M. Keith Booker
University of Arkansas
Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) was one of the most controversial novels of the early 1990s, mostly because of the graphic (but gleeful) violence seemingly committed by its deranged (but dapper) protagonist, Patrick Bateman. At the same time, the novel gradually came to be recognized as an extremely insightful satire of the ruthless and soulless materialism of Reagan-era America—and especially of the atmosphere that reigned on Wall Street during that time. Brought to theaters in April 2000 by director Mary Harron, a young Canadian feminist filmmaker, the film has also been controversial. Still, Christian Bale’s turn as Bateman has become iconic, while the film has become something of a cult favorite. It is clear that Bateman serves as the embodiment of late 1980s capitalism—and especially of the masculinist “greed is good” culture of Wall Street capitalism. Still, the capitalism of the 1980s was the beginning of today’s neoliberal order, so the film remains highly relevant today[1]. However, American Psycho can also be seen as an important critique of certain elements of the popular culture of the 1980s. This exploration of the culture of the 1980s is especially relevant today, when much of the culture of the 1980s is looked back upon with so much nostalgia[2].
Patrick Bateman, American Psycho
The very title of American Psycho suggests that Bateman is something of a representative figure, meant to critique certain tendencies in American society. We get a look at these tendencies in the opening scene, whenBateman and some of his fellow Wall Street investment bankers—including Timothy Bryce (Justin Theroux) and Craig McDermott (Josh Lucas)—seemingly compete to see who can display the most boorish, homophobic, and sexist behavior. Members of this group regard each other, not as friends, but as rivals, indicating the highly competitive ethos that is the basic texture of their world. Yet they are all very much the same. At one point, McDermott spots another of their colleagues across the restaurant, asking if that person is “Reed Robinson.” Bryce, though, declares that the person indicated is obviously Paul Allen, a man who (played by Jared Leto) is one of Bateman’s most hated rivals, though Bateman himself is sometimes mistaken for Allen (among others) in the film. Bateman, however, declares that this man is not Paul Allen. Indeed, virtually all of these men seem to have trouble distinguishing any of themselves from any of the others. After all, they are all essentially products of the greed culture of the 1980s. They end the scene by tossing in their identical American Express platinum cards to pay their portions of the $570 bill (quite a sum in the 1980s, though they seem to regard it as a modest amount) for the meals they just consumed. Such cards were a key sign of status in the 1980s, but they do not allow any of these men to distinguish themselves here—such a card is simply a minimum requirement for anyone in their milieu.
The men thus have to look elsewhere to compete, as in the slightly later scene in which they compare their fancy business cards almost as extensions of their own identities. That well-known scene is a comic one in which the vanity and pretentiousness of the men are on full display, but it becomes especially comical due to the way Bateman proudly whips out his card, confident of its superiority, and is later shocked to realize that the contest has apparently been won by the hated Allen, while Bateman has the worst and plainest card of the four men who compete. The film here includes an extra joke at the expense of the pretentious men, all of whom are so concerned about the cosmetic appearance of their cards that they have failed to proofread them properly, as they all identify themselves as Vice Presidents of “Mergers and Aquisitions” [sic]. Bateman is the only one, though, with an extra typo in the spacing of the company name, his reading “Pierce &Pierce,” while the others all read “Pierce & Pierce.”
One of the most consistent characteristics displayed by Bateman and his colleagues is their attitude toward women. To these men, women are merely objects to be acquired and enjoyed like any other consumer good. Bateman, of course, takes this attitude to a whole new level by treating women as objects upon which to visit abject violence (with a possible occasional cannibalistic turn toward literally consuming them). Bateman (pretending to be Allen) makes clear his attitude when he entertains two prostitutes in his posh Upper West Side apartment (one a street hooker and one a high-priced escort). When the three start to have sex (with Bateman videotaping the whole proceeding), he appears to be much more interested in his own body than in theirs, preening and posing for the camera, using the women merely as props. Then, as the women later sleep in the bed, Bateman gets up to grab some implements of torture. The novel gives us graphic details about the horrific things he then does to women, but the film simply cuts to the part where the women leave, battered, bloody, and somewhat stunned.
Late in the film, Bateman (still pretending to be Allen) again entertains two women—including the street hooker Christie (Cara Seymour) from that first threesome. This time, though, he hosts them in Allen’s apartment, delivering his review of the music of Whitney Houston as the sexual festivities begin. Christie recalls that first session with Bateman and attempts to escape as the mayhem begins, while Bateman, maniacally waving a chainsaw, pursues her. Still, she escapes the apartment and heads down the stairs. Bateman spots her several floors down and drops the chainsaw on her, impaling and killing her in a manner that might be inspired by his film viewing but that also seems virtually impossible to pull off in reality, raising the possibility (central to the film) that what we are seeing is Bateman’s fantasy.
One clue that much of Bateman’s violence might occurs only in his own head is that he is not violent with the two women with whom he interacts most. His fiancée, Evelyn Williams (Reese Witherspoon), spends much of the film attempting to plan their wedding, while Bateman spends his time trying to avoid the subject, claiming that he is too busy with work, though he actually seems to devote very little of his time to work, even when he is in his office. He also devotes relatively little time to Evelyn. Suitably rich and attractive, she also seems as vapid and superficial as Bateman himself. Meanwhile, Bateman doesn’t seem to have much interest in her sexually, preferring to sleep around with other women instead, including Courtney Rawlinson (Samantha Mathis), her best friend and the fiancée of Bateman’s rival Luis Carruthers (Matt Ross).
The other woman Bateman seems to regard slightly differently (in that he neither kills her nor has sex with her) is his young, starry-eyed secretary, Jean (Chloë Sevigny). Granted, there is a moment when he seems about to kill Jean with a nail gun after she finally comes to his apartment[3]. Evelyn, though, calls and leaves a message on Bateman’s answering machine at that very moment. Interrupted, Bateman sends Jean away, telling her that she needs to leave because he can’t control himself and something bad might happen if she stays. He thus seems to have a change of heart (to the extent he has a heart) and genuinely to change his mind about killing her (or fantasizing about killing her).
Patrick Bateman, Culture Critic
Bateman is not just a product of 1980s greed culture. He is also a product of the popular culture (especially music and film) of the decade. As Rischard puts it, “Bateman cannot achieve his fantasies of control or dominance without pop culture organizing his desire around the commoditized objects and ‘hardbodies’ that male yuppies code as significant acquisitions” (Rischard 2020, 439). One of the most hilarious features of the novel involves Bateman’s incredibly self-serious chapter-long reviews of various 1980s musical acts (reviews that also appear, in shortened form, in the film). Such chapters are devoted to Phil Collins and Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News, all prominent producers of 1980s pop music. Bateman’s taste might be a bit questionable (as when he prefers Collins to Bruce Springsteen), and it might be significant that he does not devote reviews to Michael Jackson or Madonna, surely the two most important pop acts of the 1980s. Still, his discussions are knowledgeable and coherent (unlike some of his discourse), if they do tend toward cliché (and even if his lofty opinion of Huey Lewis and the News seems especially eccentric). These musical reviews are also surprisingly lengthy in the novel, though they are compressed in the film and integrated into the action as Bateman relates them to several of his victims (who seem quite uninterested) as he is preparing to murder them. Here, though, the film has a significant advantage because it can actually let us hear the music on the soundtrack. Thus, in his first murder of a named character, he invites his hated rival Allen back to his apartment, then brutally murders him with a nice, shiny axe—with “Hip to Be Square,” the 1986 hit by Huey Lewis and the News, playing in the background on his upscale sound system. Hilariously, as he chops away at Allen, we can hear the lyrics “You might think I’m crazy, but I don’t even care” sounding in the background. Several aspects of the film make us wonder how much of the whole Allen narrative exists only in Bateman’s fevered imagination, which would explain how his killing can be so coordinated with the music, while also suggesting that pop music has played a key role in constituting Bateman’s American psyche.
Music also provides a clue that Bateman might have imagined his encounters with Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe), the detective who is supposedly investigating Allen’s disappearance. Kimball is certainly characterized quite oddly. He dresses very well for a private investigator, and his hair style is much like that worn by Bateman and all of the other Wall Street guys in the film. In the book, this similarity is even more clear, as it is stipulated that Kimball wears designer clothes and is about Bateman’s age—both are said to have been seven years old in 1969 (Ellis 1991, 272), while other, more precise, information in the text indicates that Bateman was born in October 1961 (270). Kimball looks a bit older than Bateman in the film because Dafoe was in his mid-forties at the time of filming, though the visual parallels between Kimball and Bateman are still clear. In the film, the possibility that Kimball might be Bateman’s projection is further emphasized by the fact that, when he first arrives in Bateman’s office, he is carrying a fancy briefcase similar to Bateman’s. On a return visit in the film (he interviews Bateman only once in the novel), Kimball pulls a CD out of that briefcase that just happens to be Fore!, the 1986 album by Huey Lewis and the News that Bateman glowingly reviews at length in the novel. Here, though, Bateman claims to be unfamiliar with this album, saying that he doesn’t really “like singers.” At a bare minimum, it seems likely that Bateman, if he has not imagined Kimball altogether, has at least misperceived the detective, remaking him in the image of the interchangeable men with whom Bateman is familiar and projecting onto him an interest in the music of Huey Lewis. This prospect, of course, also raises the possibility that one reason why all of the men in Bateman’s circle are so similar is simply that he perceives them that way because his imagination is so limited that he can’t picture them being any other way.
In Ellis’s novel, Bateman also constantly watches both films (on videotape) and television, and he at one point admits that his perception of reality is strongly colored by his film viewing (265). This motif is de-emphasized in Harron’s film, though the film does at one point feature a sequence from the novel that seems surely derived from movie-inspired fantasy, made effective because here we can actually see it. Here, Bateman goes on a rampage that includes a running gun battle with a group of New York cops, winning the battle when their cars explode in a hail of his bullets. The sequence reads like a parody of any number of cinematic action sequences, suggesting that Bateman might just be imagining it based on films he has seen. We also see some of Bateman’s film viewing in shots of pornography on his TV and in a shot of the famous final moments of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) playing in the background on television while Bateman does crunches in his apartment as part of his extensive exercise regime. Among other things, this film, along with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), were crucial inspirations for the wave of slasher films that, beginning with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), became a dominant force in American horror film in the 1980s. It is important, then, that American Psycho shows Bateman’s familiarity with these films. Set in the late 1980s, the film version of American Psycho qualifies as a sort of slasher film, though it would more accurate be see it as a critical response to the 1980s slasher cycle[4]. The same might be said for the novel, which appeared just as that initial cycle of slasher films appeared to be waning. Of course, American Psycho can be read as a parody of both horror and pornography, which happen to be the two genres that received the biggest boosts from the rise of home video during the 1980s. Not coincidentally, both genres are alsofavorites of Bateman, who spends so much of his time renting and returning videotapes that it becomes a running joke,
The satire of 1980s American culture and society in American Psycho is now particularly relevant given the tendency in recent American popular culture nostalgically to look back on the 1980s as a more innocent time of simple pleasures and bright, cheerful popular culture, dominated by films such as E.T. (1982), Ghostbusters (1984), or The Goonies (1985) and music such as Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” Yet American Psycho reminds us that the 1980s were a time of increased economic inequality and precarity and of a popular culture informed by an unprecedented amount of darkness and violence[5]. American Psycho displays much of the same kind of graphic violence that is typically found in 1980s slasher films, including an emphasis on sexually charged violence aimed at women, something that critics such as Carol Clover (1992) have identified as central to the genre.However, it gives this violence an extra twist of irony that arises largely from the hints that much (or all) of this violence might simply be occurring in Bateman’s diseased imagination. And it establishes its dialogue with the slasher genre early on: the first few seconds of the opening credits display drops of blood falling, each drop accompanied by a dramatic pluck of violin strings, while a tense hum sounds in background. This opening, especially given the title of the film, irresistibly recalls the soundscape and the famously intricate opening credits of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film that hovers in the background throughout Harron’s American Psycho, though it is not overtly mentioned at any point (beyond the apparent allusion in the title)[6].
Still, Bateman is an unusual slasher in important ways. Continuing a precedent set by Psycho and Texas Chain Saw,the settings for many of the classic slasher films of the 1980s are relatively rural: the Bates Motel is far off the beaten path, thanks to a new highway, and Leatherface and his family live in farm country. Halloween (1978)would, importantly, extend the coverage of the slasher to the suburbs, but Bateman’s activities in the ultra-urban environment of Manhattan would have still been highly unusual for the genre[7]. Meanwhile, as prototypes for the slashers of the 1980s, Norman Bates and Leatherface are lonely, marginalized outcasts, clearly unattractive to women. They are also left behind by the progress of American capitalism: Bates is the proprietor of a rundown, dying motel, Leatherface a member of a family driven into poverty by changes in the meatpacking industry. The rich and handsome Bateman, on the other hand, is by all accounts a great success in the world of business and desirable to women, perhaps more Gordan Gekko than Norman Bates.
Bateman is, in fact, centrally located within American capitalism—in terms of both geography and class. This centrality sets him starkly apart from cinematic predecessors such as Norman Bates or Leatherface—or from his closest predecessors in American fiction, such as that other murderous unreliable narrator, Jim Thompson’s Lou Ford. Indeed, Bateman is particularly reminiscent of Ford in a number of ways. Both men seem particularly to relish sexually charged murders of women: Ford even apparently began his career as an American psycho with a sexual assault committed when he was fourteen years old, just as Bateman (in the novel) claims to have raped a family maid when he was fourteen. And, as opposed to the marginality of most slasher characters, both Ford and Bateman are the central point-of-view characters in the narratives in which they appear, though these narratives are destabilized by their unreliable points of view.
Such parallels suggest a psycho-sexual sickness at the heart of American capitalist society that long predates the Reagan ’80s, though the differences between Ford and Bateman are also crucial. Ford occupies a position of some authority as a deputy sheriff, but only in a remote county in West Texas that he has never left prior to the time of the action of Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952). The wealthy, urbane, Harvard-educated Bateman, though, is very much at home in the environs of Manhattan. Though he can actually be quite awkward in certain situations, he is generally quite articulate and can at least produce an impression of intelligence and expertise. Bateman might be faking most of the time, but he seems to fake “upward,” pretending to be more intelligent and sophisticated than he is so he can “fit in” on Wall Street—as opposed to Ford, who generally pretends “downward” in order to fit in with the “yokels” in Central City, Texas.
Such differences are crucial, suggesting that, between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, the locus of the “success” to which American men are all supposed to aspire has shifted from the ordinary small town to the glitzy big city. Meanwhile, in the conformist fifties, the goal was to be “normal,” to be indistinguishable from everyone else. Yet the pressure to be like everyone else has helped to make Ford an aberrant killer (or at least to fantasize about being one). Bateman, on the other hand, has been driven by the pressures of the ultra-competitive 1980s to try to be better than everyone else (causing him, ironically, to be indistinguishable from similarly driven peers). That both Ford and Bateman are nevertheless psychotic killers (or at least imagine themselves to be) suggests that both narratives of success (and perhaps all narratives of success) are seriously flawed, making everyone at least feel like they might be pathological.
Patrick Bateman as Unreliable Narrator
In some ways, the most obvious parallel between Bateman and Ford has to do with their unreliability as point-of-view characters: both have so much trouble separating their own fantasies from reality that readers of the novels in which they appear or viewers of the films in which they appear[8] can never quite trust that the events we see on the page or the screen are actually happening within the worlds of the fictions. For one thing, neither can be trusted, as a narrator, to tell the truth; for another, it is entirely possible that they themselves don’t know the truth because they have completely lost touch with reality. This point, of course, is harder to get across in the film versions, where we can actually see many of the things that are talked about in the novel, as when we are actually shown violent murders (though the violence is considerably curbed in comparison with the novels).
Bateman gives us a nmber of specific reasons to doubt his reliability as an information source. Early in the film version of American Psycho, Bateman returns home to his ultra-clean, modern, luxury apartment and is shown going through some of his extensive ablutions, including a discourse of male skin-care products that gives us a hint at his narcissistic emphasis on appearances. Then he goes beyond hinting to deliver a key assessment of himself: “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And, though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe even you can sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.”
With this speech (a modified version of a longer monologue he delivers near the end of the novel), the film provides an early indication of how we should regard Bateman’s reliability as a narrator or point-of-view character. A quick cut then to an establishing shot of Manhattan’s skyline, including a brief shot of the World Trade Towers, reminds us of the thoroughly urban nature of Bateman’s surroundings[9]. A similar speech that also appears relatively late in the novel is edited down and included quite early in the film as Bateman (in the midst of receiving spa treatments) delivers a voiceover in which he declares, “I have all of the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but not a single clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.” He then goes on to complain that his “blood lust” (comparable to Ford’s “sickness”) seems to be getting stronger. Narrators stabilize stories by providing a reliable central perspective from which events can be viewed But, if Bateman simply “isn’t there,” then there is no such reliable perspective. We simply cannot be certain whether Bateman actually commits the various horrific crimes he claims to commit, whether he is simply fantasizing about his murders, or whether he literally hallucinates the murders. And, of course, it could be some mixture of all three.
Still, it seems fairly clear that Bateman does not, within the world of the narrative, commit most of the crimes that he claims to have committed, though this aspect seems to be clearer in the novel than in the film. Among other things, some of the most anatomically unlikely murders in the novel are excised from the film, which tends to minimize the depiction of violence, especially against women. In addition, others seem amazingly unaware of Bateman’s murderous activities. Thus, in the film, we see the bloody axe murder of Allen, then follow Bateman as he drags the body (in an overnight bag) out of the building, past the oblivious doorman in the lobby, and then past Carruthers, who happens by on the street, expressing admiration for the overnight bag. Bateman then stuffs the body in the trunk of a cab and transports it somewhere that is not shown in the film, causing no consternation in the cab driver.
Bateman eventually goes to Allen’s own apartment, where he is chagrined to discover that Allen’s apartment is obviously more expensive than his own. He then takes some of Allen’s things to make it look as if Allen had gone on a trip, leaving a message on Allen’s answering machine, in which he imitates Allen’s voice to let callers know that Allen is away in London. Near the end of the film, meanwhile, Bateman returns to Allen’s apartment, where we have been led to believe he has some bodies stored in a closet. There, he discovers no bodies; in fact, the apartment is vacant, and a realtor who is showing it assures him that the apartment does not belong to Allen. Soon afterward, Bateman encounters his own attorney, Harold Carnes (Stephen Bogaert), who apparently mistakes him for someone named “Davis” and says the confession he phoned in as Bateman was hilarious, but unbelievable because Bateman is too big of a spineless dork to murder anyone. He also assures him that he has recently had dinner in London with Allen, who is alive and well. (In the novel, Kimball also travels to London and meets with Allen, thus verifying Carnes’ story).
The self-undermining narratives of American Psycho and The Killer Inside Me have the mimetic function of capturing Bateman’s and Ford’s own uncertain grasps on reality: we can’t tell what is really going on, but neither can they. But this interpretive uncertainty also has a larger function. In Ford’s case, it tends to undercut the confident narratives of national power and righteousness that were so crucial to the American rhetoric of the peak Cold War years. In Bateman’s case, it undercuts the “greed is good” narrative of 1980s cutthroat capitalism. In both cases, our inability to map the events of the text accurately parallels the overall failure in cognitive mapping that is a crucial component of the global system of late capitalism as famously characterized by Fredric Jameson (1991), a system that was just taking shape at the time Thompson was writing The Killer Inside Me and that was just moving into its new neoliberal form when Ellis was writing American Psycho.
If the unreliable nature of Bateman’s narration calls into question the truth of anything he tells us, then that might just be the nature of the world in which he lives. It is thus entirely appropriate that American Psycho ends with a scene in which Bateman is seated in a restaurant with Bryce, Van Patten, and McDermott. On the television, we see Ronald Reagan delivering a speech (from August 1987) about the Iran-Contra affair, in which Reagan, despite his repeated denials, was widely suspected of being fully aware of a sequence of illegal arms sales deals made by the U.S. government to Iran in order to generate funds to provide illegal aid to the murderous right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Bryce reacts angrily to Reagan’s speech, asking “How can he lie like that?” Bryce notes that Reagan “presents himself as this harmless old codger, but inside …” Bateman seemingly completely unhinged by this point, thinks to himself, “Inside doesn’t matter.” Asked his opinion, Bateman simply says, “Whatever.” In this society, pervaded by lies, the truth is irrelevant and all that matters is appearance. The film then ends with a final interior monologue in which Bateman declares the meaninglessness of his earlier confession. He has now concluded that, in the world in which he lives, everything is meaningless. A final closeup shot of his eyes shows the emptiness within.
References
Booker, M. Keith. “Fast Times at Buckley High: The Assault on 1980s Nostalgia in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards.” Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 13, no. 1 (2025): 1–19.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Updated Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992.
D’Hont, Coco. “‘I Like to Dissect Girls’: Mary Harron’s American Psycho as Gendered Metafiction.” In ReFocus: The Films of Mary Harron, edited by Kyle Barrett, 74–88. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. Vintage-Random House, 1991.
Graham, Matt. “Twenty-First Century Postmodernism: The Legacy of American Psycho in the Era of Donald Trump.” The Journal of American Culture 44, no. 3 (September 2021): 223–36.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Rischard, Mattius. “Masculine Capital / Yuppie Patriarchy: Visualizing the Noir Commodity in American Psycho.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 62, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 437–462.
Robinson, David. “The Unattainable Narrative: Identity, Consumerism and the Slasher Film in Mary Harron’s American Psycho.” Cineaction 68 (2006): 26–35.
Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me. 1952. In Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s, edited by Robert Polito, 1–160. Library of America, 1997.
Notes
[1] See Graham (2021) for a discussion of the ongoing political relevance of both the novel and the film of American Psycho. After all, Donald Trump (Bateman’s hero in the novel) is very much a creature of the 1980s.
[2] For an alternative view, see d’Hont (2021) for a reading of Harron’s film as a response to Ellis’s novel that is filtered through the equation of violence with masculinity in the films of the 1990s, such as the early films of Quentin Tarantino.
[3] The nail gun we see is a pneumatic model but has no air hose attached, suggesting that Bateman might merely be imagining this moment.
[4] Robinson argues that American Psycho goes beyond overly meta-slasher films such as the Scream franchise because of the way its self-conscious dialogue with the slasher genre becomes a fundamental exploration of the way “narratives work” in our consumerist culture (Robinson 2006, 30).
[5] For a reading of Ellis’s 2023 novel The Shards as a critique of the 1980s nostalgia craze that was written within that craze, see Booker (2025).
[6] Psycho is mentioned in the novel, where Bateman complains that the blood in the famous shower scene “looked fake” (108).
[7] Of course, there were urban slasher films in the 1980s, but films such as Dennis Donnely’s The Toolbox Murders (1978) and William Lustig’s Maniac (1980)—the former of which is actually mentioned in Ellis’s novel—remained exceptions and failed effectively to take advantage of the satirical possibilities of their urban settings in the way that American Psycho does. Perhaps the most direct predecessor to American Psycho in terms of its urban setting would not be a slasher proper, but Lucio Fulci’s 1982 film The New York Ripper, an example of the Italian giallo film, a genre that has much in common with the slasher but also includes more elements from conventional crime films.
[8] The Killer Inside Me was adapted to film in 1976 and (more faithfully) in 2010.
[9] Despite such brief establishing shots, American Psycho, like many “New York” films, was mostly shot in Toronto. For example, the “Wall Street” building in which Bateman’s office is located is actually theToronto-Dominion Bank Tower.