Guts and Glamour: American Psycho’s Brutal Commentary on American Society and its Effects
In the past couple of decades, dramas have become one of North America’s guilty pleasure movie genres. According to a statistic published by the Statista Research Department, drama films brought in nearly 35.7 billion USD from box offices between 1995 and 2022 (Statista). For comparison, that is more than thriller/suspense and horror films brought combined, making the drama genre the third most popular movie genre in the United States and Canada. Despite this, many movies in the drama genre fall under the radar, typically leading to movies being forgotten with time. Unless the film in question becomes what is known as a cult classic, or the phenomenon in which a piece of media reaches popularity by fulfilling the interests of a specific audience in society. For instance, the now-popular drama 2000 film American Psycho, which has gained notoriety in recent years due to its popularity online.
In short, American Psycho is a drama film based off a book written by Bret Easton Ellis of the same name. The film follows a Wall Street yuppie by the name of Patrick Bateman who slowly descends into insanity, leading him to kill and dismember numerous people along his spiral, with most of his victims being prostitutes. At the end of the movie, he calls his lawyer and admits to the crimes that he has committed, but he is never arrested for what he has done throughout the film. The film ends with Patrick spacing out while the other Wall Street investors slowly talk over him while he attempts to admit to the heinous acts he has committed. Despite the movie’s grotesque and disgusting nature, the film has developed a cult following in recent years, becoming a highly suggested film online, mainly due to its ambiguous ending. Many have theorized the movie’s meaning, with theories ranging from Patrick Bateman being a master serial killer that has fooled his peers into believing that he is clinically insane to Patrick Bateman being the only sane individual in the film, as everyone else has become desensitized to murder and degradation of flesh. However, American Psycho has spawned a generation of teens and young adults that have a skewed understanding of manhood, leading to the misinterpretation of Ellis’ stern warning to the late 20th-century American culture and the normalization of Bateman’s unhealthy behaviors in the 21st century.
Before going into the context and effects of American Psycho on the newest generation of teens, it is crucial to understand what led to the rise of American Psycho in the past couple of years. As of this year, the movie is officially 23 years old, so it is shocking to see a movie that is so popular amongst teens, especially since this movie is older than most of its younger fans. Journalist for El País, Juano Villalba, argued that modern social influence led to the rise of American Psycho, specifically the idea of becoming a “sigma,” a phenomenon that focuses on mainly men becoming physically jacked, wealthy, and unrestrained by the sentimental value of relationships, sometimes almost crossing the line into misogyny territory, all of which are characteristics that Patrick Bateman possesses throughout the film (Villalba). In his article, “Why are Gen Z men obsessed with Patrick Bateman from ‘American Psycho’,” Villalba states, “Those days [before lockdown], both media and social networks continued to be dominated by the obsession with sex, beauty, money and comparing oneself with others. But the pandemic and the lockdown multiplied their effects” (Villalba). Coincidentally, yuppie culture is composed of an obsession of lust, extreme beauty standards, and becoming overwhelmingly rich without one facing the consequences of their dehumanizing behaviors. What makes this correlation even more convincing is that the revenue for American Psycho saw one of its largest jumps in its entire history during the pandemic, increasing by 553%, which lines up perfectly with the rise of sigma culture (Villalba).
While there is no definite way to prove the correlation between the two, one theory is that those who have been influenced by the production of Bret Ellis’ work might have been misled into believing that Patrick Bateman is a role model or relatable. However, Patrick Bateman is not even meant to look like a good person, and he purposely written in this way to poke fun at anti-heroes in films. Paulie Doyle, author of the i-D magazine article, “How American Psycho predicted the capitalism, masculinity and chaos of 2020,” argues that the film directors made Patrick Bateman seem “completely pathetic and socially inept” to ensure feminist groups that the movie was not glorifying Bateman’s misogynistic behavior (Doyle). Despite these guard rails that the film directors implemented in the film to avoid criticism from the public, the rise of people who obsess over Bateman’s personality and physique on social media during the Coronavirus pandemic presents a failure of disclosing Ellis’ satirical meaning behind the book and the movie. In a sense, it is extremely ironic that a piece of literature purposely criticizing the consumerist and inhumane nature of yuppie culture became the face of a movement of muscular and socially detached teenagers through a time of prolonged social isolation.
Figure 1: In the infamous business card scene, Bateman breaks into a sweat after his coworkers prefers Paul Allen's business card to his, leading him to silently rage about competition.
Even prior to the rise of American Psycho’s fame during the 2020 pandemic, Ellis’ book and movie adaptation were meant to be a warning to the future generations of a dehumanizing and degrading society. In journalist André Loiselle’s “Canadian Horror, American Bodies…”, he discusses the phenomenon of American culture and its influence on Canadian cities, explaining, “There was a perception in the 1970s and early 1980s that the city’s wholesome image was being challenged and that the monster of ugly American excess was threatening its pleasantly boring normality" (Loiselle). While the historical context of American Psycho is a topic worthy of further research, what is important to recognize is that the rise in socially poor behaviors led to a fear across North America that criminals and the evil of society would disrupt the stereotypically pleasant nature of the eighty’s urban populations. However, Ellis’ argument was that the wealthy, promiscuous, and mechanical were the “ugly American excess” that had already plagued the United States’ cities. Using yuppie culture and the aggressive and cold-blooded nature of Wall Street, Ellis forms the plot of American Psycho as a commentary against the culture that had already been instilled in the rich, populated areas of the United States.
No matter what theory one chooses to believe in regarding the film adaptation, almost every analysis of Bateman and his surroundings highlights Ellis’ commentary of materialism, dehumanization of people, and the rise of near perfect beauty standards. Those who theorize that the movie is about Patrick Bateman getting away with a real murder recognize that Bateman preys on the homeless and prostitutes for flesh. They would also recognize that Bateman purposely fits into a certain look, spending a lengthy period just to fit into the clean and well-groomed businessmen of Wall Street, such as his prolonged makeup and heavy workout routines. As a result of these hardcore routines, Bateman has the conventionally attractive body type, thus appealing to Gen Z teens who wish to achieve such a body type. Loiselle writes about this interesting characteristic of Bateman, arguing, “…[Bateman’s] body is the central metaphor of the satire, depicted at once as a temple of aesthetic perfection and as an empty shell that can be cast out and indistinguishably replaced” (Loiselle). While this scene can be interpreted as Bateman wishing to be a man of lofty standards, Ellis’ true intention was to make fun of those who focus too much on an appearance just to fit into a specific group of people and be seen as a nobody. This idea is touched upon in Lanta Davis Reighard’s “’This Confession Has Meant Nothing’: Confession in Bret Easton Ellis,” where Reighard summarizes, “That these characters generally fail to find the meaning, truth, or redemption they seek could be written off as nihilistic and hopeless, but as [scholars] David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet point out, sometimes this kind of nihilistic despair ‘provides its own self-critique’…” (Reighard). Unlike most films where the film directors and writers focus on getting their message across, Ellis and the directors of American Psycho purposely wrote the film to poke fun at the unhealthy culture of upper-class people in the late 20th-century without being overtly straightforward about how clearly inhumane such actions taken by Bateman are.
Figure 2: Photo of Patrick Bateman's physique, typically considered to be societally attractive.
While this ending may be boring or anticlimactic to some, especially for teens who may have seen Bateman as a figure worth copying, it is important to remember that Ellis’ most notable work is not to be seen as only a form of entertainment, but rather a message through the utilization of social extremes to warn the future of American teens. In an analysis written by Sylvia Söderlind, she writes, “Ellis’s early critics [tend] to overlook the distinction between author and narrator and read representation as advocacy, thus ‘totally miss[ing] the face that the novel actually criticizes the very same acts it appears to glorify’ (Messier 75)” (Söderlind 68). What is extremely worrying about this information is that there is a clear trend of people misinterpreting American Psycho as a movie promoting misogyny and corruption rather than a piece poking fun at such dehumanizing behavior. Söderlind’s paper was written back in 2008, meaning people eight years after American Psycho played in theaters were concerned that the film encouraged such outrageous behaviors. However, rather than taking the time to fully analyze the behaviors of Patrick Bateman and those around him, people argued that Ellis was confessing to his own twisted beliefs, as if American Psycho was some sort of manifesto of hating women and killing the homeless. On the other extreme, teens and young adults who began to idolize Bateman during the Coronavirus pandemic believe that American Psycho is a rulebook to success, which is just as equally terrifying as those who misinterpreted the film in 2008.
Regardless of the extreme, this phenomenon that the film spawned is a very uncommon occurrence. While movies have caused major splits in public opinion in the past, American Psycho formed a unique split where two major sides fail to learn from Ellis’ commentary altogether. As a result of this split, one could argue that Bret’s subtle approach to the urban crisis ultimately failed due to its mistake for glorification. Nonetheless, today’s generation of men have fallen for the physique, attitude, and behaviors that Bateman possesses, misunderstanding his character as the human form of success. But this could be further from the truth. In American Psycho, the audience is presented a pathetic, mentally fragile, and self-centered businessman that is bothered by the existence of competition and takes it out on those who are lower in the 1970s United States’ social hierarchy. Through his actions, Bateman showcases a man who is unable to come to terms with the fact that competition is inevitable, and he vents his anger out through an exaggeration representation of yuppie culture, resulting in the murders of those who are seen as nobodies in the cities. Thus, American Psycho, while notorious for its debatable ending, also serves as a commentary on perfectionism and social hierarchies, highlighting that even the highly appraised societies around the world struggle with the consequences that coincide with the dehumanizing consequences through fast progress.
Works Cited
de Moura Saraiva, Jefferson. “Painful Lust: Status and Consumerism in American Psycho.” Anuário de Literatura, vol. 23, no. 2, July 2018, pp. 109–19. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7917.2018v23n2p109.
Doyle, Paulie. “How American Psycho Predicted the Capitalism, Masculinity and Chaos of 2020.” i-D, Vice Media Group, 27 Apr. 2020, https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/k7em39/howamerican-psycho-predicted-the-capitalism-masculinity-and-chaos-of-2020.
Loiselle, André. “Canadian Horror, American Bodies: Corporeal Obsession and Cultural Projection in American Nightmare, American Psycho, and American Mary.” Brno Studies in English, vol. 39, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 123–36. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2013-2-8.
Reighard, Lanta Davis. “‘This Confession Has Meant Nothing’: Confession in Bret Easton Ellis.” Christian Scholar’s Review, vol. 45, no. 4, Summer 2016, pp. 311–30. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=a9h&AN=116463442&site=ehost-live&custid=s8431036.
Söderlind, Sylvia. “Branding the Body American: Violence and Self-Fashioning from ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to ‘American Psycho.’” Canadian Review of American Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2008, pp. 63–81. EBSCOhost, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=sso&db=a9h&AN=33442009&site=ehost-live&custid=s8431036.
Statista Research Department. “U.S. & Canada: Film Genres by Total Box Office Revenue 2022.” Statista, 5 Jan. 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/188658/movie-genres-innorth-america-by-box-office-revenue-since-1995/.
Villalba, Juanjo. “Why Are Gen Z Men Obsessed with Patrick Bateman from ‘American Psycho’?” EL PAÍS English, 11 Jan. 2023, https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-01-11/why-are-gen-z-men-obsessed-with-the-main-character-of-american-psycho.html.