American Psycho

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0:00:04.4 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres. Joining me to count down the top 10 greatest Huey Lewis and The News albums and dive deep into the twisted mind of Patrick Bateman, American Psycho, are senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Julian Sanchez…

0:00:20.2 Julian Sanchez: Landry, hey, let’s get lunch.

0:00:22.9 Landry Ayres: And associate editor at Reason, Liz Wolfe.

0:00:24.8 Liz Wolfe: Hey, thanks for having me.

0:00:27.3 Landry Ayres: So glad to have you both here, especially to talk about a film that is as kind of complex and odd as American Psycho, specifically when you think about where it came from as a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, and then what it became as a film and really what it’s become after that in its legacy in internet culture. So the book itself was really called out as being highly misogynistic and hyper-​violent, and there were calls for boycotts of it from all of these people, and it was… And it is, it’s a very graphic book in and of itself, I don’t think you can deny that. It’s even said that apparently when they were making the movie and there was talk of Leonardo DiCaprio getting to be cast as Patrick Bateman, that Gloria Steinem herself had to kind of help convince him that it would ruin his image with his younger female fans and tried to convince him not to take it, but eventually they land on Christian Bale. And it’s really interesting because both the script was written and adapted and it was directed by women as well, and it really takes on a new form in the visual medium and becomes I think a lot more about a pointed depiction of masculinity at a certain point in time. Is this movie a feminist film in that way? Yes or no, and why? What’s your take on that?

0:02:03.8 Liz Wolfe: I mean, the thing that I keep coming back to is not the degree to which it is or is not a feminist film, because to some degree, I like the restraint that the director exercised in terms of understanding which pieces to excise from the book and use and how to use them in a way that is still a decent and pleasant-​ish viewing experience. I think had she had more fidelity to the book, it would have been terribly graphic, terribly uncomfortable to watch. There would have been… It would have sort of seeped into the obvious explicit horror category, you might have lost some of the satirical elements, so I appreciate the restraint to some degree. But the thing I keep coming back to is how interesting it is to consider this sort of metro sexual ultra vain dude-​scaping, manscaping type attitude, because one of the things that I think people sometimes talk about nowadays is they sort of pretend we’re in a new fresh wave of Tiktok-​fied dude hair, dudes caring a lot about their personal care and hygiene routines, men are being more freely vain, but we did have this whole wave in the ’80s, so this isn’t exactly a thing that’s limited to 2022 or 2021, or something that happened with the advent of social media, this is something that really existed 40-​ish years ago, and so I really like the degree to which American Psycho brings you back to that time and reminds a modern day viewer that this is not a new or recent phenomenon.

0:03:39.4 Julian Sanchez: So I’d say… Well, I’ll obviously just second that. I re-​read the book for the first time in probably 20 years in preparation for the podcast, and I had… I guess we blotted out, the movie kinda keeps itself firmly in the realm of black comedy by keeping most of Bateman’s actual killing sort of off-​screen, you see the blood splash on his face, or the… From a distance, a body with a chainsaw in it, but it managed to still play, for the most part, darkly funny. The book has these really lengthy nauseating descriptions of graphic sexual violence that just drag on past the point anyone could conceivably find it funny that I wouldn’t be extremely worried about. So psychologically it’s… I don’t think it could have been filmed or released if they’d actually included that. It makes the human centipede look like a Disney film, or would if they’d filmed that. But yeah, to Liz’s point, I think one of the interesting things, again, this maybe comes a little bit more in the book, is… You know what I mean? The book, you really are a third of the way through before you actually get scenes where Bateman is actually killing anyone.

0:04:58.2 Julian Sanchez: There are kind of increasing references to maybe he’s got these impulses, but for a very long stretch of it, it is him kind of tediously, meticulously describing every article of clothing that everyone’s wearing and every appliance and all the… Exactly what brand of moisturiser he uses and where the tie is from and where the pocket square is from, and this is coupled with, again, a little more in the book, Bateman and his whole social circle’s incredibly intense homophobia. You get a little bit of this in the movie, they use the F… Not that F-​word, the homophobic slur F-​word, a fair amount, you… Kept a lot more in the book along with racial slurs. And there’s interesting tension there, you’ve got this stereotypically, ’80s stereotypically gay hyper-​interest in the sartorial concerns and the fine points of dressing elegantly and correctly and working out and…

0:06:11.6 Julian Sanchez: You get this in the film, right? Kind of Bateman’s narcissistic obsession with his own Adonis-​like physical perfection, and then almost maybe as a kind of reaction to that really intense homophobia, you get this in the film, a little bit, he reacts with obvious kind of horror when Luis Carruthers sort of mistakes his incipient strangling as a sexual overture, and obviously Bateman is kinda disgusted and revolts against that, that gets stretched out a lot more in the book, the… And there’s a weird tension there because he’s doing something with that, because, of course, he’s overtly reacting in this kind of revolted and hostile way. But Carruthers doesn’t actually get killed in the book as I recall, he in fact… I mean, I think it’s the fact that violence is eroticized for Bateman, the fact that… Again, much more clearly in the book, that he is sexually aroused by the violence he inflicts, creates this situation where he backs off in an attempt to kill Carruthers precisely because I think he’s anxious about recognizing what it might mean for him to experience sort of the arousal of that murder in a context where in some sense the victim is a man who is attracted to him. So that’s something that’s… It’s a 90-​minute movie, so there’s just a lot of that doesn’t make it in in the same level of detail.

0:07:56.7 Liz Wolfe: So this is I think actually a huge weakness of the movie, the fact that the connection between the eroticism he feels from violence, I don’t get that in the movie to nearly the degree that I would have expected. Do you guys get that? To some degree, the thing that they do a really good job underscoring and highlighting is that he is so… That Bateman is so detached from getting any sort of sexual gratification from women, you know, he obviously sees them as objects, he has porn on in the background while he’s doing routine chores and errands and stuff like that. Making a dinner reservation, there’s just porn playing the way that I would maybe put on a cooking show or something like that or a beauty tutorial. But for him, it’s porn. But I don’t get that connection in the movie, between eroticism and violence as it’s sort of portrayed in Bateman’s mind. Do you get that in the movie?

0:08:49.7 Landry Ayres: I really don’t. I’m not sure where it gets… To me, what’s interesting is he talks about these compulsions that are constantly sort of creating this inhuman need for him to enact violence on all of these people. And you sort of get the idea that… And he says, “I’ve confessed to killing 20 people,” and this might have happened before, and he’s had these compulsions for a long time, but only recently are they being forced out into his real life. But you kind of get the idea that he’s well planned enough that he’s probably enacted this type of thing before, but the release he does get from it becomes less and less over time.

0:09:36.0 Landry Ayres: But I don’t know if that comes from the act itself not functioning in the same way or if it’s that he gets sloppy in the way that he does it and he gets closer and closer to getting caught doing it by someone like Willem Dafoe’s character, and that is… He comes to this fear fueled confession when he finally calls his lawyer on the phone after he’s gone on this crazy killing spree out of nowhere, and he begins to break down emotionally, and it’s one of the few times in the film beyond just rage, that we’re getting a lot of emoting from this character. And you wonder for a brief moment where this is coming from and what it’s going to? And then you realize that it’s simply a fear of getting caught, not a fear of being inhuman and realizing any sort of thing about himself. He doesn’t undergo a significant internal change at that moment, there’s no like…

0:10:44.1 Julian Sanchez: There is no catharsis. There’s nothing to learn from the telling.

0:10:47.8 Landry Ayres: Exactly. There’s no catharsis there, it’s only, “I’m about to get caught,” and the guilt says, “That is where it comes from.” So the sort of lack of any type of gratification from this… It’s true, it’s sort of complicated, but maybe that lends into the sort of dissatisfaction that he feels at the end of the film. I can’t speak to the ending of the book, but maybe that disconnect where we assume there to be a gratification, really, it being absent is trying to illustrate the meaninglessness of it all and the sort of flaw in what could be seen as delusions, but I think a lot of people take as something he has enacted on these people.

0:11:40.9 Julian Sanchez: The movie much more than the book, right? Kind of leans into this idea of ambiguity, about how much of this violence he’s carried out is some kind of hallucinatory fantasy. There’s a little bit of that in the book, but it’s less… The way the movie is structured, all of the elements that seem like we’re getting Bateman’s unreliable narration, we’re seeing through his eyes stuff that probably does not literally happen exactly as it’s depicted, it is sort of bunched together at the end in a way that it’s not that none of this happens in the book, it’s that they are compressed as the final moments or, you know, the final like what, 20 minutes, in a way that much more strongly biased towards a sort of suggestion that, “Oh, maybe this is all in his head.”

0:12:37.9 Julian Sanchez: That’s much less strongly suggested in the book. In the book, I think the stronger implication is, “Yes, he’s an unreliable narrator,” but that in a sense, the society around him is so psychopathic that he is in fact kind of normal, that it will not allow him to be caught because, well, he’s this wealthy, attractive, outwardly conforming rich white guy, and so even when he tries to openly confess, they sort of don’t recognize him as frightening, as this monster that he is. One of the interesting scenes that in the movie I think leans more into this, again, the ambiguity about whether he’s really done it is he goes to visit the apartment where he’s killed Paul Allen in the movie, Owen in the book, and a couple of other sex workers there, at least that we’ve seen on screen, and everything is sort of cleaned up and repainted and there’s a realtor showing the place, and it’s sort of a little bit tense, and it leans a little heavier in the movie into the potential interpretation that this was never Paul’s apartment, that none of that really happened.

0:13:56.0 Julian Sanchez: In the book, the clearer implication is this is a multi-​million dollar condo that needs to be resold, and so the people who own this and stand to make money off it are not about to report a bunch of gruesomely dismembered bodies in this apartment, so this has all been covered up because, well, look, we can’t tank the property value of this luxury condo. And so, in a sense, it’s about the networks of protection around, which is in its own way pretty timely, right? The way these institutions of wealth and power acts to protect even people who are increasingly obviously and openly depraved. You could pick your favorite… Take your favorite example from the contemporary headlines.

0:14:49.9 Liz Wolfe: You see that from the broker who’s present in the movie scene where he goes back to Paul Allen’s apartment, and she sort of responds with this very vague, difficult to sort of discern and end suss out. Not exactly a sense of suspicion, a sense of guardedness, she sort of seems to be aware of the history of what happened in that apartment, and knows that somebody who is also aware of that is absolutely somebody that she wants to get as far away as possible from that situation, because it threatens… It jeopardizes her bottom line, it threatens the ability of the people, the stakeholders, to basically rehabilitate this apartment and get it sold again or rented again, and so I think that scene is really interesting because it’s almost like… I think that it lends some credence to the idea that these things actually did happen in reality, and not just in Bateman’s head, because there’s a sense of acknowledgement from her, and… I don’t know, I don’t know what to make of her guardedness, if not that.

0:15:51.3 Liz Wolfe: But one thing I also think about a lot that really I hadn’t considered it upon my first or second watch of the movie, but the re-​watch, is the degree to which Bateman’s like almost archival work is really impressive and bizarre, the degree to which he has these drawings of the women that he slaughters, and the brutal ways that he kills them, and he has these very brutal depictions. He almost never focuses on the sexual side of things, there’s definitely very graphic detailed sketches of their bodies, but more than anything, it’s focused on the weapon that’s used.

0:16:25.3 Liz Wolfe: It’s not about the boobs, it’s about the chainsaw. But then you also see… I mean, the degree to which he can very easily in his confession rattle off all the different crimes he’s committed. He almost keeps these things very front of mind. He’s also doing the archival work of recording himself having sex with these people before he kills them, and sometimes also recording the killings. So that’s the thing that I really found fascinating upon re-​watch, the degree to which he’s almost obsessive because it all goes into this idea of like, he cares so much about the image he’s constructed of himself, and there’s such a strain of vanity throughout all of this, but it’s like these crimes would be less meaningful to him and less fulfilling to him, to the extent that they even are fulfilling, if they weren’t so heavily documented, and if he didn’t have these means of sort of listing them out and compiling them and feeling some sense of accumulation. And there’s just an interesting detail present in how he documents this, you would almost think that a more savvy killer would be interested in covering their tracks, whereas he’s almost interested in making it clear that he remembers every single little detail of each of these different encounters, which I think is part of… That detail is what makes American Psycho different than other things that could perhaps be loosely fit into this genre.

0:17:45.5 Landry Ayres: Right, it doesn’t seem like… If you saw this film and the killings absent of Patrick Bateman’s life outside, you could kind of get the impression that he’s a serial killer and he’s collecting trophies. It’s like some people take fingers from their victims, or it’s Dexter Morgan’s blood slides, or whatever.

0:18:08.3 Liz Wolfe: He has the lock of hair in one of his that he’s fiddling with at work. The blonde hair. Always blonde.

0:18:14.9 Landry Ayres: Always blonde. And you can see that it could just be like a trophy collection type of thing, but when that is placed in the context of Patrick Bateman and this sort of consumerist, yuppie satire, it becomes much more than, “I get a fulfillment from being reminded that I kill people.” It is that fulfillment is derived from a list, a collection of things that are more associated with labels and esteem, rather than just a sort of collection of trinkets. It’s much more of something that he is proud of rather than just feels they come… He talks about his compulsive needs, but the trophies he collects and the archiving, which I think is a really great way of putting it because it’s so organized and is this sort of record of the acts, it creates more of a story for him, which a lot of serial killers in the sort of depictions that we get, they do sometimes get depicted as doing this for esteem, and they eventually confess and want people to know all of the people that they’ve done, but in the consumerist label, sort of routine driven world of American Psycho, he stands out, and maybe it is more a sort of satire on that type of thing, and equating it with the serial killer type collecting compulsion rather than comparing Patrick Bateman to the serial killer. It’s sort of moving in the opposite direction and drawing our eyes in a new way.

0:20:07.8 Julian Sanchez: Obviously… I mean, you get a connection between his status anxiety and the murders, in both the book and the film; he first moves to kill Carruthers, but he doesn’t actually do it, when he realizes Carruthers has a much better business card than he does and this enrages him. There’s a murder that he confesses to in the film that we don’t see on screen, that we do get at length in the book. Where he kills an ex-​girlfriend from Harvard. And it’s right after she’s come to his apartment. He’s got this painting of David, someone that he’s very proud of, on the wall, and she realizes that he’s hung it upside down. And she giggles a little bit and that’s when he hits her in the head with a nail gun. A lot of his violence in both of them, seems to immediately follow some kind of perceived humiliation, or something that’s thrown his sense of status into question.

0:21:18.6 Liz Wolfe: Well, the thing that I find really baffling still, is which women get targets on their backs versus which don’t in Bateman world or in Bateman’s mind. Because I think you could almost line them up to be a high status, low status thing. Where Evelyn and Courtney, and these women, who are in his milieu aren’t ever threatened in the same way the other women are. But then a prostitute that he finds on the street is somebody who ends up killed or he’s constantly killing prostitutes. He sees a secretary of somebody that he can feasibly, plausibly, do all this with. But then the one thing that really does scramble this is Elizabeth, I think is her name, the brunette acquaintance of his. Who runs in his same circles, who he has the threesome with Christie the prostitute, and Elizabeth. And he kills Elizabeth first, and then he’s angling to kill Christie. And she ends up almost successfully escaping. But that’s the thing that really scrambles it for me of Elizabeth would be the type of person who would be seen in a cohort with Evelyn and Courtney, and those types. And so I don’t know what to make of that status pursuit. In terms of his victims. What do you guys think there?

0:22:34.8 Julian Sanchez: It does seem like there’s a kind of escalation, where most of his targets are lower status. And there’s an element of class humiliation that perceives the physical sadism. Where he goes out of his way to talk about where he worked, and his fancy job. And he’s asking the prostitute he picked up on the street, “Oh, where did you go to college?” In the scene with Elizabeth, she’s saying, “Oh, where do you summer? Is it the Hamptons?” It’s a whole element of obviously, she didn’t go to college, doesn’t summer anywhere, doesn’t have a context.

0:23:16.3 Liz Wolfe: She’s obviously a North Fork girl.

0:23:18.0 Julian Sanchez: Yes, obviously. But right, his issues seem to escalate over the course of it where he is gradually ascending to victims closer to his own socio-​economic status, and class status. Although, in the book, the first indication of his tendencies is that his fiance’s neighbor has been decapitated. And he off-​handedly references, “Oh yeah, I did that.” and then kinda moves on. And it’s actually quite a while before we get back to him being a murderer. It’s something in the book, at least, where actually, one of the first murders that we’re conscious of him having committed, is someone who lives next door to his fiance. And is presumably also someone wealthy enough to be living next door to someone in that income bracket.

0:24:27.1 Landry Ayres: It’s also really interesting, and I noticed this as I was watching, that there are several moments in the film, and I think they’re almost exclusively when he’s talking to women. I might be wrong about that, but I think it’s the case. Where he, in a normal conversation in a public place when he would normally be very guarded and trying to not describe his acts or anything like that. He will flat-​out tell people about his compulsions for violence and what he does. Like, they’re at the night club one night and one of the women over all of the music asks what he does. And part of this is, he probably feels like he can get away with it because there’s all the loud music playing, and she can’t really hear him, but she says, “What do you do?” and he says, “I work in murders and executions.” And she hears “mergers and acquisitions” and asks him if he likes it, because all the people she knows that works in that hate it.

0:25:20.2 Landry Ayres: And it’s this weird like she’s not phased by it. But then later on, he’s on the phone with his secretary and he’s trying to tell her… I think he says either, “I’ll kill you”, because she’s questioning him or he’s like, “I’ve killed a bunch of people.” It is a blatant confession, and she just goes, “What’s that? I can’t hear you.” And then later on when he’s breaking up with Evelyn, at the restaurant, he is describing his compulsions for… He says, “I have these homicidal tendencies that I cannot let go,” and she is so in her own world that she’s being broken up with that that sort of impact does not even phase her at all. And I was really kind of taken aback by that because he… It’s weird because he takes such pride in the work but is also so guarded about it with certain people, but perhaps it’s that status anxiety in the way that he escalates and sort of differentiates his victims that he feels like there’s some people that he can be honest with, and maybe it’s perhaps ’cause he doesn’t feel threatened by those types of people and it’s a way of sort of exerting his own power on them.

0:26:40.6 Liz Wolfe: And the most transgressive part of that scene, the one where he breaks up with Evelyn, is not even that he is sort of quietly admitting to some of these things while she ignores him. The most transgressive part is that he’s using a crayon or a colored pencil to color on the table, and he’s coloring stuff about his most recent execution, I think it might have been a chainsaw situation, but it’s not even the fact that there’s a chainsaw there, it’s the fact that he is coloring on the table at this presumably very high status restaurant. That’s the thing that really should be most striking about the entire thing.

[chuckle]

0:27:14.1 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, one of the things that is conspicuous is how little he seems to care about getting caught, and that’s in a sense where I think this is in a sense the satirical point, which is he doesn’t really have to hide it, he gets… There’s a great scene that actually I don’t think is in the book where he runs into Carruthers while he’s dragging a blood-​soaked sleeping bag or garment bag with one of his victims in it and loading it into the trunk of a car, and Carruthers walks by and looks at what he’s kind of dumping in the back which is obviously a bag with a body in it, and he says, “Ooh, where did you get that garment bag?” And he goes, “Oh, Jean-​Paul Gaultier,” slams it and jumps into the car and goes off. So he’s kind of throughout just increasingly open about what he’s doing, and it’s just never believed or recognized. In a lot of ways, this is a kind of a magical realist book and film in that sense in that you have these sort of horrific but in one sense fantastical in the sense of just being wildly outside of again normal reality, but juxtaposed with these incredibly mundane catalogues of brands and details of couture, and no one ever bats an eyelash even as it just becomes increasingly overt that he’s a psychopath and that’s okay, he fits right in. So that’s what he says in both book and film, “Your family is so rich. Why do you even bother with this job?” “Well, I wanna fit in.” And of course, he does.

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0:29:15.5 Landry Ayres: Speaking of things that in the… When this movie was released and in the world of it that people don’t bat an eyelash at, they kind of take for granted, but looking back on it now might jump out and mean a lot more to us than when this film was made, is the inclusion of the Donald Trump idea in this movie, and the idolatrous worship of Trump that is even heavier in the book but is still very very present in the movie, the sort of always looking at a different table and saying, “Is that Ivana? Is that Donald?” He changes an opinion about a restaurant because he hears that Trump actually really, really likes it, and his favorite book is Art of the Deal. Are Patrick Bateman types, or people maybe that saw American Psycho… I don’t wanna overstate this, but are they partially to blame for Trump 2016? While the film might have not changed it so much, is there this sort of collective idea of what Trump was at that time that has morphed and changed and became The Apprentice, and then the man who ran and won the presidency, and how did we get from American Psycho Donald Trump to the American psycho Donald Trump?

0:30:52.7 Julian Sanchez: It’s interesting because it’s clearly in a sense pretty political, so this is a book that comes out in ’91 or ’92, but the film that comes out in 2000 when Donald Trump is a liberal Democrat, so it’s not like he’s being held up as a bad guy because liberal Hollywood doesn’t like a conservative Republican, but nevertheless… That’s not what’s motivating this, and yet, when you wanna show that someone is a soulless sociopath with no redeeming qualities, how do you show it? Well, you show that his personal hero and role model was Donald Trump.

0:31:34.3 Julian Sanchez: So even with the political valences sort of inverted, the understanding for Ellis and his readers and I guess the view of the film is supposed to be, Oh my gosh, you would have to be a really depraved person for Donald Trump to be your personal hero, which is one of those interesting things about his political ascendancy, is that in his own milieu, New York, and folks who are interested in things happening in New York, Trump was regarded with this degree of horror and contempt long before he had any kind of political identity that was beyond being a friend of the Clintons.

0:32:25.4 Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I mean, I sort of… Compare this… I agree with all of that, and I compare this a little bit to the first, a few episodes of Sex and the City, where Samantha, the character in Sex and the City tells Carrie when introducing Mr. Big basically to the audience, he’s like the next Donald Trump, except younger and better looking, and that when you watch that today, it has a completely different meaning, but back then it’s useful, especially for me, I am much younger, I am on the very young end of millennial and it’s useful to contextualize what the 1990s image of Trump was within these certain social sets, because it was sort of, I think to some degree, an aspirational, it can be a sense of machismo, there was some amount of aspirational wealth clout that came with that.

0:33:17.0 Liz Wolfe: There wasn’t a sense of, “Oh, this person is so objectionable and there are all these political attachments there,” so much as it was like, “This guy is super well connected, top of his game,” and a lot of men in a lot of different industries, I think aspired aspire to be like that, he had this, I guess, transcendent quality, despite being a real estate magnate where all the Wall Street bros, the financial dudes were interested in emulating that and sort of saw him as aspirational, even though he wasn’t quite as explicitly within their industry or somebody who had risen through the ranks of their specific vertical, he was still sort of seen as the almost like status reaching every man, the every man of the elite in a sense.

0:34:01.5 Liz Wolfe: And I think you see that in Sex and the City, you see that in American Psycho. And it’s funny because I wonder how many modern viewers see the Donald Trump references in American Psycho, and to take that sort of mental shortcut of thing like, Oh yeah, the director is saying like, “Donald Trump Bad and Bateman bad.” And everybody’s a psychopath. And It’s like, Well, that doesn’t make sense. That’s pretty anachronistic if you actually think about it for more than three seconds, but I wonder to what degree the film holds up better because of people’s mental laziness and ability to take those shortcuts.

0:34:29.3 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting too, because Patrick Bateman and especially the Trump election and presidency both kind of came… Patrick Bateman as an internet meme, really, really took off at a similar time as the sort of Sigma grind set, work hard, Elite top of your game type of semi-​satirical but not always mindset was beginning to launch, and then you have the Trump presidency and that… The sort of very, very heavy grassroots digital movement that went on to support him and try and swing the election in his direction with things like the Donald and all the memes and things that were spurred on by that, they kind of ascend in a similar way. And you can see how these ideas have always kind of been in conversation with one another, but in a way, the memefication of Patrick Bateman, I wonder, does it miss something?

0:35:47.3 Landry Ayres: Does it not make that connection… And I think you could make a lot of arguments that some people are doing this for satirical purposes, and they’re trying to say, they’re using Patrick Bateman to use these ideas and further them to call attention to something, but a lot of people, I think, use that image in a non-​ironic sense and don’t really understand the significance of what that image and character can and really represent, and it kind of muddles the meaning with that, do we risk by memefying him turning him into just another kind of Gordon Gekko, Jordan Belfort from Wolf of Wall Street, hyper-​masculine hero that people misunderstand kinda like a… Does it have Fight Club syndrome in that way?

0:36:40.0 Liz Wolfe: One thing that I think is that the memefication of Bateman himself definitely does run that risk, but memefication of specific components of American Psycho, I find to be absolutely delightful, like the business card scene, which is so iconic and also at this point, becoming a little bit of a relic of the past because… Do people still have business cards… Maybe that’s just ’cause I’m a journalist, so I’m like, “Look me up on Twitter.” But the best one that I’ve seen is the… It’s all about poking fun at corporate culture and the sort of evolving morose there, but it’s like the Paul Allen business card and then it says He/​him on it, and sort of the absurdity of how that would not in any way land the gag… The joke is that that would not in any way land in that type of corporate culture, but now that’s a thing that you see as much more pervasive and seen as that type of signalling about people’s pronouns is seen as not only something that is accepted in those types of circles, but something that I think people kind of do to signal their virtue and to get ahead, and in a lot of those environments because that’s seen as valuable in a way that it didn’t used to be.

0:37:48.9 Liz Wolfe: I don’t know, I think about… To such a high degree, all of this holds up, we don’t call them yuppies anymore, and they’re not typically Wall Street bros, this recession and financial crisis kind of ruined the creation of media around about Wall Street types, but there’s also perhaps Private Equity culture or venture capitalist culture is the closest corollary that we have now, the whole Silicon Valley earlier stage startup tech bro hustle culture doesn’t map well onto this because it grapples with status and hierarchy in a different way, and at least in the earlier stages of creating businesses within Silicon Valley, there is so much more emphasis on actually putting in the time and doing the work before you can begin to reap the status rewards. And so, in a sense, it’s not quite as cushy as you graduate from a top tier school, you get hired by one of these firms, and then you’re 26 or you’re 27 years old, like a lot of these people and you’re in it. You have your Valentino suit and you have your Jean Paul Gaultier body bag or suit bag, or whatever.

0:38:56.0 Liz Wolfe: It almost seems more like what I’ve seen people from elite schools do when they go into consulting, but Silicon Valley, at least the parts of it that are really respected, do continue to have this actual barrier to entry, which is you have to actually be good at what you do, you have to have technical skill in a lot of situations, especially if you want to be at ground level with a lot of these startups. Maybe later on, I think private equity culture might be the appropriate sort of modern day corollary, but I think to some degree Bateman will be somewhat inoculated from being as memefied because there’s not as clear of a current equivalent.

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0:39:36.8 Julian Sanchez: One of the things that interests me about this is when you put it in the context of other sort of I guess Wall Street satires or critiques is how much this film doesn’t directly really have a lot to say about capitalism in contrast to those other works. In the book, actually, I don’t think it says Gordon, but there is an off-​hand throw-​away reference to, “Oh, what happened to Gekko?” So it’s implying that Gordon Gekko is a character in this fictional world who has maybe suffered some kind of comeuppance for financial crimes. But this is, in a sense, right, have something to say about… And we’re all libertarians here and generally pretty pro-​capitalism, but they all have a critique that is specific about the structures of capitalism itself and how the artist perceives it as, whatever, taking advantage of people or being based on scams and trickery or whatever, and that’s almost entirely absent here.

0:40:50.7 Julian Sanchez: There’s a critique of the kind of level of character and culture, these are shallow, insipid, banal people who look down on and or have no compassion for the homeless and the less fortunate, and feel superior that they don’t really in any… As though they deserve to feel that way, or have any kind of greater personal merit, but the sort of meat of what Bateman actually does with his work is just not part of the story at all. There’s not a story about, in a sense, Wall Street finance itself being a kind of hostile, some kind of destructive force. You hear almost nothing about… He’s really interested in the Fisher account that Paul Allen has, but that’s… As far as you can tell, all he actually does at his desk is read Sports Illustrated and make homicidal doodles, which is… Yeah, I don’t know. Look, it’s not that I feel like, “Oh, I really needed to read another English major’s critique of capitalism,” but it is interesting to me that the… In a way that’s almost maybe a little bit Bateman-​like, the contempt is at this very cultural level, right?

0:42:26.3 Julian Sanchez: Patrick Bateman is this… How do you know he’s bad? He’s like Donald Trump, and, also, his only kind of cultural passion is for really insipid kind of super mainstream, the most kind of mass market, mass culture… He’s really into Genesis and Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis, and he even thinks in the book, right, “God, Huey Lewis is in inferior… Is superior to Elvis Costello,” which, God what kind of… What kind of Philistine idiot would think that… Of course, that is a crazy view. Of course Elvis Costello is better than Huey Lewis, but how much this sort of satire and the contempt is… In a sense, really, lacks any kind of coherent statement about why at a structural level, “I think Wall Street firms are bad and exploitative because X, Y, Z,” and is much more centered on, “I find these people repellent at a cultural level.”

0:43:29.3 Liz Wolfe: I think to some degree, it means that… One thing that was really striking to me as a New Yorker who has too many vaguely yuppieish friends is like the degree to which so much of this goddamn dinner reservation rat race is still absolutely, totally a thing. I put this in one of our exchanges before this of like, “I feel like I’ve been to Dorsia,” so to speak, in the sense of, to me, an Indian meal in Jackson Heights is just as good as the fanciest thing that everybody is raving about in Manhattan, but for whatever reason, there’s a whole set of people, and I think it transcends industry, to some degree, I see it reflected in friends who are higher in nursing or a whole bunch of different fields, where there’s just this interest in doing this thing to be able to talk… It’s, I guess, a means of connecting with other people. “Did you try the squid at Dorsia?” “Oh yeah, we tried the squid ravioli there” or whatever, and it’s relatable to some degree because I’m such a food person, but there is just this component that’s like, I almost wonder, this rich person, New York status game, will this ever feel out of date? This happened… This is set in the ’80s, I still feel like some people that I know play this game and talk in this manner in 2022. In 2060, will this continue to be the way that moneyed New York high society type stuff works?

0:44:50.6 Liz Wolfe: Not that I… I don’t wanna oversell the degree to which I’m a part of that, but I do know a few people who are very much like that. And I oftentimes will try out a restaurant with them every once in a while, and I’m just sort of constantly annoyed by how overrated a lot of these places are. I think perhaps because I’m not getting the social capital benefit from talking about it the way that they are. They go to work at a fancy law firm and they say, “Oh, I got a reservation at this place and we tried this dish there,” whereas I’m just like a frickin writer who tweets too much, and so if I say, “I got a reservation at this fancy place,” I don’t think it means that much to the people that I’m trying to impress, and I think I kind of prefer my group because of that reason. So most of that you get in Jackson Heights is just as valuable. [laughter]

0:45:34.9 Julian Sanchez: Yeah, obviously, if they remade it, Bateman would be Instagram-​ing all his appetizers.

0:45:39.9 Liz Wolfe: [laughter] Well, that was an interesting part of the opening sequence like, the degree to which it’s not blood, it’s plating that we’re seeing with the red liquid that’s being used. And then, I don’t know if you guys caught this, in the credits, also business card font for all of them. Yeah, which I thought was just a fascinating way of just continuing to underscore these points about, this is fundamentally a critique of upper crust people, not any of the deeper things beneath that.

0:46:11.1 Julian Sanchez: Although one of the things I’ve seen Ellis admit in interviews is that there is a somewhat kind of confessional element to this, not that Ellis is admitting to a series of murders, but that… Right, look, I mean, it doesn’t get… Maybe this comes out more clearly in the book, but like, Ellis is clearly intimately familiar with all of these brands. And some of the restaurants are made up, and some of them are real, and I think what he said in interviews is, “Look, this is a satire and a critique,” but it’s a critique of something that he is not totally unfamiliar with, that in fact he is actually quite well acquainted with Etro, and Versace, and Manolo Blahnik, and all these things, and has… And he recognizes in himself some of that sort of desire to kinda elevate himself through identification with brands, as he’d be recognized as someone tasteful and…

0:47:21.1 Landry Ayres: He threw his dad under the bus at first, when the book first came out apparently. People were asking him what he’s based on, he was like, “Oh, my dad, he’s a real monster.” And then only until recent years was he like, “Actually, I was just kind of embarrassed, and so it’s actually much more based on my life during a certain period of time when I was going through and living a life very similar to Patrick Bateman, not in the killing sense, but in this sort of consumerist, consuming status anxiety-​driven sense.”

0:47:54.5 Liz Wolfe: I mean, looked at one way, these restaurant names and these brands, these fashion brands, and the names of different people who are working on different projects like, looked at one way, it’s shorthand for constructing a personality, or for attempting to convey that you have a personality to people, and I think there’s a really dark side to that. There’s a laziness that springs from that, and we see a lot of those themes touched on in American Psycho. But also, looked at another way, and I hate to be this constant capitalist shill, but I am one, it’s kind of cool and interesting and maybe valuable that people who perhaps cannot or won’t develop a personality in other ways are able to transact money that they earned to feel like they have the trappings of a personality, and to feel like they’re able to…

0:48:39.1 Liz Wolfe: I don’t know, I imagine this is a way that people rise in the ranks of status and class where perhaps they were born to a much poorer family, but they need to relate to certain people and within a certain professional setting, and so one of the ways that you signal your belonging-​ness is by saying, “Hey, I got a reservation here,” or, “That food that you’re talking about, I know about that as well.” And so to some degree, it’s a means of people… It’s a means for people to climb into classes that they weren’t born in, and to use these really sort of easy shorthand ways to signal that they’re part of something that they’re perhaps not naturally part of. I think that’s a really cool thing, you could sort of use it for good or for evil.

0:49:19.1 Julian Sanchez: Look, you know, I’ll… I’m… I like a nice extra suit as much as the next guy, probably more than the next guy, so… I don’t meticulously obsess in the same way over every aspect of that, but I think to some extent it lands in satire because probably a lot of the audience gets to feel superior to Bateman because, well, because they’re not serial killers, and because… And a huge racist, but because it’s not to the same extent, but it lands to the extent that I think we look at this and probably… I guess if we’re from the kind of classes reading Bret Easton Ellis novels, recognizing a little bit of that like, “Oh, you know what? I do like finding a nice suit, and thank gosh I like how this looks, and I hope people notice that it’s something fancy, as long we, you know, just have to not mistake that for a personality.”

0:50:31.4 Landry Ayres: Yeah, as a person who worked at a JoS. A. Bank for three years in college, I do recognize a quality suit when I see one because I stared at so many that weren’t for that long. Not a sponsor of the show, and won’t be in the future.

0:50:46.5 Julian Sanchez: I gotta say, one of my… I… One of my favorite blazers that I wear all the time is a tweed JoS. A Bank blazer. I did it…

0:50:53.4 Landry Ayres: The blazers are different.

0:50:54.7 Julian Sanchez: It is. It is and…

0:50:56.7 Landry Ayres: They do something with the blazers. The suits will fall apart.

0:50:58.9 Julian Sanchez: Perfectly nice score, man. I’ll buy it, I’m just saying.

0:51:03.3 Landry Ayres: Yes. I still have one in the closet.

0:51:04.3 Julian Sanchez: I own garments from JoS. A Bank that I like a lot. I have no shame in that.

0:51:10.5 Landry Ayres: I’m sure you bought two and got 19 free. [chuckle]

0:51:13.7 Julian Sanchez: Look, it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt that you could get two, you get two for one. Seriously, no, come for me, Bateman, I’ve no shame in my JoS. A. Bank jacket.

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0:51:25.3 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s pop, the letter N, Locke with an E, like the philosopher, pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you liked the show. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, and is produced by me, Landry Ayres. To learn more, visit us on the web at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.

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