Satire is often inextricably tied to the era it exists in. Heathers is so ‘80s, its sick and twisted take on John Hughes movies could only work then. Idiocracy is supposedly set in the future, but everything in it drips with mid-2000s iconography. But right on the verge of the millennium, one movie tackled the then-common “yuppie” stereotype with a pitch-perfect satire that feels as cold and sterile as its main character, while also being intensely watchable: American Psycho.
Now streaming on Hulu (or on Disney+ with a Hulu add-on), director Mary Harron’s razor-sharp thriller is so timeless, even 25 years later, it hits just as hard.
American Psycho, based on the book of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, begins as a portrait of Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a 27-year-old ambitious young professional living it up in the ‘80s with a strict self-care routine and many thoughts about business cards. What he doesn’t have are feelings. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory,” he says in an intimate voiceover. “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.”
So where is he? The few times we see Bateman truly passionate is when he indulges in a guilty pleasure: murder. However, he’s still just as calculating in that activity, donning a now-iconic plastic raincoat and nonchalantly delivering monologues about pop music while picking up an axe.
Bateman is an unflinching — if exaggerated — character study of a specific kind of guy, the sort of man who nowadays would post “rise and grind” on his Instagram story and probably get just a little too into crypto. Much like the Joker, Patrick Bateman has become an unironic symbol for “sigma male” memes, idolized and worshipped by men as the perfect example of streamlined, effective detachment.
Patrick Bateman’s male detachment ironically made him fodder for multiple memes.
Director Mary Harron seems to be aware of this and leans into it, portraying Bateman as the perfect anti-hero it’s hard to root against, even as he lures his unsuspecting victims to his spotless, minimalist apartment. You can draw a straight line between this and other classic anti-hero stories like Breaking Bad, or even the more recent Sweetpea.
Patrick’s approach to his murderous hobby is so confident and matter-of-fact that by the time he devolves into a chainsaw-wielding maniac, it’s still entirely believable. Patrick Bateman exists, as he says, as an abstraction, the harsh reality of optimizing yourself to the point where the repression accumulates a body count. Whether or not his crimes are real or imaginary doesn’t matter: it’s a fable against capitalism, consumerism, and toxic masculinity, a story that’s unfortunately as old as storytelling itself.
Satire is about bringing an issue to its foregone conclusion, and for American Psycho, that conclusion is realizing that in a world this rigged, there’s no way to self-sabotage if you’re on top. A quarter-century later, it feels like reality is making this message feel less and less outrageous. That’s probably why a remake directed by Luca Guadagnino with Austin Butler as Bateman is rumored to be in the works (Bret Easton Ellis thinks it’s fake, however.) Even if it doesn’t happen, this movie will probably be just as timely in 2050 as it was in 2000 — for better or for worse.
