Or, How An Absent Father And Some Heinous Insecurity Might Make You Think You’re A Psycho
So why is Mary Harron’s masterclass of a film—the one meme-infused one starring Christian Bale—even called American Psycho? Well, because the book is, obviously. So why then does the book have that title? It’s not just “Psycho”, and I suspect the reason isn’t simply to avoid intruding on Alfred Hitchcock’s domain. While it calls back to its predecessor to a limited degree, it doesn’t have the same directness, tonally or psychologically. American Psycho isn’t a story about just one person, either, despite the self-absorption and fragile overconfidence of its protagonist. It’s more a story about a society. American society. Particularly in the upper end of that society.
The film is remarkably adept at reproducing the spirit of the novel, even as the novel meanders and wanders into what must surely be deliberately vague and often incredibly tedious sermons about consumer culture. Bateman can spend whole pages at a time spouting what is assumed to be regurgitated reviews of Broadway shows, restaurant meals, fashion attire, or the latest CDs, which are very adequately represented in the film with a few pithy lines. In other words, the novel has its charm (and its tedium) but the film usually does the same thing with much greater efficiency.
It is important to acknowledge that Patrick Bateman, like all of Bret Easton Ellis’ protagonists, is an utterly unreliable narrator. What he says must always be taken with a grain of salt, because he frequently, even within his own version of events, speaks or acts with contradiction. This is reflected in the film by similar incongruities or events which seem impossible or confusing; we are not meant to know what is accurate or not in his mind precisely because Bateman himself no longer recognises reality at all.
Patrick Bateman, the eponymous “psycho”, entering a bathroom in one of the many purportedly prestigious but ultimately forgettable dining locations in the film (with the notable exception of Dorsia, which has become something of an internet meme). There’s so much gold: in the decor (which are not coincidentally like prison bars), the frame of the mirror, Bateman’s cufflinks and even arguably even his tie. A colour almost universally associated with wealth.
Yet, figuratively, the focus here is on hands, and touch: the taps and hand towel and Bateman’s own gloves; each of them focused on hygiene or the desire to mitigate or ameliorate touch, or the various problems associated with what touch might imply. The dispenser is mirrored here, for emphasis, and is literally in the centre of the frame.
All of which is appropriate given the nature of a scene about misunderstood homoerotic desire. I’ve often wondered: Bateman is clearly repulsed by Luis, but instead of turning to homicidal violence as he might with a woman, he is reduced to impotent babbling (and yet another flaccid “I have to return some videotapes”) by the romantic overtures of another man. Doesn’t sound like much of a psycho to me, just someone inured by their culture to be repulsed by same-sex desire, and perhaps even confused about his own feelings. Image: Lion’s Gate Films
Alienation and Resistance to Vulnerability
In the novel, Bateman’s date with his personal assistant Jean goes distinctly (though not fundamentally) differently to the film. It extends over several scenes—including an amusing interlude when they do, albeit briefly, get into Dorsia through sheer bluff—but one key detail remains the same in both. Jean elicits in Patrick a small measure of humanity. She is the one figure who he has some kind of empathic response to, or feels some fleeting sense of romantic—rather than pornographic—relationality.
The pair end up at Arcadia and then back at her apartment (rather than his, as it is in the film), where her desperation to invite him upstairs initially irritates him. Several brief thoughts of his diverge somewhat (if not completely) from the psychologically stark brutality of the rest of the novel. Able to reflect his internal monologue, they illustrate his nature more effectively than the equivalent film scene.
First:
Sitting across from Jean right now in the darkness of Arcadia, it’s very easy to believe she would swallow any kind of misinformation I push her way—the crush she has on me rendering her powerless—and I find this lack of defence oddly unerotic.
Because, of course, it undermines his fantasy of power. What has he overcome or defeated if there is no resistance? Power fantasies are possessed by those who are, pretty much by definition, in the grip of a raging insecurity of some kind. Unto itself power is sought only by those who have something to prove. Whether such a person realises it or not is naturally irrelevant.
Bateman equates sex with power, because in the films he watches that’s how sexual desire and behaviour are constructed, and those films are similarly designed to appeal to insecure men for exactly that reason. It gives the target demographic, almost always men and boys, permission to feel powerful through a medium absolutely designed to sooth insecurity by reframing the reality of what is often an interaction fraught with uncertainty and therefore anxiety. Which is among the reasons why porn itself can be so harmful. It’s not the flesh and the fucking that’s the problem; it’s the power dynamic.
Patrick Bateman, a serial porn consumer, possesses no imagination of eroticism which is not prefaced by physical dominance, nor can he apparently feel aroused without a corresponding sense of resistance, which is dominance is constructed to overcome. A great example from the film is how, during his plan à trois with the prostitutes, he spends most of his time admiring his own musculature as he flexes and watches himself in the mirror; he is utterly disengaged with his female companions and seems to need them only as masturbatory tools while he gets off on his own apparent strength—or at least the appearance of such strength.
Whilst not explicitly rape fantasies, there is little to suggest otherwise regarding Bateman’s expression of desire. His treatment of the prostitutes he hires is consistent with this idea of dominance-and-control-as-satisfaction. We’ll get to this later but in the meantime, ask yourself: who is it that inherently needs to fantasise about or enact dominance? Is it a person already comfortable in themselves and their status?
Then:
We stand on the sidewalk in front of Jean’s apartment on the Upper East Side. Her doorman eyes us warily and fills me with a nameless dread, his gaze piercing me from the lobby. A curtain of stars, miles of them, are scattered, glowing, across the sky and their multitude humbles me, which I have a hard time tolerating. She shrugs and nods after I say something about forms of anxiety.
…
“Do you want to come up for a drink?” she asks too casually, and even though I’m critical of her approach it doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t want to go up—but something stops me, something quells my bloodlust: the doorman? the way the lobby is lit? her lipstick? Plus, I’m beginning to think that pornography is so much less complicated than actual sex, and because of this lack of complication, so much more pleasurable.
The largely unspoken subtext here is that the doorman who eyes Bateman intensely (and who does not compete with him on the level of apparent status or wealth) is intimidating because within that particular foyer he wields more power than Patrick does. The very notion of this most slight of challenges to his masculinity shrinks his desire. The tragedy here is that Bateman’s unrecognised growing affection for Jean stays his hand, not the doorman; the latter simply acts as the fulcrum for his hesitation. Bateman has known Jean, we should recall, far longer than perhaps all of his partners (formal or otherwise) and in a context—his work—in which he takes a sincere, if unjustified, pride and also allows him to know a lot more about her.
Yet here, with some strangely genuine feelings of affection growing inside him and a fatherly figure looking over the object of his desire, his first thought is not toward the opportunity itself—the path of growth—but to retreat into the “easy” pleasure of porn. His fantasies of power exist because he lacks real power in his actual life, or more accurately feels as though he lacks it. The doorman disarms him because Bateman is, in reality, unused to having his power legitimately challenged. At the first example of this, he is filled with a “nameless dread”. There’s a name for it, he has just never bothered considering what it is.
In the pornographic environment he finds so appealing, a woman can be reduced to what Bateman really wants her to be: an object to be used and discarded. Not unlike a cigarette, or a plastic wrapper. It is also worth noting his intolerance to humility, something which seems foreign to him. That’s exactly what intolerance is; a lack of exposure.
And, finally:
And though it has been in no way a romantic evening, she embraces me and this time emanates a warmth I’m not familiar with. I am so used to imagining everything happening the way it occurs in movies, visualising things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead, the seventy-millimetre image of her lips parting and the subsequent murmur of “I want you” in Dolby sound. But my embrace is frozen and I realise, at first distantly and then with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside me is gradually subsiding and she is kissing me on the mouth and this jars me into some kind of reality and I lightly push her away.
Not only does this final section in particular almost perfectly prefigure many of the self-perpetuating pitfalls available to males in the internet age, it neatly summarises Patrick’s inability to recognise the difference between fantasy and reality.
Just as the circumstances of his birth (as male, white, and moneyed) have coddled his ego and atrophied his sense of humility, so too has it dislocated him from actuality. Even as he begins to feel the first warm sense of affection (I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest he is capable of something like love), he immediately and instinctually begins to reframe it as something from a film. To keep it at arm’s length, something visual which he can watch from a distance and turn on and off at will. In other words, to keep him in complete and sterile control.
Bateman is so unfamiliar with romantic feeling that he attempts to reframe his own emotional existence as a film in the third person—mirroring the endless stream of pornography he watches, to the extent that his first stumbling recourse during some anxiety-ridden conversation is to mumble that he has to “return some videotapes”. Under pressure, his mind instinctually turns to the dopamine hit of easy stimulation, which eases that anxiety just a little bit. Not unlike scrolling a phone for a while instead of engaging with the environment but feeling a little awkward doing so.
It is this almost-conscious refusal of the real which is the supreme tragedy, in my view, of the entire story (both novel and film). Patrick Bateman is so trapped in what he believes his reality to be—blinded and deceived as he is by the trappings and co-dependent status-scramble of his ludicrous wealth—that he cannot even begin to feel the genuinely wonderful sensation of love and affection without instinctually shrinking from it.
Contemporaneously, dating apps conjure the same delusion. Swipe after swipe and a glut of opportunity mimics the endless availability of online porn, and in turn stifles the sheer terror of, y’know, actually having to engage with another human being on any kind of “real” level, or take any sort of risk at all.
Because that would involve… vulnerability. And finally we get to what is actually so appalling and repulsive to Bateman, and what a porn or dating app addiction are designed to feed: a way to avoid feeling open enough to be potentially undefended.
For Bateman, all those lifelong habits and practices—all tied to domination and his fear of emasculation—have turned even his his subconscious desires into a form of simulation one step removed from reality, all in aid of avoiding vulnerability. The story’s tension turns on his inability to refute those habits and face his true nature; instead, he doubles down—a classic strategy of denial—and goes even deeper, and risks his perceived reality shifting from mere simulation into full-blown simulacra.
Internet Culture Before the Internet
What is quite stunning about this observation is its universality. The novel was written in 1991, well before the advent of the internet, at least the pervasive iteration we know it as today. The internet, even by the end of that decade, was little more than a random splattering of plain-text pages marked with “under construction” or flashing gifs and 200x200 pixel jpeg files which took five minutes to load over a lightning-fast 56k modem (until an errant sibling picked up the phone to make a call and was greeted with data screech).
And yet the contemporaneous and no less portentous crisis of masculinity is there; the social awkwardness is there; the anxiety of inescapable internal dialogue babble is right there. It should remind us that humans have always been overly introspective, and the impulse to delusions of fucking grandeur when it comes to our assumptions about how we are externally perceived are not modern but ancient. Most of the time, other people aren’t thinking about us at all: they’re thinking about themselves. That’s another point both book and film make quite well.
Bateman’s engagement with women in particular, even Joan, screams at the top of its lungs that he probably isn’t even really a “psycho” at all. He is an entitled scion given everything he might materially want, and tenure to behave as he pleases without consequence. Ergo, his behaviour is more a commentary on the nature of male neuroticism and insecurity (and what kind of personality is forged when human beings are allowed to possess truly extraordinary wealth), than any particular form of psychosis. Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, as Salvor Hardin reminds us in Asimov’s Foundation, suggesting that Bateman is egregiously bungling rather than actually psychopathic.
After he calls Dorsia and pretends he has a reservation, this is where his mind wanders:
I hang up too, and with a smile that tries its best to express pleasure at her choice, I find myself fighting for breath, every muscle tensed sharply. Jean is wearing a wool jersey and flannel dress by Calvin Klein, an alligator belt with a silver buckle by Barry Kieselstein Cord, silver earrings and clear stockings also by Calvin Klein. She stands there in front of the desk, confused.
Ahh, yes. A true master of the universe at work. Let’s see him neg her to overcompensate for his stupidity and follow that up with more deflection as he bullshits to himself as much as he does to Jean:
“Yes?” I ask, walking over to the coatrack. “You’re dressed… okay.”
She pauses. “You didn’t give them a name,” she says softly.
I think about this while putting on my Armani jacket and while reknotting my Armani silk tie, and without stammering I tell her, “They… know me.”
He is exactly what a culture of pure consumption has created him to be; he no longer sees other people or even himself as human beings but just meat in suits or dresses, defined and branded by corporate icons just as cattle would be, and to be chewed up and spat out with the same casual consumption as one might a steak. In the end, it’s just… okay. He is the ultimate consumer: able to have everything but satisfied by nothing. The rampant anxiety he suffers throughout the rambling mess of his unfulfilling life suggests things will never, ever exceed just… okay. And why, one might ask, is that?
Because the only thing Patrick Bateman really wants or needs, he cannot buy: the affection of an absent father. So, without qualm or consequence, he instead indulges every unhealthy urge and thought he has, abusing women and venerating a form of masculinity he desperately hopes will please the image he has of that fatherly love he cannot, in his actual physical reality, ever receive.
Mummy’s Boy
In the novel, when Bateman visits his mother at a place called Sandstone, with barred windows “where she is now a permanent resident”, it is inferred she is locked in a psychological ward. Patrick endures the following interaction with his mother:
“You look unhappy,” she says suddenly.
“I’m not,” I tell her with a brief sigh.
“You look unhappy,” she says more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark blinding white, again.
“Well, you do too,” I say slowly, hoping that she won’t say anything else.
It is interesting to me that his mother, like Patrick, is vain. Even sedated, she continually touches her now bright white hair. Is she self-conscious around Patrick in particular, or is she simply used to being seen, herself, as an object? A prime role-model for her son’s own understanding of women and identification with a shallow appearance-as-substance performativity. Their bland conversation revolves around gifts—items, stuff; the value of a market—and will likely result in yet more clothes that he can decorate her in. Even her own mother is like a doll to dress. To control.
He continues his banal interaction with her, noting what she is wearing, and what he paid for it, as they awkwardly discuss, in April, what they might like for Christmas. Bateman distractedly looks at his own shaking hands, and “dried blood, probably from a girl named Suki.” Then, most tellingly:
I [look] back at my hand, the specks of blood under the nail on my thumb, the photograph of my father, when he was a much younger man, on my mother’s bedside table, next to a photograph of Sean and me when we were both teenagers, wearing tuxedos, neither one of us smiling. In the photograph of my father he’s wearing a six-button double-breasted black sport coat, a white spread-collar cotton shirt, a tie, pocket square, shoes, all by Brooks Brothers. He’s standing next to one of the topiary animals a long time ago at his father’s estate in Connecticut and there’s something the matter with his eyes.
From the two photos we can clearly infer he is from old money; if his father, as a younger man, is standing “at his father’s estate” then the Bateman wealth is at least three generations old. One can imagine the outrageous comfort, entitlement, status, and (we shouldn’t forget) expectation which were all likely gifted in that singular package we call “upbringing”.
The inference here is that both Bateman boys were miserable; even in the trappings of luxury and wealth, they are both sullen. Their father, in his photo bedecked in Brooks Brothers finery, clearly set the tone for the consumerist attitudes of external status display—and through it, validation—which they would carry with them in life. At what cost, such wealth and prestige? Is growing up with money really worth such existential misery, and the attendant need to become self-obsessed to the point of ridicule (none of these people take each other seriously), simply to maintain a pathetic facade of status when it does nothing to feed one’s soul?
Patrick Bateman’s price is particularly steep. Either he is in fact a psychopath and a serial killer, shielded by the incompetence of his peers and all the privileges granted by the circumstances of his birth, or he is an extremely damaged human being with wild fantasies beyond his ability to enact, but which have overtaken his very conception of reality.
“I’m not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her,” he says about his mother when he visits her. This sense of obligation, or perhaps guilt, which remains emotionally unreconciled for him, is very likely the specific driver of his chosen outlet: rage, in the form of the violent dissection and beheading of women—breaking them into manageable parts. This, in lieu of the harm he cannot express against the mother which he still remains obligated to for reasons outside of his control. Those reasons, which we are not privy to, are irrelevant anyway. What is it again that he is enacting in his expressions of dominance? Oh yeah, control. Over women. Because he has no control over his relationship with his mother.
And his father? Dead, years ago. So that ship has sailed. Another thing that Patrick cannot control. So, to summarise: Patrick Bateman is moving through his life utterly terrified, and is desperate to prove to everyone and everything, above all himself, that he is not. He could have turned inward—perhaps to drug abuse or self harm like his brother Sean does—but his entitlement and lack of humility drove him to express his insecurity outward, into fantasy and the harm of others. By making others feel terrified and vulnerable he is attempting to cover the exact same feeling within himself in order to perpetuate his self-denial.
Screams for help, and Screams of women
That Bateman spends the film essentially crying for help—he repeatedly lets his “real” feelings slip through his facade, and engages across the span of the story in ever more extreme behaviour even though he suspects he cannot actually get away with it. In the end, he even calls his lawyer—the closest thing one of these gilded but utterly isolated people have to a spiritual guide—to “confess” his crimes.
I particularly enjoy the scene in the film where Bateman bumps into his lawyer, who thinks his confession is a joke. He calls it “hilarious”, but as Bateman continues—in his desperation to be seen and heard as he actually is—to insist that he is in fact guilty and has done all of these horrendous things, the lawyer gets sick of it and becomes irritated instead. Not for a second does he think to ask “are you okay”, or “do you need help”, but tells him to shut up.
Ironically, the same careless and idiotic aura of intellectual vapidity which protected him—which also made Paul Allen think he was Marcus Halberstram, or any number of other identity misalignments—meant his own lawyer has also mistaken him for someone else even though he clearly recognised him in person to some degree. It was precisely his admission as Bateman—who the lawyer calls “such a dork”—which further shielded him from any real repercussion. And yet, in that same moment he is both freed of any material responsibility for his actions—real or imagined—and yet also imprisoned by the madness of the society he lives in. Is Patrick Bateman actually insane? Almost certainly.
But is the narrator even Bateman? Could he be Paul Allen perhaps, overcommitting to adopting Bateman’s persona? Or someone else entirely, groping with various identities so shallow that they can be replaced as easily as clothing? Both film and novel are full of these cookie-cutter blokes engaging in endless and yet strangely understandable misidentification.
Yet, in my view, it is to what degree the society around him is also insane which is the real question being asked here.
It’s one thing for Bateman to have a breakdown, and collapse crying into a telephone to make an impassioned confession to his lawyer. It’s quite another for that same lawyer and in fact the entire world around him to simply ignore all that has happened and pretend that nothing has changed. Not least because it might risk upsetting the precious status quo which enables their perch at the top of the pile. Functionally nothing at all changes. And that’s how the world of power and wealth works; it wants nothing to change, unless it is driving that change from within in response to threats from without.
Bateman is an outlier, an unfortunate casualty of this culture of excess no more or less important than the homeless guy he probably really did kill (and got away with not because of his skill or wealth per se but simply because homeless people are among the most overlooked and ignored members of any society). More gross incompetence and self-indulgence than psychopathy, with a nice slice of luck and structural protection to see him through.
Descent
Whether the murders that Patrick Bateman commits are real or imagined are largely beside the point. His degeneration is what we are actually seeing. He either imagines killing or does in fact murder people, and we cannot know for sure which is “true”. Whether he is either doing it or fantasising about it should be equally horrifying. Does he kill Paul Allen with an axe in his living room? Maybe. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter because Patrick Bateman no longer registers reality as it is experienced by a healthy human being. Nor do any of these “alpha” males, the clone-like vice-presidents all wearing the same suits and watches with practically indistinguishable business cards and haircuts.
The point of all of this is to show what happens to the nature of a human being who is drowning in a sea of excess with an almost unlimited degree of privilege and without an iota of real accountability—all due not to any personal quality but simply because of a cluster of arbitrary numbers somewhere—and without so much as a single boundary or form of restraint with which to keep their screaming ego in tact.
“Patrick Bateman”, whoever or whatever that is, does not exist simply as a character, but a symbol of the excesses of capitalism. The film is set in the ‘80s precisely because at that point this kind of lifestyle was novel enough that none of its proponents had yet learned to keep a lid on it, and in fact actively bragged about how much they “worked” and earned. While multi-millionaires and billionaires still live largely the same way now, they tend to shield themselves more carefully, behind exclusivity and a shroud of mystique and often throw a few symbolic shillings back to the chumps who slave away for them in the form of “philanthropy”—a conceptual fig leaf which itself could use an entire digression.
And there are lessons here more generally. How we as a culture have descended into the barriers of social media and “smart” phones in general in order to assuage anxiety and avoid vulnerability. And yet, mysteriously, Gen Z reports heretofore unimaginable levels of anxiety. Of course, it’s not mysterious at all. Could it be that the same vulnerability which Patrick Bateman fears and loathes is the very same that modern mobile communications engender, and in avoiding engaging with the actual environment, the real, we have created an entire generation now interfacing with a mere simulation of that world? And like Bateman, it seems unlikely that the habit will be kicked any time soon.
The work is too hard, the ego too fragile, the culture too enshrined, the vested (and profiteering) interests too powerful. American psychos are just the first of many.
Final Words
Some of the final lines of the film are spoken by Ronald Reagan, as he engages in some damage control in response to the exposure of the American government’s involvement in the Iran Contra “affair”, as it was called (at least it wasn’t Contragate, possibly because it sounds too much like a commercial brand). Reagan starts blathering on about the thin line between protecting the country and being found out on a lie. It interests me how close this is, both in time and tone, to Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” claim, and yet there sits Reagan, bald-faced in his deceit.
One of the characters says, “I can’t believe he can just lie like that”. A colossal irony given that it is precisely what all of the characters have been doing the entire film. They all lie not just to each other but most of all to themselves. I feel it is important that we get to hear Reagan speak in the film, too—it’s not what he says that is important but how he says it. Because that exact same stilted diction and flat tone of voice is how all of the characters in the film speak.
That particular tone is (almost) universal in its expression, and it’s one of the genius devices of the Harron’s film. Close to none of the characters speak like a normal person—one of the rare few being an unnamed character Bateman hangs around with, merely as an example of someone naturally inured to bullshit—and initially it can seem a little like a stage play, or over-acting (or just poor acting). But it is a deliberate stylistic decision. Every character in the film (except for the homeless guy Bateman murders) is in constant PR-mode, just like Reagan is.
We as an audience adjust to that tonal dissonance quite early on, as the stilted quips between characters are used to amuse us, shock us, and distract us from its wooden-ness. But the next time you watch the film, pretend that everyone is Ronald Reagan and it’ll sink in soon enough.
And what does that say?