How ‘American Psycho’ explored the difference between a psychopath and a psychotic
American Psycho, the story of Patrick Bateman, a status-obsessed investment banker turned serial killer, has been through a number of iterations since the release of Bret Easton Ellis’ shocking novel in 1991, but it remains just as relevant and discourse-generating as it was upon release. Ellis’ novel is still a bestseller, and a 2013 musical adaptation was generally well reviewed – but, let’s be honest, when we think of American Psycho, we’re all picturing the same sequence of images.
Christian Bale, fresh from the shower, stares into his bathroom mirror, exfoliating as his mask peels away, symbolically removing one face and preparing to don another. Sleek and besuited, Bale’s Patrick Bateman compares business cards and haircuts—‘Impressive. Very nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s card’—and who can forget Bateman’s infamous dance to Huey Lewis and the News before murdering his colleague? Bale’s masterful, comically dark performance, paired with the abundance of quotable dialogue in Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner’s screenplay, has ensured American Psycho’s lasting popularity, especially in the meme-driven digital age.
An essential aspect of American Psycho is its status as a timepiece. Both the book and film have often been described as “Yuppie satire”, a lens that firmly grounds the story in its Reagan-era setting. The term “Yuppie”, short for “young upwardly mobile professional”, often carried a derogatory tone and described a generation benefiting from the economic shift of the 1980s. As Western economies transitioned from manufacturing-based industries to service-based ones, financial centres like Bateman’s New York became hubs of economic prosperity. This transformation rewarded those at the forefront of the revolution, like Bateman and his peers, with enormous wealth, highlighting the era’s stark contrasts in social and economic dynamics.
The Yuppie in the popular imagination became a figure of crassness, greed, debauchery and conspicuous consumption. The superficiality of Bateman’s circle and the obsessive competitiveness that initially drives him to kill are portraits and escalations of the callous and ultimately crazy instincts that commentators at the time saw as driving the Yuppie lifestyle.
Viewing the film primarily as a satire of the 1980s, however, does not entirely explain American Psycho’s prevailing popularity and sense of relevance. One idea that could explain the film’s continuing place in the cultural zeitgeist comes from an on-set story related by director Mary Harron in an interview given to Filmmaker Magazine. “In the middle of shooting, Christian told me he had been watching this show on serial killers and what the differences between them were. He told me, ‘A psychopath is someone like Ted Bundy who kills and knows it is wrong, but can’t stop or just doesn’t want to stop. And a psychotic is someone who has no boundaries in his or her mind’. Christian thought that for most of the film, Patrick is a psychopath, but after the murder of the two girls, he becomes a psychotic. To me, that is absolutely right.”
Bale and Harron’s interpretation of the character of Patrick Bateman in this way demonstrates that, although rooted in a specific cultural context, American Psycho is, above all, an exploration of a psyche buckling under pressure. This accords with Ellis’ purported vision for his novel, which was, he claims, not intended as “a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture” but as a portrait of his own “isolation and alienation” in a “consumerist void”. Bateman’s psychopathic tendencies are enabled by the Yuppie culture that surrounds him and compels him to view other people as either threats or disposable. His psychotic collapse is triggered by an inability to separate truth from fiction.
Even if ‘the Yuppie’ no longer features prominently in the popular imagination, the psychological pressures that enable Bateman’s competitive psychopathy are very much still with us – and, if anything, the struggle to distinguish between the boundary of fact and fiction has only become more prominent in the culture. American Psycho endures because of its wit and performances but also because it is a nuanced and acute portrait of human psychology driven beyond its natural bounds.
