American Psycho, first released in 1991 and adapted into film in 2000, has since had a minor resurgence on the internet. This newfound popularity is completely earned: It's an amazing movie. However, some of the fans interested me. A significant number of the heavily ironic Patrick Bateman fan accounts also showed noticeably conservative views- one even posted what was basically a Ronald Reagan fancam. Despite the typically heavily ironic engagement with the source material, i.e using it to make sigma grindset memes, I do think there is something to be said here about misinterpretation. Why would you be a fan of something that’s actively making fun of you? This variation in audience response brought up interesting questions of the nature of both the book and film adaptation’s satire, and how they work to convey the overall message. In order to do this, it’s probably important to establish what this message actually is.
In the words of its author, Brett Easton Ellis, “American Psycho is a book about becoming the man you feel you have to be, the man who is cool, slick, handsome, effortlessly moving through the world… Everything meaningful wiped away in favour of surfaces”. This theme is embodied by the novel’s setting and characters, as yuppies in 1980s America. Ellis satirises both capitalist consumerism and toxic masculinity by taking them to their logical extremes (and then a bit further) in a narcissistic psychopath, who’s only humanity is a false shell and who embodies the ‘dissatisfaction’ of the ‘collective male psyche’. The business card scene alone is laughably absurd, painting Bateman as ridiculously materialistic and insecure.
In some cases, the issue is that people are unable to separate this veneer from the entire rest of the movie, when they’re intrinsically linked. That’s how we got people thinking he was cool ‘apart from the murder’- he gets girls, he’s rich, he wears suits etc. However, it is important to the narrative that Patrick is a serial killer because it demonstrates just how much he is allowed to get away with- all anybody notices is his Jean Paul Gautier overnight bag, and not the dead body he’s making very little effort to hide inside it. So, when they don’t realise this, viewers get sucked in by the charismatic and appealing show of excess Patrick creates. And though Easton-Ellis could have made him actually unattractive or pathetic or unmanly or all number of things to dull this appeal, that’s not the point. Sometimes, satire is missed by the very people it's criticising because it's laughing at them for reasons they wouldn't consider to be bad- and therein lies a paradox. Because in order to make 'Bateman' or people like him laugh at him, you would have to uphold the very things you're trying to poke fun at. It is very easy, then, to assume that satire such as this can’t work in screen form full stop, because all we see are these aforementioned ‘surfaces’. And that’s definitely some of it- but I don't think that’s inherent in adapting a book like this to film. In fact, I would argue that the film has incredible potential in enhancing the themes of the novel in a different way; a byproduct of adapting satire across media forms.
Those who have read the book tend to be a lot less sympathetic towards Bateman- and sure, maybe that’s because the film cuts a lot of the more graphic parts: it’s less easy to think a guy is cool if you’ve just read 500 pages of him doing unspeakable things with rats and power drills- but I think it has a lot to do with the narrative focaliser. Patrick is a completely unreliable narrator, and though we can see this with the film’s confusing ending, the book creates a much greater impression that this is the case. Bateman directly addresses the audience multiple times, goes on tangents to nobody in particular about his music taste, and offers insight into his internal monologue. At one point, he even asks the reader ‘Did I do this on purpose? What do you think?’ This combined with blatantly false information, e.g the cheerio being interviewed on the Patty Winters show, all gives the impression that he is constructing a view of his life for the reader. We can assume this is an extension of his need for control and also to project his veneer (though these desires are likely one and the same), as at one point when he begins to lose control he lapses into third person and narrates an absurd scene as if it was a movie. In all these cases Patrick breaks the fourth wall, making us very aware we are reading a book written by him, and prompting us to think about our own reactions to his character.
This is where I think the movie has a unique position, as by making it clear the entire movie is not necessarily just from Patrick’s point of view- but deliberately CONSTRUCTED by him- we are offered a much more insightful view into his head, and can more easily understand the film as a satire. This means the actual events of the movie (who he kills, what is real) is much less important compared to what he shows us and what this tells us about how he views society. It also works well in reinforcing the satire: when you see how he deliberately presents himself to try to look cool from an outside perspective, you see how ridiculous he often looks (again, business cards). There is a gap between how he believes he is presenting himself, and what we see of it; causing us to both consider his perspective and thought process, but also inducing cringe in the viewer. This might be what the movie was actually trying to do: mainly reinforced by the incredibly structured opening scene in which Patrick addresses the viewer in a monologue and introduces his life.
We also see this idea in one of the key themes throughout the movie, which is Patrick’s obsession with identity (thereby, how he is presented). In some ways this is shown to be a reaction to the society he inhabits: in the consumerist society, everyone is so concerned with being on trend that they look the same- for example, all wearing Oliver People’s glasses. Throughout the film characters are continually mistaken for one another, most notably Paul Allen / Owen mistaking Patrick for Marcus Halberstram. In the novel, Patrick goes to extreme lengths in order to keep up this charade, actively lying about his own name and the name of his fiancée. This is likely a reflection of Patrick’s obsession with his identity; to admit that he is Bateman and not Halberstram would be to relinquish control over how he is perceived, a kind of vulnerability. And vulnerability is both decidedly unmasculine, and puts him at a disadvantage in this capitalistic world where everything must be calculated. It is in situations like this where we see both capitalism and masculinity intersect, bringing us back once again to the cause of the core emptiness in Bateman’s life.
…And, of course, his solution to this emptiness. Patrick Bateman’s motive for killing at first seems to be reactionary. Of it, he says ‘In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.’ His murders may also be the only thing he has of himself other than the façade he has constructed: ‘This is my reality. Everything outside of this is like some movie I saw once’ But the fact that he hurts others never satisfies him: ‘But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling.’ What is his acceptance of how he feels worth if he cannot do anything with it? If he cannot change it? His violence is the only way he feels he can express this. He wishes to externalise his pain, to inflict his own suffering onto everyone else. He cannot seek help from others, because this is the only acceptably masculine way. This thought process is a direct product of the gender roles pushed on men: making them more likely to project their pain outwards into destruction, to get revenge on an uncaring world (or whatever they see as the root of their issues). Therefore, potentially the draw to Patrick is his relatability: the way his pain is manifested into extreme violence could feel like catharsis.
However, this may not be the only aspect to consider. Here, it seems more that Bateman is trying to level the playing field, or in some warped way, to one-up his peers. In most of the killings we see Bateman engage in, he is reinforcing his social status: when he stabs the homeless man, he tells him that he stinks and to get a job: emphasising his wealth and class and therefore ‘superiority’. In the same scene he calls the homeless man the n word, and at one point attempts to kill a japanese delivery boy after his colleagues go on a racist tirade. All his murders of women are sexual in nature, as he appears to use this sex as a form of dominance to reassert his power over them. Particularly when you look at his motives on a closer scale, Bateman is often trying to escape his own feelings of anguish and inadequacy by making others feel helpless and terrified. For example, when he sends people pieces of dead bodies in the post, or when he tortures the girls before killing them. This culminates in his murder of Paul Allen, who he targets based on his jealousy, as his normal one-upmanship via conspicuous consumption (apartments, tanning beds, limos etc) is ineffective: so he turns to murder.
I think this is ironically, somewhat reflected in his ‘fans’. Many of the accounts I saw were cruel to ‘social rejects’ yet also cruel to what they see as ‘mindless conformity’ of women; ridiculously ironic considering Bateman’s speech about the ‘pleasures of conformity’. The hypocrisy, is perhaps, projection: protected just barely by the belief that this internal anguish, their adopted identity as ‘misunderstood’ and ‘tortured’ makes them different, makes them special. Of course, it doesn’t- and all they are doing is reinforcing the same rigid structures that make them miserable in the first place, just as Bateman does, time and time again.
What the movie misses is being able to paint this ‘catharsis’ as the rightly pathetic action that it is. This is because it omits the scene when Patrick goes to the lengths of disguising a urinal cake as a chocolate in order to feed it to Evelyn. She eats it, but he is not satisfied- realising that ‘In the end, the displeasure it caused her was at my expense’. Though he is causing these people suffering, he is going to so much effort to do so that the indifferent, smug, unbothered- even evil idea that he had of himself is shattered. The fact that he has done this to Evelyn is pathetic, the opposite of his cool movie star masculinity he works so hard for. He has not affirmed anything real over her in this situation. His assertion of control is all illusory, his attempts to show off are one-upped by his coworkers, his cries for help are met with indifference. Because even when he reveals what he had believed to be his true self in admitting to Paul’s murder, nobody cares or even believes him- even his killing means nothing. What he thought was his catharsis is ultimately rendered useless. He is, at his core, contradictory and meaningless. It was all for nothing, and he will never be fulfilled. This once again calls back to the concept discussed earlier, of how sometimes satire is ineffective because of how people view the qualities being made fun of. Patrick himself shows contempt towards his own overinvolvement; because to show genuine feeling is to show vulnerability, and a certain level of uncaring means nothing can have power over you because you don’t care about anything. Here, however, making fun of them using their own logic works; because though Bateman types would find his non-indifference embarrassing, it is a direct product of his violence and posturing, which is what they would idealise. It is effective in pointing out the inherent contradiction and futility of being somebody like Patrick, rather than shifting the mockery onto an unrelated factor. In this way, the film would have been able to present the murder as an extension of Bateman’s mindset rather than as a kind of ‘inside repressed darkness’ with something that just makes him ‘snap’:
So- is it bad to relate to Patrick Bateman? Not inherently: it could be the first step to understanding the impact of societal systems and the malaise they have sown. It all depends on what people make of Patrick’s character; and ultimately, whether they are able to find their own meaning in the film’s (somewhat abstract) representation of the ills of modern society. Whether they can- or indeed, care to- pinpoint the source of Bateman’s dissatisfaction, or whether they simply wish to use him as a vessel through which to wallow in their sadness and reinforce the very thing that’s keeping them miserable.