It’s been 25 years since Mary Herron’s American Psycho slunk its way on to movie screens. Yet the film, based on a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis and starring Christian Bale as yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, has never quite managed to die.
Last fall, Lionsgate announced a new adaptation of Ellis’s novel. Online, smarmy, bloody Patrick Bateman is at the center of memes and 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,” a lone wolf figure so hyper masculine and independent that he needs no human connection and thus is superior to everyone else. In the eyes of a certain type of young man, being a sigma male is the pinnacle of aspirational masculinity.
Bateman’s a weird figure, a 26-year-old banker who spends his days competing with his friends over whose business card is cooler and who can get reservations at the hipper restaurants, and his nights torturing and murdering whoever he thinks he can get away with killing.
In the end, Bateman becomes a shell of a human being, a monster who tortures and murders and rapes out of sheer emptiness. He was invented as a dark reflection of the Reagan moment, but there’s something about Trump’s America that seems to make him particularly, worryingly compelling.
Online, paeans to Bateman generally come with a disclaimer: We’re not talking about all the murdering, just about how good Bale looks in the movie. There’s a sense, though, that Bateman’s aesthetic is part and parcel of the regressive ideology he embodies — especially when it comes to his favored Armani suits, and especially when it comes to our current cultural moment, which has seen politics and pop culture swing rightward.
“Hierarchy, tradition, aggression — male-coded values people thought had been left in the dustbin of history. All have come roaring back,” cultural analyst Sean Monahan wrote in December.
Monahan notes that Bateman is a particular “touchstone” for this trend, appealing because of his wealth and hedonism, but also because of his violence.
This subtext becomes explicit in the parts of the internet where people unironically aspire to become sigma men. There, they openly fantasize about Bateman’s violence. 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.
In this worldview, Bateman is simply fun to watch. 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 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, looks out for Trump and Ivana at every Manhattan hot spot he visits, 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, we are aspiring to make those parts of ourselves bigger.
Bateman is back, then, because Trump is back, because the 1980s are back, because the culture that birthed them is back: all that wealth, all that greed, all that empty rage.
Constance has more thoughts on this topic; to read them, check out this longer piece she wrote about Trump and American Psycho.
