Why Patrick Bateman endures

It’s been 25 years since American Psycho slunk its way on to movie screens. Yet the film, starring Christian Bale as yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, has never quite managed to die. 

The satirical horror film, directed by filmmaker Mary Harron and adapted from a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, follows the exploits of a 26-year-old investment banker who spends his days competing with his friends about who has the coolest business cards and who can get into the nicest restaurants, and his nights wantonly murdering and torturing his victims. 

Last fall, Lionsgate announced a new adaptation of Ellis’s novel, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Austin Butler. Online, meanwhile, smarmy, bloody Bateman is at the center of memes, reaction GIFs, and fancams galore. Something about the combination of his goofy, slightly inhuman facial expressions, his violent exploits, and his sharply tailored suits make him perfect fodder for the internet — especially among young men, who play with absurdist memes that revere Bateman as a “sigma male,” the pinnacle of aspirational masculinity. 

In the more pathological corners of the manosphere, a “sigma male” is the alpha male’s introverted cousin. While the alpha male effortlessly commands the respect of his peers, the sigma is a lone wolf figure so hypermasculine and independent that he needs no human connection and thus is superior to everyone else. Bateman is considered so synonymous with the figure of the sigma that one of his expressions from the film — a smirky raised-eyebrow pout — is now called “sigma face.”

“I will never be Patrick Bateman,” a young poster mourns on a forum for lookmaxxers, an incel-derived subculture of men obsessed with optimizing their physical appearance. “I’ll never be a white, chadlite, 130 iq genius investment banker harvard graduate. Why even live at this point?”

Bateman is an expression of the most violent and depraved kinds of wealthy masculinity of which our culture can conceive, and depending on your relationship to that archetype, he becomes either antihero or villain. He was invented as a dark reflection of the Reagan moment, but there’s something about Trump’s America that makes him particularly, worryingly compelling. 

Patrick Bateman began as a complicated yuppie satire

In Ellis’s novel, Bateman is a weird figure, positioned as a symbol of toxically masculine yuppie malaise, obsessively cataloging the designers he wears with the same half-blank, half-sensuous detail with which he obsessively catalogs the torments he inflicts on his victims, mostly women. 

The idea is that Bateman is what happens when a human being internalizes the priorities of the yuppie, luxuriating in meaningless status symbols. In the end, he becomes a shell of a human being, a monster who tortures, murders, and rapes out of sheer emptiness.

The yuppie as a cultural construction is a fundamentally conservative specimen cloaked in insincere liberal posturing. He likes art, so he uses it as a means of gentrification and consumerism. He pretends to respect women, but he uses and discards them. He cares about health, so he is obsessed with optimizing his lifestyle. 

Yet there’s a certain ambivalence to Ellis’s prose as he deals with Bateman, which is perhaps why this novel has a reputation for controversy. He takes nearly as much pleasure as Bateman does in describing his skincare and workout regime, the fine fabrics of his clothes: he’s making fun of these preoccupations, but they are also what gives the novel its juice. And when he describes Bateman’s crimes, he does so with a sort of jejune glee at his own daring: There now, aren’t you shocked? 

Harron’s 2000 film is more pointed in its satire of yuppie culture than Ellis’s novel. Harron and Bale together manage to kill Bateman’s glamour a little — you wouldn’t think you could make a handsome man having a threesome look uncool, but Bale, smirking and flexing and fist pumping at his own reflection as he copulates with two sex workers, manages it. 

Yet the film also treats Bateman’s violence as cathartic, something close to a redemption of the callow, shallow world in which he lives. We can see this best in the famous scene that comes when Bateman kills his business rival Paul Allen, played by Jared Leto. 

Bateman decides to kill Allen because Allen, having landed a plum account at their investment firm, is able to secure reservations at the hottest restaurants in Manhattan, and moreover everyone likes his business card better than Bateman’s. In the iconic murder scene, Bateman dons a raincoat to protect himself from blood and dances stiffly along to Huey Lewis and the News’s “Hip To Be Square,” which he sees as an ode to “the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends.” Then he bashes Allen’s head in with an axe.

Textually, Bateman is killing Allen because he cares so much about their meaningless power games and posturing. When Allen dies, though, his death feels deserved and therefore funny because all of his concerns are so pointless: Bateman’s murders are the way Harron expresses cinematically how bogus yuppie life is. Watching, you feel satisfied by Allen’s death, as well as a certain emotional respect for Bateman, for being the person to deliver your satisfaction. For a moment, you feel that he’s the one person who sees how stupid they are.

Online, the Bateman memes are as ambivalent as the source material is. There’s something slippery about Bateman that makes it tricky to react to him with any uncomplicated emotion. 

Some are enchanted by his glamour, especially his beautiful suits, his elaborate skincare routine, and his impeccably decorated home. In 2017, Vox’s sister site Racked called this phenomenon the Patrick Bateman Lifestyle Brand, writing, “you can find articles that break down or overanalyze his grooming routine, look back at the restaurants featured in the book as well as project where Bateman would dine today, and provide a virtual tour of his apartment.”

“I think that Patrick Bateman in ‘American Psycho’ epitomized the growing permissiveness for men to be more attentive to their appearance,” Bruce Pask, men’s fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, said to the New York Post in 2016. “[In the late ’80s] there was a rapid expansion of the availability of men’s high fashion, a heightened awareness of designer labels and a vast array of grooming and beauty products entering the market for the first time that were targeted specifically to men.”

All these paeans to Bateman’s devotion to appearances generally come with a disclaimer: We’re not talking about all the murdering, just about how good Christian Bale looks in the movie. There’s a sense, though, in which Bateman’s aesthetic is part and parcel of the regressive ideology he embodies — especially when it comes to all those Armani suits, and especially when it comes to our current cultural moment.

America goes Psycho

Sean Monahan, the cultural analyst who predicted the “vibe shift,” has been using the phrase “boom boom” to describe a recent pop cultural swing to the right. “The fetishization of the past is very boom boom,” Monahan wrote in December. “We see this in the return of the suit, especially in double-breasted and fuller-fitting, pleated cuts; the return of the loafer and the Oxford shoe (see: Miu Miu’s recent collaboration with the storied Northamptonshire cobbler, Church’s); the return of blockbuster, cultural touchstone boxing matches like the recent Tyson-Paul Netflix fight. Hierarchy, tradition, aggression—male-coded values people thought had been left in the dustbin of history. All have come roaring back.” 

Monahan notes that Bateman is a particular “touchstone for this look,” which tends to draw on famous villains as its icons. They are appealing because of their wealth and their hedonism, but the violence that runs under their actions is part and parcel of that package.

This subtext becomes explicit in the parts of the internet where people unironically aspire to become sigma men. A post on a looksmaxxing forum declares Bateman to be “(ALMOST) the ideal male,” citing as Bateman’s assets not only his chiseled good looks, wealth, fashion sense, and charisma, but also his “dark triad and low [inhibition],” referring to the psychological theory of a triad of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy believed to be common among criminals. Only the fact that Bateman is under six feet tall keeps him from receiving full marks, the post concludes. 

Others in the looksmaxxing world believe Bateman’s masculinity is invalidated by his yuppie insecurities, now rendered misogynistically into feminine attributes. “Bateman is the polar opposite of both sigma and alpha,” wrote one poster. “The entire point of the character is that he has not a shred of real self worth or independant masculine energy, his entire life is chasing the validation and approval of others to obsession. Like a woman.” 

The irony here is that Bateman mostly murders women, either sex workers or ex-girlfriends. His murder of Paul Allen is so fun and iconic in part because it’s the only time Bateman murders someone who he considers to be a true threat to his own power. 

There’s also a strong contingent of Bateman memers who say the whole thing is a joke, a blood-soaked nihilistic troll expressing that nothing ever really matters. “no one idolizes patrick bateman. the people who think of him as sigma just like the visuals and the funny things that patrick does in the movie,” one poster says on the American Psycho subreddit. Says another on a subreddit dedicated to quasi-ironic posting about sigma men, “It’s funny seeing people shocked about us ‘idolizing’ him lmfao.”  

In this worldview, Bateman is simply funny and fun to watch, with his beautiful suits and his maniacal line delivery and his overt and bloody cruelty. Moreover it’s funny to express your admiration of him and watch shocked trend journalists clutch their pearls. The rest of it simply doesn’t matter.

There’s a nihilistic glee to this joke similar to the alt-right’s early embrace of President Donald Trump, a joy at the spectacle of cruelty and a rejection of everything else as meaningless. That’s not a coincidence, because there’s a basic affinity between Bateman and Trump, despite Trump’s less-than-classic suit tailoring. Bateman himself adores Trump in both novel and film, looks out for Trump and Ivana at every Manhattan hot spot he visits, and recommends Trump’s book to the detective investigating him for murder.

Bateman’s idolization of Trump is a moment of like recognizing like: one man who has invested his whole personhood in the surfaces of things, leaving only a sadistic void howling within — seeing another and reaching out to him. Part of the pleasure of watching Bateman, of reveling in his glamour, his viciousness, his violence, is recognizing the same anger and craving for luxury in ourselves. When we aspire to be like Bateman, or even simply to dress like Bateman, we are aspiring to make those parts of ourselves bigger. 

Bateman is back, then, because Trump is back, because the 1980s are back and boom boom, because the culture that birthed them both is back: all that wealth, all that greed, all that empty rage.