American Psycho was released in 2000 and is based on a novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis (1991). The film is a satire on ‘80s yuppie culture. This essay identifies various sociological and philosophical themes present in the film while utilising theoretical frameworks like post-structuralism, Marxism and feminism to analyse the film.
Plot Summary
Set in 1987, American Psycho opens with our narrator, Patrick Bateman, doing his daily rituals—skincare and otherwise—as well as explaining his relationships with several other characters in the film. We go over his contentious relationship with his colleagues as well as his distaste for his fiance, Evelyn Williams.
In a business meeting, Patrick and several of his “friends” show off their business cards, leaving Patrick enraged at the supposed inferiority of his own. At the same, he meets Paul Allen, a fellow worker who mistakes him to be Marcus Halberstram instead. Later that night he murders a homeless man and his dog as a way of venting out his frustration.
At a Christmas party organized by his fiance he is invited by Paul Allen to go out for lunch, to which he readily agrees. During lunch, Paul and Patrick discuss several topics, including their colleagues, upon which Allen remarks on his disgust for Bateman, still unaware that he is not dining with Marcus Halberstram. After getting Paul Allen drunk and luring him to his apartment, Patrick brutally murders his rival and then disposes of the body. Going to Paul Allen’s home, he clears out some clothes and leaves a voicemail pretending to be Paul Allen, saying that he has left for London on a business trip.
Some time later, Patrick is visited by private investigator Donald Kimball, who interviews him regarding the disappearance of Paul Allen. He feigns ignorance and then, later, in the evening, takes two prostitutes home whom he has sex with and then tortures before letting them go. Bateman's colleague Luis Carruthers reveals a new business card, so Bateman tries to strangle him in the restroom of an expensive restaurant. Carruthers mistakes the attempt for a sexual advance and declares his love for Bateman, who panics and flees. Kimball conducts a second interview with Bateman, revealing that a colleague of Bateman claims to have spotted Allen in London, calling the entire investigation into question. After murdering a model, Bateman invites his secretary Jean to dinner, suggesting that she meet him at his apartment for drinks. Bateman plans to kill her with a nail gun but desists after he receives a message from Evelyn on his answering machine.
An agonized Bateman meets Kimball for lunch. Kimball reveals that a colleague of Bateman claims to have had dinner with him, cementing his alibi. Bateman brings Christie, one of the prostitutes, to Allen's apartment, where he drugs his acquaintance Elizabeth before having sex with her and Christie. After Bateman kills Elizabeth, Christie runs, discovering multiple female corpses as she searches for an exit. Bateman chases her and then kills her. Afterwards, Bateman breaks off his engagement with Evelyn.
As Bateman uses an ATM, he sees a cat. The ATM displays the text "FEED ME A STRAY CAT", so he prepares to shoot the cat. When a woman confronts him, he instead shoots her. A police chase ensues, but Bateman kills the officers and blows up a police car. Bateman kills two more people before hiding in his office. He calls his lawyer, Harold Carnes, and frantically leaves a confession.
The following morning, Bateman visits Allen's apartment to clean up the remains but finds it vacant and for sale. The realtor tells him that the apartment does not belong to Allen before ordering him to leave. Bateman sees Carnes and mentions the phone message. Carnes mistakes Bateman for another colleague and laughs off the confession as a joke. Bateman clarifies who he is and again confesses the murders, but Carnes says his claims are impossible since he recently had dinner with Allen in London. A confused Bateman returns to his friends; they muse whether Ronald Reagan is a harmless old man or hidden psychopath before discussing their dinner reservations. Bateman, unsure if his crimes were real or imaginary, realizes he will never receive the punishment he desires.
Analysis
American Psycho’s world represents our postmodern capitalist society quite precisely, with the film’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, being the embodiment of the average postmodern subject. He constantly tries to fit in and establish a unique identity of his own among others around him, which he attempts by listing all the commodities he owns. Although a lot of it is left out in the film adaptation, the original novel takes it to an extreme level, with multiple pages full of Bateman simply listing all the different kinds of products that he owns.
The basic social phenomenon taking place here is what Marx would call “commodity fetishism”, the process that assigns commodities an inherent value, abstracted from all other social processes. People directly equate value with commodities instead of seeing the value of a commodity as a result of the labor put into making it. Commodities are thought to have some mystical properties trapped within them. In postmodernity, this process is taken to its extreme by the dominance of sign-value. In classical Marxian economics, a commodity gains value from the labor put into it; this value then manifests itself into exchange-value (the ratios in which commodities can be exchanged) and use-value (the utility of a commodity). The theorist Jean Baudrillard, however, introduced a third kind of value, which he observed in the rising consumer culture of the late twentieth century: sign-value. This is the value commodities gain by using different signifiers (signs) to differentiate themselves from other commodities. The typical example of such a signifier is a brand logo. It doesn’t matter if the material component (the amount of labor put into making them, the color, the fabric, etc.) of two commodities is exactly the same, they can still hold different values if one of them has a logo that signifies prestige. This is one of the many contradictions of postmodern capitalism: although all commodities of a particular kind are infected with sameness and monotony (materially), they still present themselves in a hierarchy by just using signs that are not materially real.
The rule of signs/signifiers is what characterizes the postmodern condition, something strikingly visible in the world of American Psycho. Bateman, like the average postmodern subject, tries to differentiate himself from others by simply owning and consuming different objects (commodities), but it is in this very process of irrational consumption that Bateman loses all of his inner identity, his authentic self.
With no real inner content, he becomes just one sign among others. In the film as well as the novel, characters repeatedly get mixed up; people refer to each other by the wrong names as they lose their identities.
Bateman himself describes this in the film as follows:
“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 you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.”
The process of commodification is taken to its logical conclusion in American Psycho. Everything and anything is a token to be bartered and staked. In a dinner conversation, when his colleague Timothy mentions the genocide in Sri Lanka, Bateman one-ups him by going on a spiel about all that’s wrong with the world—the arms race, apartheid, terrorism, world hunger, and so much more. Yet he actually cares about none of these issues; they only exist for now and they only exist to let Bateman feel superior to everyone by flaunting his intellect. His later acts of cannibalism can also be seen as a metaphor for consumption. He has aligned himself so closely to yuppie consumerist culture that not only has he lost sense of himself he has lost sense of what can and cannot be a commodity.
Other than the dominance of signs and the loss of the authentic self, American Psycho represents another characteristic of postmodernity: hyperreality, another Baudrillardian concept. Hyperreality is a condition where the difference between simulations of reality and reality itself starts to fade away—the representation of reality starts to matter more than reality. Patrick Bateman is a violent psychopath who tortures and murders people. Nothing could be more real than the bodies that he exerts violence upon, and yet all of this seems to have no effect on his daily social life; the way he (re)presents himself is what is seen as real.
There are various examples of this in the film. After killing one of his colleagues, Paul Allen, he leaves a fake voice message on his phone saying that he went to London, and this becomes enough for other characters to claim that they actually spotted Paul Allen in London.
In another scene, he returns to Allen’s house where he had left several corpses, but the corpses are gone with the house being renovated. Apart from being an example of hyperreality, this scene can also be viewed from a classical Marxist perspective—Bateman is a rich white man; thus, none of his crimes have any value for the law, and he is able to get away with everything he did.
Patrick, who is practically immune from being held accountable for his actions, can be seen as a prime example of the type of approach and nature that we have developed in ourselves and which is relevant in our current societal scenario: extremely competitive and driven by the hunger to be the best. It is evident in the scene where Patrick gets extremely anxious after seeing Paul's name card, which has a seemingly better font and shine than his own. Moreover, he proceeds to project his aggression and frustration on to another person who conspicuously happens to be a beggar and also black, making him inferior to him both racially and class wise. He stabs the beggar and, as mentioned earlier, gets away with it. American Psycho remains as joyfully timely in its parody of white male privilege now as it did then. Patrick, being at a higher position in social hierarchy, is seen indirectly justifying his approach towards the beggar by constantly blaming him for not having a job and expressing his disgust, symbolically acknowledging how we as a society equate a human's worth to their materialistic success, considering their existence to be useless if they are not contributing enough to this profit-driven society. The entire movie is in fact a critique of the hollowness of the consumerist and capitalistic money-grubbing perspectives.
The movie is also a social commentary on the sexual insecurity of men, their shallowness, and their obsession with commodities to conceal their apathy. Patrick Bateman flushes out his repressed anger born out of corporate culture by killing people, which seems more like a hobby than a necessity. All of his peers talk about being “raiders” and “killers”, but Patrick just takes it one step further. Yet like the countless times we’ve seen women forced to dress on screen by male directors, Harron (director) and Turner (co-writer) get to essay Patrick’s vanity by opening the movie with his robotic morning workout and shower routine. He is not a victim of consumerist culture; he is its perfect male product. He is not just a vessel of toxic masculinity or hegemonic masculinity—he’s the culmination of pure, unfettered masculinity. Patrick is almost in tears during one of the most famous scenes of the movie while he is dancing to his favorite Huey Lewis and the News song because nobody, especially Paul Allen, understands the depths of "Hip to be Square". “It’s a song so catchy people probably don’t listen to the lyrics,” Patrick says while turning red, “But they should, because it’s not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of friends; it’s also a personal statement about the band itself!” It is also a personal statement about Patrick Bateman himself. No one but Patrick understands the full pleasures of conformity, and if you cross that line or dilute that pleasure, you might as well have a blade shatter your forehead.
It is also interesting to trace the origins and causes of Bateman’s psychopathy. It is not something he was born with; instead, the kind of society he found himself in caused him to develop it. In the process of conforming to the social norms of the Yuppie culture, he feels so pressured that this anxiety manifests itself into the psychopathic urges Bateman faces.
Towards the end, Bateman and his colleagues are watching a speech by Ronald Reagan, and one of them specifically makes reference to Reagen’s smile being an act, a facade. This is no coincidence, as it fits very well with the film's themes. Other than the fact that Reagan was one of the major figures in neoliberalism, what better example of the postmodern condition than an actor who has become the president of a world superpower!
Baudrillard talks about Reagan in his America (1989), where he analyzes “the American smile” as a sign:
“It is also Reagan’s smile—the culmination of the self-satisfaction of the entire American nation - which is on the way to becoming the sole principle of government. An auto-prophetic smile, like all signs in advertising. Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile. Give your emptiness and indifference to others, light up your face with the zero degree of joy and pleasure, smile, smile, smile. . . Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”
During the last scenes, Patrick makes a call to his lawyer, Harold, to confess his heinous acts of brutally murdering the escort girls and his colleague, Paul Allen. Harold, in return, calls his message a prank and says that Bateman is a dork who cannot dare to commit such an act. Harold walks off flap-doodling and rubbishes Bateman’s claim that he killed Paul as he himself spotted Paul in London, demonstrating that American Psycho deals with the superficiality of postmodern society and the extreme shallowness of oneself that clouds the belief of an individual. That is very much depicted in this last scene when disgruntled Patrick spits out the fact about a society ruined by the vanity of commodity fetishism:
“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference towards it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
References
Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Marx: On Fetishism.” Purdue University, 2011, www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.html.
Marx, Karl. “Wage Labour and Capital.” Marxists Internet Archive, 1849, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/.
Kellner, Douglas. “Jean Baudrillard.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016, plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/.
Gao, Lemin. “Baudrillard’s Hyper-Reality: A Tiny Review on American Psycho and Its Postmodern Themes.” Lemin Gao Veritas, 3 June 2020, lemingaoveritas.com/2020/06/03/baudrillards-hyper-reality-a-tiny-review-on-american-psycho-and-its-postmodern-themes/.
Crow, David. “American Psycho: A Vital Satire of Fragile Masculinity.” Den of Geek, 14 Apr. 2020, www.denofgeek.com/movies/american-psycho-vital-satire-of-masculinity/. Baudrillard, Jean. America. London, Verso, 2010.
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