Still, although known for her maverick writing style, in 2019 Turner wrote an essay for The New Yorker that told her ordeal about growing up as a member of the Lyman Family cult and by tail end of last season she published the memoir When the World Didn’t End (Crown Publishing, Penguin Random Books, 2023).

Turner is known for the creative partnership with veteran director Mary Harron which generated four movies, among them the horror satire ‘American Psycho’ which follows yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale). As an independent artist Turner broke through with Cheryl Dunye’s ‘The Watermelon Woman’ and Rose Troche’s ‘Go Fish,’ with the latter she would work together in ‘The L Word.’

Meanwhile When the World Didn’t End allows us to understand the places she comes from as she was raised in a secluded cult managed by Melvin “Mel” Lyman, a self-proclaimed saviour who defended their isolation from a world that “had lost its way.”
In a video interview with The Big Picture Film Club, Guinevere Turner, one of the brightest of her generation, speaks about the creative process, the Harron partnership, pioneering lesbian representativity in film and TV, ‘American Psycho’s cultural impact and coping with trauma while working on her memoir.

Gabriel Leão: You’ve been contacted by publishing houses to write about your early life experiences with the Lyman Family Cult for decades. What made you feel like writing it at this stage of your life?

Guinevere Turner: The reason I wrote the book is because I wrote the movie ‘Charlie Says’ which is about the women who killed for Charles Manson, and their time in prison.
It was then that I realized that I’ve been avoiding talking about my childhood in the press. Because often I had been asked; however, it wasn’t relevant to the movie I was promoting, and I know how it is relevant to talk about it now.

In 2019, I wrote a piece that was published at the New Yorker Magazine, and it was one of their top 25 most read stories of the year and people from all sorts of platforms reached out to me, regular people who had been in cults or raised in cults like me, and then also publishers and agents saying: “Are you going to write a book about this?”
For years people had been saying: “You should write a movie or a TV show about it.” Because that is what I do, and I thought: “I got to write a book first to control how I’m going to tell this story.” It is tough to work through all that with a crew, a cast, and opinions of people with money.

Therefore, it seemed like now was the time to write the book, I wasn’t ready before, but then the opportunity was here. Hence, I decided to tackle it and it was not easy.
I haven’t written a book before, I write screenplays. The publishing house said: “Here is your contract, and you have two years.” I thought: “I’m not going to need two years.” And two years later I was astonished and figured out that I need two years, so I had to use these two years better.

GL: One of your most known working partnerships in cinema is with film director Mary Harron. How do you both operate, and why does it work so well?

GT: It is funny, I was just talking with her on the phone, because we are in different places, we are just about to make our fourth film together that we wrote, and she is directing. It has been a while since we’ve written together and just because we’ve been doing other things, and I forgot how much we laughed, we exceptionally have a dark humour which really makes us laugh.

We try to be in the same place, but for years I’ve been living in LA, and she lives in New York, and now I’m in Syracuse, New York which is just five hours North from New York City. We’ve known each other so well at this point, it is our fourth film and we’ve written other scripts together. We like to be in the same room because it is the reason that it works, and it was almost immediately as we met in 1997 and started to write together.
We are not competitive, and there is no sort of ego, so I’ll say some really dumb ideas and she will say really dumb ideas too. We are not embarrassed about that; we are not also shy to say: “I don’t think that is a good idea but what about this.”
There is a lot of ego in collaboration and sometimes people want their ideas to be the one that gets used, and with us is just the opposite, it flows easier in that way, and I think that is important as we are not competitive or self-conscious, we just try to make the best thing.

We have the same sense of humour, and although not all of our movies are funny, we have a sensibility in common, we work really well together. What is crazy is that when I met her, she was single, no kids, and we were just starting on our first project, and now her daughters are on their 20s and giving me notes and they give really good notes. I remember when I was in the hospital room, and they were born.

GL: One of the reasons you wrote When the World Didn’t End was working with the script of ‘Charlie Says.’ Do you see any similarities between the Manson Family and the Lyman Family?

GT: (Breaths)… There are many similarities. But that said as a person who studies about, has been in a community of cult survivors, deprogrammers, counsellors, and is very up on cults. The similarities across countries and decades of cults are kind of shocking sometimes. It is all just patriarchy on steroids and in the rare case when there is a woman in charge it is still power dynamics on steroids in which women and children usually suffer. I have never met Mel Lyman. I know Manson better than I know Lyman because I did a lot of research on Manson and he spoke every time a camera was pointed at him, not so for Lyman, and Manson lived about 30 years longer.

I don’t think Lyman cared about being famous, he cared about getting his music out there, about whatever his philosophy was, bringing people to a different kind of consciousness and way of being, whereas Charles Manson really wanted to be famous.
In my research, and in the way that I crafted my film, I really started to understand the reason that Manson practically lost his mind and started encouraging his followers to prepare for “The War,” “The Apocalypse,” and eventually killing these people. What else made the Manson Family infamous is because he realized he wasn’t going to get famous; therefore, he needed to crank up the stakes to keep his followers.

Manson was like this because he wasn’t going to get a record deal, on which he crafted the whole family around like he was going to get this deal, his music was going to get out to the world, and that didn’t happen. Manson was a con man; Lyman was an acid-using deep-thinking musician who got a lot of people to follow him though, still not always to everyone’s benefit. There is a lot of that man that I don’t know.

GL: Is there any possibility of When the World Didn’t End becoming a picture?

GT: Yes, I hope that it begins this year, I have just finished the script. Absolutely (want it), it was hard to write the book, to go through all of the press and talk about it, but also in both cases great. Still, it is very personal, has lots of traumas, and people connect to it in a way as they share their trauma. So, it is a lot and now I’m going to put myself through all of that again: write the script, get the movie made, go to the screenings, talk to the movie people, and journalists. I’m really putting myself through this several times, but I feel wise and strong enough to handle it without it really getting to me in the way it would when I was younger.

Because it has to do with my writing and I’m working on an adaptation to turn it into a screenplay and a movie or perhaps a limited series. It is too much story to fit into in just a 100-minute movie, but my manager was blunt: “We want it to be a movie.”

I tried, though I just wrote her last week and said: “I’m at the page length that an average feature film would be but I’m only twelve (years-old).” (Laughs)… Which is about the middle of the book. And she was like: “Maybe it is a limited series.”
It is hard because it is a difficult book to adapt and adapting difficult books is what I do, but not the ones that I’ve written.

It has hit me: “Who wrote this? How are we supposed to make this a visual thing?” Because so much of my book happens in my head, so much of it is what I’m thinking and not being able to really tell anyone while in screenwriting terms you give the character a best friend, a guru that they can talk to, you have voice over, but none of those things are true or seem right for this. I’m really challenged about how to make it cinematic, how to separate myself from the actual story, and just look at it as a professional. I feel very challenged, and it might be the most challenging experience I ever had.

GL: Another work featuring a toxic male figure is ‘American Psycho,’ which features Patrick Bateman, who is adored by bros and is the face of the sigma male movement. What are your feelings about Bateman’s position in culture?

GT: It is strange, surprising, and hilarious when it is not so disturbing, which is to say that there is passionate fanbase for this movie as we are still talking about this movie 24 years later which is great. I hope that everything that I make gets talked about 24 years later.

A part of the huge passionate fanbase of this movie are just toxic men who just didn’t get a whole layer of the movie, that it is a satire on a set of men, on commodification and capitalism at its worst. They think he is a “cool dude.” (Laughs).

That to me is the sort of thing you couldn’t do on purpose. I just assume that those that watch this movie understand that Patrick Bateman although handsome, flawlessly worked out, donning very expensive clothes, is still a desperate man who is killing to get noticed and still can’t be noticed.

A loser with all the worse kinds of hyperbolic male traits: he wants all the things, and it is not enough; women are just like nice suits to him, maybe not even that important; he is an actual murderer of women for sport, and everyone (in the movie) is like: “What?” (We both laugh).

I find him very interesting because this movie was not very well-loved when it came out in 2000, wasn’t well-reviewed, and at the premiere screening at the Sundance Festival it received awkward applauses at the end. It was painful.

But it has just gained momentum. Once, I asked my students who weren’t even born when it was released: “Why do you care?” One of the girls goes: “Memes. There is just so many memes, you have to know what it is.” (We both burst into laughter).
We made a very ‘memeable’ movie before memes were a thing.

GL: You’ve been for long a champion of LGBTQIA+ representativity on the screen, in particular lesbians. How do you feel about newer generations catching up with your early works, such as ‘Go Fish’ and ‘The Watermelon Woman’?

GT: Amazed and very pleased, especially in the case of ‘Go Fish.’ It is so very analogue (laughs)… We used (tele)phones and everything about it just feels very much of its time which was early 1990s. They just showed it as an anniversary screening at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks ago and a young Brazilian woman was crying and told me: “I come from a different culture and things are different for LGBTQIA+ people in my country, but this movie has moved me so much, I feel like it is about me.”

That makes me happy because you really don’t know that if you made something universal until a lot of time goes by, and in the case of this movie 30 years.
I feel continuously surprised and sat through with it at Sundance, we laughed at ourselves, and we were so young, I was 24 (years-old) in that movie. It is also so interesting to have a record of yourself at such an age, not only what I looked like, but I wrote it, thus what I thought, my perspective on the world.

‘The Watermelon Woman,’ is so interesting because (sadly) people didn’t pay attention to it for like 25 years. Now, every time I turn around there is a still from it in something either about queer cinema, Black women directors, or what they call the construction of auto-fiction with Cheryl (Dunye) playing a Cheryl who is kind of her with this sort of half documentary style.

I was in my first semester here at Syracuse University, my students didn’t know, they hadn’t seen my name, they had just to take my class, and so it came up that I was talking, and I mentioned ‘American Psycho,’ then one of the kids checks his mobile and comebacks: “Excuse me, you wrote ‘American Psycho’?” And I was like: “Yeah, don’t you guys google your professors?”; “We didn’t know who you were. We didn’t have your name.”

And them everybody is googling it, and another student goes even more excited: “You were in ‘The Watermelon Woman’.” And I was like: “How these 19 years-old people knows this movie?!”
Apparently, it was a required class for freshman in this college, 90s queer cinema, and they show ‘The Watermelon Woman.’

GL: You also played an essential part in the writing of ‘The L Word,’ which you also named, and later, the series would have a sequel for a whole new generation. How do you feel about being part of and living through those days?

GT: It was my first and only time working in and writing for television. It is different from movies, it’s a room full of people, deadlines are strict, and it is fun; writing for film is so solitary, it is just Mary and me.

Before it had come out there is an excitement: “Is this going to work?”
It is the first television show that is specifically about lesbians ever, at least in North America. So, there is an energy about it: “How can we make this a fun show while also maintaining its politics?”, “How can we make it speak to lesbians, obviously our audience, but also to people outside of the community?” In the end, it has to be a good show, regardless of who it is about.

It was exciting, to write something in May and it is on TV on December. In film, something in May is like three years later (laughs) in May.
The TV show ‘Broad City,’ is about two millennials who are best friends, in one episode they mention both ‘American Psycho’ and ‘The L Word,’ and I was like: “I’m so famous.” (Laughs).

I worked with Rose (Troche) in ‘The L Word’ and ‘Go Fish,’ and it is interesting because a generation of lesbians grew up with the series; if we were told in our early 20s that there was going to be six seasons of a TV show that then would be turned into another TV show, and there would be a reality TV show that was just focused on lesbians, we probably would burst into tears of joy and say: “So many changes.” But I mean not that many changes.

What really happened was that networks and corporations realized that LGBTQIA+ people have buying power, and if you build it, we will watch it, especially lesbians as we were also starved for representation. They probably thought “fools” (of themselves) because they didn’t do it sooner. The show was well-received, it was on the cover of New York Magazine before it even came out. It is thrilling that the concept of ‘The L Word’ has become a shorthand for “lesbians,” a cultural mark, and a way of talking about a community, including making jokes that are not homophobic.

GL: How do you process having fans ranging from your queer stories and ‘American Psycho’?

GT: Hilarious. There is this small group of people who just love independent film who have seen both, but I think most of the fans of ‘Go Fish’ have never seen ‘American Psycho’ because, I, myself, would have never see ‘American Psycho,’ I probably would have eventually, but I would have been scared and I don’t like scary movies. And the idea of making those bros sit and go through ‘Go Fish’ and make those lesbians of my generation sit through ‘American Psycho’ (We both laugh), I’d love it. You know, we have many sides (gestures over her head), at least two, the one who can write satires about serial killers and the other who can write romantic comedies about lesbians.

Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for reading purposes.

Also Read: Iconic Scenes: American Psycho – Business Card Scene

The post ‘American Psycho’ to ‘The L Word’: Guinevere Turner Details Her Transformative Storytelling appeared first on Big Picture Film Club.

Severance is a sci-fi/horror dystopia tv show on Apple TV+ starring Adam Scott, best known as everyone’s favourite nerd and Cones of Dunshire creator Ben Wyatt from Parks and Recreation. Created by Dan Erickson with Ben Stiller directing six of the nine episodes, Severance is about an office where the employees go through “severance” they are psychologically split into two people, one who exists solely in the office and one who exists everywhere else. Neither remembers or knows anything about their other self, apart from that they do exist. The office people have skills, personalities and desires but no memories, essentially all they do is work. The office is shaken up by the departure of one staff member, Petey, and the arrival of another, Helly. Mark, played by Scott, is promoted to office manager and deals with the orientation of the newcomer. Helly instantly hates what is happening, considering it akin to slavery and tries desperately to quit, even though quitting would lead to her “death”. The outside self of all these employees volunteered for this and want their office selves to carry on working.

The show is incredibly creepy. Not just the premise but the office itself, stark white walls, a maze of corridors, the on the surface nice Milchick but is simply part of management’s control over the employees and “the break room” where disruptive employees are sent and come back shaken.

Severance is not the only show to deal with the horror of life in an office. Movies like The Matrix and Fight Club have their protagonists stuck in boring cubicle-bound jobs which leads to one becoming a prophesied superpowered saviour and the other a dangerous gang leader with multiple personalities.

“Uh Oh, Sounds Like Somebody’s Got A Case Of The Mondays!”

Cult-classic Office Space has no actual horror or dystopia about it and is a comedy about a workplace but it may well bring on an existential crisis about the sheer pointlessness and frustration of working in a cubicle. It contains what might be the bleakest line ever uttered in cinema, “so, that means every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.” Peter (Ron Livingston) is hypnotised by a therapist into letting go of his worries for a few minutes but when the hypnotist has a heart attack mid-session the feeling sticks and Peter no longer has any worries and goes into his office job, which he hates, and does whatever he wants. He abandons the dress code, sleeps in and destroys a wall of his cubicle to give himself space and when efficiency experts are brought in to lay people off they are impressed by him simply telling it like it is – why should he work hard? Why shouldn’t he do the bare minimum? And they have no answer for him.

“Low Overhead, My Boy – We Pass The Savings On To You!”

Being John Malkovich paints a far weirder picture of the office. Out-of-work puppeteer Craig (John Cusack) takes a job as a filing clerk in a bizarre office located on the seventh and a half floor of a skyscraper with ceilings so low everyone is permanently in a crouch. The office is full of odd people – the secretary who claims everyone is unintelligible because of fictional speech impediments, the owner of the company Dr Lester who wants to have in-depth conversations about sex and relentlessly drinks carrot juice and the icily cool Maxine, who Craig immediately falls in love with. Things get odder as Craig literally finds a door that takes him inside the mind of actor John Malkovich, he can see through Malkovich’s eyes, hear what he hears, and after about 15 minutes is ejected into New Jersey. What follows is a surreal battle for control of the door and over Malkovich.

“Most Guys I Know Who Are In Mergers and Acquisitions Really Don’t Like It.”

American Psycho asks the viewer to decide what is scarier: a sociopathic serial killer coworker or the blandest of bland offices, where people confuse colleagues because they have a similar haircut and discuss business cards as if they’re going through the complicated feelings of hatred, jealousy, and awe felt by Salieri to Mozart in Amadeus. The workplace, Pierce & Pierce, does “Mergers & Acquisitions” and as nebulous as that description is even more nebulous is what anyone does there. The serial killer, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), is indeed the scarier option if only because the office doesn’t make you listen to Phil Collins while it destroys you.

It is safe to say most offices aren’t as dangerous, weird or sinister as some of the above-mentioned workplaces and the return to the office will be less dramatic.

Also Read: The Ingredients Of A Cult Classic

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What’s Going On?

A group of handsome men in their 20s and 30s sit around a conference table, they look well-off and successful, dressed in a variety of expensive if dull suits. We hear voiceover narration from Patrick Bateman, the main character and amoral murderer. The small talk is all of getting reservations at fancy restaurants, where they bought their suits and “accounts” – that shibboleth of American tv and film business people. There is a brief interaction between Bateman and Paul Allen and it transpires Allen has confused Bateman for another one of their colleagues – which is of great importance later in the film. After Allen leaves there begins a comparison of business cards (which are naturally kept in little metal cases). The discussion around the right shade of white for the card, the font of the lettering, the paper stock used is excruciating. Bateman recoils as some of these executives seem to prefer other cards to his own and when Allen’s card is presented Bateman comes close to a breakdown.

Acting

Christian Bale might have peaked with this performance as he is perfect in this film. In this scene, Bateman’s prickly and fragile ego is on display as someone daring to touch his suit or prefer another business card can possibly send him over the edge. The expressions on Bale’s face range from incredibly insincere smiling to barely contained anger to a terrifyingly blank intensity. The rest of the cast does very well in that they care about these things but clearly not as much as Bateman. When talking to Allen, Bateman’s narration explains how he’s confused him for another executive as they have similar style and appearance but there is a certain similarity with all of these men.

They’re All Awful But One Is More Awful

The book American Psycho was released in 1991 and the film adaptation was released in 2000 and certainly captured a certain type of person. The 90s were a period of prosperity for America, the Cold War won and they were running the world. These people are one of the products of that prosperity – they are shallow, greedy and vain, full of their own self-importance and entitlement (but living in the incredibly delicate state when the presentation is more important than substance in that it is so easily destroyed). The fact that Allen got a reservation at a fancy restaurant needles everyone in the room as it suggests he is more important than them. It’s hard to imagine something more pointless and self-congratulatory than comparing business cards, and of course, to most people, they look exactly the same. They run through the different shades of white – bone, eggshell, pale nimbus – when for virtually everyone else they would assume they were all the same. Allen’s card is described by Bateman as having a “tasteful thickness” to it and the difference between tasteful and tacky would surely be measured in millimetres. It’s easy to picture the months-long design process between these obsessed executives and poor designers and publishers, where they were harangued for not having the right thickness of paper. You also imagine that if we followed all of these characters as they left the room as each one would be calling their printer so they could outdo their rivals.

I find all the characters repellent and you forget that while they may all be superficial Bateman is the only one murdering people. Obviously in any chart ranking their awfulness Bateman is in a different category and one very much far away from the rest of them.

The best feature of all might be that all of the cards say they are a Vice-President and you can’t help wonder just how many Vice-Presidents they have in the company? Perhaps this explains why the virtually indistinguishable details of the cards are so important to them, in the hierarchy they’re all the same, and this is a way to be the best.

The Cards

The presentation of the cards themselves is fantastic. As Allen hands over his card, the cinematography and score would suggest this is Most Important Thing In The World. The One ring, the Death Star plans, Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase are nothing compared to this card. Each one is produced with a magician’s flourish and there is something reminiscent of a knight drawing a sword.

Legacy

American Psycho has always been a cult film but has achieved the ultimate twin cultural achievements of being a meme and parody youtube video. Bateman looking at Allen’s card with his horrified expression is a popular meme, where the card will be substituted for some other shocking item or piece of information. I’ve seen many videos where what is being compared is not business cards, but cats, or Pokemon.

That image of these executives has also become a shorthand for a type of shallow, probably incompetent, business-pretentious executive; a certain President’s children and their own style has often been compared to the executives in this scene. When Bale went on to play Batman whenever he was in Bruce Wayne’s business attire it was hard not to be reminded of Patrick Bateman.

Also Read: American Psycho: 19 Years On

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Christian Bale

Before American Psycho, the films on Christian Bale’s résumé were relatively squeaky clean, starring in such films such as Pocahontas, Little Women and the musical The News Boys. Stepping into the role of the titular psycho, Patrick Bateman was a far cry from his other roles, but since then he has gone from strength to strength, displaying a wide range of diversity and going to extreme lengths in order to fully delve into whatever character he is playing. From the rapid weight loss to show the effects of insomnia and paranoia in The Machinist to working out enough to suit the physique of the Dark Knight, Bale has shown his dedication towards any role.

Perhaps his most well-known role is now Batman, however, there is so much more to Bale’s repertoire than the Caped Crusader. Since American Psycho premiered, Bale has been nominated for four Oscars, one of which he won for Best Supporting Actor in The Fighter. It seems he’ll only be starring in one film this year, Ford vs Ferrari (or Le Mans ’66 depending on where you are in the world), however, I’m sure we’ll see him again very soon.

Jared Leto

Perhaps most well known for his music rather than his acting for a while, Jared Leto didn’t really have a starring role in many films. It seems for a while he was most well known for his roles as Jordan Catalano in My So-Called Life, Angel Face in Fight Club and Tobias Jacobs in Girl, Interrupted before he was hired to be Paul Allen in American Psycho, a colleague of Bateman’s, unaware that he is also his nemesis. Though his most memorable scene belongs to Bale more than it does to him (you know the one, where Huey Lewis and the News is playing just before Allen gets struck in the head with an axe), Leto has since become a lead actor in his own right, starring in films such as Requiem for a Dream and Mr Nobody.

Leto has also been nominated for and won an Oscar, for his role as Rayon, a transsexual diagnosed with AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club. Though Leto doesn’t act as often, he has starred in the Blade Runner sequel, has an upcoming Marvel film where he’s starring as a living vampire in Morbius and, of course, who can (or rather, who will) ever forget his Joker. According to Leto’s IMDB, there are two upcoming Joker films he is attached to so… we all have those to look forward to.

Willem Dafoe

Willem Dafoe is one of those actors where every time he pops up in a film, I always find myself saying to anyone I’m with (or even if I’m alone), “Hey look, it’s Willem Dafoe!” With over 129 credits to his name, Dafoe is one of those actors that I think surprises people with his range and the depth that he can bring to a role. Before becoming Donald Kimball, an NYPD detective that is suspicious of Bateman as starts to really get into his violent spree, Dafoe starred in Clear and Present Danger, Born of the Fourth of July and the incredible The Boondock Saints.

Though Dafoe has been in a wide range of films since, such as The Grand Budapest Hotel, Antichrist and even Mr Bean’s Holiday, it is hard to deny his take on the Green Goblin. Though Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy didn’t always have its best moments, I think its fair to say that Dafoe’s performance was one of the better things about the films. Since his performance as Norman Osborne, Dafoe became Vulko in Aquaman, a friend and mentor to Jason Momoa’s Arthur Curry. Dafoe has five films coming out this year and at least two coming out next year, which shows there is clearly no slowing this man down.

Reese Witherspoon

Reese Witherspoon already had three big films under her belt before American Psycho came around. She was a teenage runaway getting revenge in Freeway, a naïve and sweet girl in Cruel Intentions and as a manipulative, over-achieving girl in high school in Election. So although her role as Evelyn, Bateman’s as equally narcissistic, materialistic, cheating fianceé, was diverging from her usual ‘teenager’ role, it was worth it in the long run. Though like Leto, her best scene belongs to Bale (their inevitable break up scene), it still showcased her comedic timings as she over-dramatically cries in the restaurant.

From there, Witherspoon embraced and twisted the dumb blonde image at the same time in Legally Blonde, a film that cemented Witherspoon as a star. She went on to a win an Oscar for Best Leading Actress for her part as June Carter Cash in Walk the Line and was nominated again for Wild. Witherspoon has since delved in producing, her biggest producing credit thus far being the hit show Big Little Lies in which she also stars. Though it seems she’ll only be in Big Little Lies and The Morning Show this year, she’ll also be stepping into her iconic Elle Woods character once more, as Legally Blonde 3 will be heading our way in 2020.

Also Read: Women In Horror: An Ode to Laurie Strode

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