aloud.

The second shot is a close up of Bateman while his internal voiceover lets the audience in on how he feels about his fiancées attempt at conversation. The composition of the shot allows for some lead room to the left of the frame as Bateman looks out of the window past the frame. The following shot is another two-shot of the couple in which Bateman removes one headphone from his ear and the music playing in the scene becomes quiet and distant. The audience now understands the music as diegetic and as the audience, as with much of the movie, we are hearing what Bateman hears as he hears it- his fiancée speaking, his internal monologue, and his music.

The next four shots alternate between close-ups of Bateman and Evelyn. First, a close up of Bateman for three seconds as he speaks, then Evelyn for three seconds as she responds, followed by a one and a half second close up response from Bateman. The increasingly quick paced cuts highlight the conversational tension between the two characters. The seventh shot is a slightly longer close-up of Evelyn. The eighth and last shot is the longest of the close-ups, showing Bateman delivering the last line of the scene and placing the headphones back on his head, which brings the diegetic background song of the previous few shots into the aural foreground for the audience, becoming the main focus of the last few seconds of the scene.

Additionally, the entire scene is shot with a handheld camera which moves along with the motion of the car, putting the whole conversation in a very shaky frame. This, of course, parallels the instability of the protagonist as well as his relationship with his fiancée. The camera work makes the mood very tense. There are no eye-line matches or point-of-view shots, but the prolonged close-ups of the protagonist, along with the internal dialogue and music changes that match the protagonist’s hearing, inform the audience that they are experiencing the narrative from Bateman’s internal perspective.