American Psycho has the distinction of being the last novel to cause a true moral panic. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 glimpse into the mind of Patrick Bateman, a wealthy investment banker who moonlights as a sadistic serial killer, was dropped by Simon & Schuster, its initial publisher, boycotted by the National Organization of Women, and widely panned by the press, decades after Lady Chatterley and Alexander Portnoy were accepted back into the fashionable fold. Yet 35 years after publication, Bateman lives on: a stage adaptation is currently in a sold-out run at London’s Almeida Theater, Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation starring Christian Bale has entered the horror-comedy canon, and Bateman looms in the common consciousness as memetic shorthand for blank, pitiless narcissism. No other character from the last half-century of literary fiction has so permeated the wider cultural world. Among the many memorable serial killers in the last few decades of pop culture, and the many fictional figures of Wall Street greed, Ellis’s combination of the two sticks in the mind, anticipating and reflecting all the insurgent male archetypes of the 21st century.
Upon Donald Trump’s election (and re-election), much was made of the many pages in American Psycho in which Bateman proclaims his admiration for Trump and The Art of the Deal. As the “manosphere” became an object of lurid fascination among the media class, it was often pointed out that some young men were crafting loving TikTok edits of American Psycho set to a pulsing synth soundtrack, that this obviously satirical and detestable protagonist had become a strange hero. Now, the fascination with these children of Bateman seems to have reached its apogee with the recent round of breathless thinkpieces and profiles of Clavicular, the 20-year-old “Looksmaxxer” and online streamer who hails from an internet community of men who go to extreme methods to achieve the uncanny handsomeness of Bale-as-Bateman: ingesting steroids, smoking meth to suppress the appetite, and hitting their faces with hammers to reshape their bone structure.
Looksmaxxing was always narcissistic, but it was not always nihilistically so. Early online communities were dominated by figures like Zyzz, an affable Australian bodybuilder whose credo was “We’re all gonna make it,” and the promise that through collective effort and knowledge pooling, the men in this strange brotherhood could achieve renewed self-confidence and romantic and social success. Clavicular has no such genial gym-bro energy, he is dead-eyed and affectless, oddly passive. Read descriptions of his mind-numbing regimen of chemical injections and jaw exercises and it’s easy to recall the famous morning routine scene in American Psycho, a six-page parade of ice packs, cleanser lotions, herb-mint-facial-scrubs, and 4200-RPM tooth polishers. Online commentary has been quick to point out these similarities. “Patrick Bateman is central both to looksmaxxing, and to modern meme culture and the online right-wing in general,” said the writer Aidan Walker on CBC Radio recently, “There’s this ironic celebration of just being so focused on these specific attributes [peak physical form and facial symmetry] that you become entirely antisocial.” The top comments on a video of Clavicular running over a stalker with his Cybertruck are more to the point: “Patrick Bateman in action,” they read, and “Real American phycopath here” [sic].
In both the comments section and the opinion pages, these neo-Batemans are often chided for not understanding the satirical purpose of the character. But Bateman is more than just a satire of Wall Street excess, he is an expression of a deep, almost cosmic loneliness and despair. When Bret Easton Ellis published American Psycho at age 27, he had already been famous for six years. Hastily anointed one of the voices of his generation for his doomed-youth chronicle Less Than Zero, he mixed with artists, models, and celebrities rather than writers and academics and eschewed residencies, guest lectures, and bookstore signings for the glittering world of downtown New York in the late 1980s. No American writer since F Scott Fitzgerald had so occupied the white-hot centre of society at such a young age. Yet like many before him, he found that these sensual pleasures produced a spiritual void. It was a time of “severe alienation and loneliness and self-loathing,” he told The Paris Review in 2012. “I had everything a young man could possibly want to be ‘happy’ and yet I wasn’t.” The character of Patrick Bateman came out of this milieu: the subtle status games and desperate jockeying for position, the casual cruelty and misogyny, and the dull, empty feeling that comes after a night of debauchery.
Reading American Psycho is a gruelling and deadening but strangely hypnotic experience: the feeling is in fact not dissimilar to the sick surfeit one feels after an hour of scrolling. The murder scenes, while stomach-churning, take up perhaps 40 pages of the novel. The rest is a catalogue of empty interactions: Bateman and his different-but-functionally-identical friends go to different-but-functionally-identical gourmet restaurants and nightclubs, they banter and one-up one another and try to assert dominance (as in the famous scene where they compare business cards), they court and seduce equally vapid and status-obsessed women, and despite their ostensible jobs as high-powered Wall Street investors, they are never once pictured doing any work. Every character’s outfit is described in minute detail (“Murphy is wearing a six-button double-breasted wool gabardine suit by Courrèges, a striped cotton shirt with a tab collar and a foulard-patterned silk-crepe tie, both by Hugo Boss.”) as are the dishes they eat at their trendy restaurants and the expensive audio equipment and designer furniture that adorns their apartments. Besides Bateman’s deteriorating psyche, there is very little in the way of plot. Potential obstacles, such as a detective investigating the disappearance of one of his victims, are introduced and then resolved in a throwaway sentence, and we are never quite sure what is real and what is imagined in this endless, numbing parade of luxury, taste, sex, and murder.
It’s fair to wonder why you would ever want to subject yourself to this. But as you read, a greater design and moral purpose becomes clear. Ellis puts the reader on edge by introducing the slippage of reality, starting small (Bateman’s outfits and the names of his friends and dates seem to shift within the same scene) and, by the novel’s bloody final quarter, doing away with realism entirely (the morning talk show Bateman watches religiously becomes more and more absurd, by the end of the novel it features an interview with a “surprisingly articulate and charming” Bigfoot). As the murder scenes become longer and more gruesome, Bateman’s bleak reveries become stranger and more poetic. The book’s hallucinatory imagery of blasted landscapes and sinister cities reads like The Waste Land rewritten for the Reagan era:
“… where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. […] Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …”
Yet the possibility of some sort of moral redemption is not entirely foreclosed, and some tiny part of Bateman still strives for human connection. A dreamy interlude in the Hamptons with a girlfriend is almost sweet – Bateman reads aloud from Doctor Zhivago and A Farewell to Arms (“my favourite Hemingway,” he says – this guy has a “favourite Hemingway?”), watches Audrey Hepburn movies, and goes skinny-dipping at midnight. It comes to an end as his psychosis sets in and he finds himself “roaming the beaches, digging up baby crabs and eating handfuls of sand”. He has a secretary who, alone among the book’s characters, seems to have retained her humanity, and in a late chapter where they have dinner together he nearly manages to establish some sort of emotional connection, he finds himself “almost dazzled and moved” at the thought that he “might have the capacity to accept, though not return, her love,” before the doors of his psyche slam shut again. “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” are the unsubtle first words of the novel, graffiti scrawled in “blood-red lettering” on the side of a bank. Yet the novel keeps tantalizing us with the idea that there might be some hope, somewhere.
At the end of American Psycho, one is left with a horrid, haunting feeling of loneliness, of having been confronted with some black truth at the center of the world. Upon closing the book, I was surprised to find that I recognized this feeling; it was the same one evoked by the bleak conclusions of the other great end-of-the-century artworks: Twin Peaks: The Return, 2666, The Sopranos. All of those works deal, at least in part, with the breakdown of the male authority figure and the failure to make a once-legible world cohere. The gee-whiz G-men and dogged detectives in Twin Peaks and 2666 fail to bring anyone to justice, Tony Soprano ends the series more alone and pitiful than ever, and Patrick Bateman continues to disintegrate. “There is no catharsis,” he tells the reader. “There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.” The last words of the novel employ the same environment-as-greek-chorus device as the first; they describe a sign in a bar reading “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT”.
Place American Psycho in this lineage and Bateman’s twisted appeal to the young and online begins to make more sense. As has been written about ad nauseam, young men are unmoored, falling behind, lost in their gooning and gambling with no models to follow and no promise of upward mobility. At the same time, if you’re willing to take some big risks, it’s possible to make a staggering amount of money very quickly these days, just as it was in the go-go Wall Street-era that American Psycho satirises, through cryptocurrency, sports betting, or increasingly extreme streaming stunts. External status markers – all the restaurants and luxury goods and clothing that Bateman catalogues in minute detail in the film and novel – have also become more visible and more charged with meaning since Ellis’s novel. Though looksmaxxing, like bodybuilding, eventually becomes an end in itself, it’s a logical outgrowth of a world where looks are more important than they’ve ever been, where potential romantic matches accept or reject you based on a few pictures and a clever line. The need to be seen at the clubbiest restaurants has only accelerated now that you can broadcast your meal to the world, and the bot-assisted trade in reservations goes beyond anything Bateman and his friends could have dreamed of. A 2024 New Yorker article on the world’s most coveted reservations discussed a new members-only app that allows Wall Street-types and influencers to shell out extra money for the hottest tables, provided they pass the initial screening. It calls itself Dorsia, after the fictional, mega-exclusive restaurant in American Psycho.
Unlike in Bateman’s era, there is little possibility of settling for a stable white-collar existence and a humdrum middle-class life if your moonshot plans for financial and social success don’t pan out. It’s just you out there, on your own, and so it’s easy to see the appeal of controlling what you can control – yourself – and looking to American Psycho as an example of what a thousand crunches a day and a 32-step skincare routine can get you, if you just push yourself a little bit harder. Bateman’s numbness, his confession that he can feel nothing, becomes something to be emulated, rather than abhorred. Looksmaxxers mock one another for experiencing “cortisol spikes,” moments when one party fails to keep his cool and displays annoyance, stress, embarrassment, or even arousal (“Clavicular had the CRAZIEST CORTISOL SPIKE after his 10/10 HTB Alice Rosenblum STARTED LEAKING their OFF-STREAM situation,” and so forth). Language of this sort is more playful and ironic than most of the pearl-clutching commentary around it admits, but at the core of it is a truly felt idea: to feel is to fail.
And one only has to look at the Clavicular-mania that has seized the chattering classes in the last few weeks to understand that the very forces that condemn a Batemanesque mentality in theory reward it in practice. The press, as it has always done, sells libidinal thrills under the guise of concerned reportage. Make a freakish caricature of yourself, burn every weak thought and flabby emotion out of you so all that remains is the hard, gleaming Terminator skull beneath and what does it get you? Just an income from streaming of $1.5 million a year and climbing, and splashy features in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and GQ, that’s all.
“American Psycho is a book about becoming the man you feel you have to be,” said Ellis in that Paris Review interview, “the man who is cool, slick, handsome, effortlessly moving through the world, modeling suits in Esquire, having babes on his arm. It’s about lifestyle being sold as life, a lifestyle that never seemed to include passion, creativity, curiosity, romance, pain.” 35 years later, that “lifestyle being sold as life” is more inescapable than Ellis could have predicted, we experience it not just in glossy magazines and on TV and among the crowd at the Odeon but every time we idly scroll. And at the very moment images of the fabulous life you could be living if you were just a bit hotter, wealthier and more productive became ever-present, simple stability became much more difficult to achieve. Life in America, to the young and desperate, feels less like a Norman Rockwell small town and more like a massive, sinister casino, full of flashing lights and nauseating scent and smoke, which promises a way out if you can only contort and suppress and deny yourself enough. Individualism has metastasized into isolationism. Just as there are small glimmers of humanity in American Psycho, there are other ways out of this nihilism, but they are difficult to see, and become more obscure every day as our pundits and influencers continue to predict an inevitable stratification between a few lucky winners and a doomed permanent underclass. So it shouldn’t surprise us that to many, the implicit choice on offer is clear: make yourself Patrick Bateman, at least a little bit, or become, to lift another phrase from Ellis, Less Than Zero.
[Further reading: Reading Lolita on Epstein Island]
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