Source: e-Flux Architecture —
Who can pick up the weight of Britain,
Who can move the German load
Or say to French, here is France again?
Imago. Imago. Imago.
—Wallace Stevens
1.
Canadian director Mary Harron shot the influential film American Psycho (2000) in downtown Toronto in 1999. She also co-wrote the script, with actress and filmmaker Guinevere Turner, based on Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 book of the same name. The controversial novel, while critically acclaimed, had ignited a moral panic in North America because of its misogyny and detailed descriptions of sexual violence. Both film and novel are set in Manhattan and follow the first-person narration of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker who happens to be a serial killer.
Or maybe not. One ongoing critical discussion about American Psycho is whether the murders actually happen, or, instead, are simply hallucinations inside Bateman’s head. He can’t recall how many people he’s killed. Is it twenty? Or forty? While the camera’s viewpoint and the voiceover narration ask us to side with Bateman, there are reasons to doubt his account. The so-called killings don’t interrupt the behaviors of the other characters in the film. And then an ATM machine orders him to feed it a stray cat. As the film progresses, the viewer’s experience mirrors Bateman’s. Bateman debates what is real about reality; the viewer questions what is real about fiction.
Harron and Turner’s script delights in exploring these confusions between fiction and reality. Architecture, décor, and artifacts—simultaneously material and immaterial—are all up for grabs. The film’s climax, for example, involves iconic Toronto commercial real estate: the Toronto-Dominion (TD) Centre. Designed by Mies van der Rohe, it officially opened in 1967 and features two almost identical towers, 55-storeys and 44-storeys, and a one-storey banking pavilion. Various architects added additional towers until 1992. Along with Toronto City Hall, it marks both the city’s skyline and its imago—the almost-unconscious mental image Torontonians have of their own city. In 2007, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada declared it a masterpiece of the twentieth century. Yet the film takes place in Manhattan. How could an architecture so closely identified with Toronto so easily double for somewhere else onscreen? The explanation combines film technique and… something else. It’s worth quoting Harron at length. She explains:
The one scene where we really did have to use Toronto for New York is the big kind of climax of the movie, when he’s in a panic and he runs to his office. And they [the production team] suggested shooting in the Toronto-Dominion Centre, which is these two identical towers in a plaza. Really beautiful architecture, Mies van der Rohe, and sort of classic, beautiful modernism. And the idea of the identical towers was so great because the story itself has a lot of doubling. It’s about mistaken identity.
The first big murder you see Bateman commit is of his rival, Paul Allen, that he’s obsessed with, and he’s someone who’s very very like him, and so people always are confusing him for someone else. So the whole idea of the mistaken identity is in the towers, because he runs into one thinking it’s his office, and it’s not. And he ends up shooting a guard, and then he runs across the plaza to the other identical tower, where he finally makes a confession to his lawyer.1
Harron here riffs on the genericness of the modern office building. Given the influence of Miesian architecture across North American cities, the TD Centre is just like office buildings elsewhere. These office towers are so much alike we all might run into the wrong one by mistake. At the same time, these two near-identical office buildings are signature Canadian landmarks by one of the most acclaimed architects of the last century. How can they be generic? And again, how can twin Toronto icons be mistaken for buildings in Manhattan? For Harron’s team, the dilemma became a chance to deepen the film’s exploration of ambiguity. They exploited the interplay between the psychic role of the office buildings in Toronto—the fiction of architecture—and the array of technical tools available to a savvy filmmaker and her collaborators—the reality of film. Harron explains further:
One of the things that the DP [director of photography] Andrzej Sekuła did was—we did a matte. We did an old-fashioned film trick as he runs across the plaza, of doing very slow film so that the towers would look very bright. So we had … the lights of the skyscrapers coming out, and then we matched that—matted it in—with Bateman running across the plaza.
And the other thing that happens in that scene is he actually runs from Toronto—Toronto Dominion Plaza—around the corner, and then he’s in New York, because we had to shoot that bit in Wall Street.
Real life invaginates the contradiction of real and perceived. Through architecture, a building in Toronto copies a building in Manhattan. Through architecture, one building is mistaken for another. Through cinema, Toronto doubles for Manhattan. Toronto’s signature architecture proves generic. And yet, that genericness somehow also becomes Toronto’s identity.
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