American Psycho': What Mental Illness Does Patrick Bateman Have

Based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel of the same name, Mary Harron’s American Psycho introduces audiences to Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a Wall Street yuppie with a purposefully nondescript job whose financial success is only matched with his greed, obsession with material commodities, and himself. It is revealed early on in the film that, in addition to his lust for wealth and aesthetics, Patrick Bateman is a serial killer. Harron’s film delves deep into the “darker side of consumerism…”  while revealing Patrick Bateman’s aspirations for conformity through his (male) identity. The purpose of this essay is to examine the number of themes that can be seen from a face-value interpretation of the film, such as appearance vs reality, oblivion and indifference, and what mental illness does Patrick Bateman have. Specifically, the main focus of this essay will be centred around the male gaze through Patrick Bateman and the motif of personal vs collective identity.

To proceed with the topic of personal vs collective identity and consumerism, it is important to understand the image of masculinity Patrick Bateman (and the other yuppies) project in the film. Being released in the year 2000, American Psycho was released during the peak of the beta male comedy. The protagonists in beta male comedies didn’t have the suave and confident personality of male protagonists decades prior, yet their desire for any form of a sexual encounter was blanketed in comedy (For example, Jim Levinstein in American Pie). “For all of their antic humour, beta male comedies emphasize the masochistic suffering of the male characters”. Although it takes place roughly ten years before American Pie, American Psycho reintroduced audiences to a dominant, alpha, sexually active straight-male from the 1950s and 1960s (albeit he is a serial killer). Steven Cohan’s Masked Men discusses how Hollywood in the mid-20th-century represented masculinity as a masquerade in different genres. In “The Spy in the Grey Flannel Suit,” Cohan insists on the notion that there is nothing beneath the mask…the masquerade is subjectivity”, Cohan discusses the theory of the mask with a solider-spy in a nicely pressed suit, “the masculine mask is worn to achieve a normative performance-orientated phallic heterosexual male sexuality. This relation of masculinity and sexuality can also be applied to the horror genre in the form of the “psycho or the ‘split-subject.” In Men, women, and chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film, Carol J. Clover notes that in the slasher film, violence is often the root of voyeurism from the male gaze. This “psychosexual fury” is always connected to sexual repression. However, while Clover’s theory could be applied to Norman Bates from Psycho, it cannot be applied the same way to Patrick Bateman.

Unveiling What Mental Illness Does Patrick Bateman Have

For Patrick Bateman, a figure who has sexual intercourse routinely, desire for heterosexual romance is “displaced by violence and narcissism”. One thing that Patrick Bateman loves more than murder, is himself, specifically how others view him. Bateman fetishizes himself and is obsessed with his own “physical condition…like the female ‘hardbodies’ he objectifies, he also renders his own body as an object”. Bateman’s obsession with himself is established during the famous “morning routine” scene. Slow pans and tracking shots of a beautiful apartment that is dominated by white. The first shot with Bateman shows him walking towards a toilet bowl to urinate as he introduces to the audience where he lives, his name and his age (in that order). In the next shot, he stares at himself through a glass poster of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables which becomes the first of many reflection shots littered through the film that displays Bateman’s obsession with himself and his duality. Les Misérables is mentioned throughout the film and shows the disconnect the yuppie brokers have from reality. They see the play as a status symbol, a sign of wealth because they can afford the expensive tickets. Meanwhile, the story is about the exact opposite. It is about class tension, and how excess and wealth found in the upper class causes angst and rebellion in the lower one, and how this causes a collapse within society. In the film Paris in the early 19th century is a parallel to New York in the late 20th century, the same problems are found within both cities only now the upper-class glamorizes the lower class without even realizing it. In Masculinity in fiction and film: Representing men in popular genres, Brian Baker theorizes that the shot of Bateman pulling out an ice-pack mask to wear, “…undermines the pervious sequence of shots”. Baker believes this because the “concept of the mask” is finally introduced as a “dominant visual signifier” which is then completely followed upon by arguably the most famous shot in the film. Bateman, shot in close-up, pulling off his herb-mint facial mask while the voice-over narration continues with the “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman” monologue. As Bateman peels away his “mask,” just like how a snake sheds its skin, his narration finishes with “I am simply not there,” announcing to the audience the Patrick Bateman his co-workers and girlfriends see is not real. Baker also notices a certain shot composition that is seen multiple times in American Psycho, every shot of a naked Patrick Bateman is always from below and behind his waist. Even for a Rated-R film, the penis is “entirely negated and removed from the visual field”, how the each “naked” shot is composited is in such a way to suggest nakedness. Baker does not elaborate on this idea of nakedness any further, but Carol J. Clover’s theory of “gender distress” could help elaborate on Baker's ideas of nakedness. Clover writes, “the notion of a killer propelled by psychosexual fury, more particularly a male in gender distress has proved a durable one…” Bateman is more comfortable in his “birthday suit’ than his Armani one because he thinks of himself as a greek-god of sorts whenever he stares at himself naked. In a scene that is centred around the male gaze, Bateman has set up a video camera in one corner of the room and begins to have sex with two female prostitutes. Baker describes the scene using harsh language to underline Bateman’s power, “…Bateman fucks one prostitute…”, he is the dominant, alpha male throughout this whole scene but his intent is neither on the girl he is “fucking” or the other one filming the video, yet Bateman’s full attention and “desiring look” is on the spectacle of his reflection staring back at him in his mirror as he flexes, poses heroically and fixes his hair. Even though this sequence is about his “charismatic” side, we still see hints of Bateman’s darker side. For one, the camcorder view is in black and white, denoting the black and white sides of Bateman. The lighting comes from the left side of the frame and causes a shadow of Bateman to be projected on the wall behind them as if to say that Bateman’s darker side is present in the room as well. Bateman’s shadow even looks as though it is strangling the prostitute’s shadow while he has sex with her. His hardbody is visible and he is not performing for the diegetic camera in the actual scene but is performing for the camera shooting the film American Psycho, he is not breaking the fourth wall, but is instead performing for the audience while highly fetishizing himself.

In the last sex scene of the film, Bateman is caught attempting to eat one of the women he is having sex with alive. He attempts to eat her, while he is “eating her out” and as the other woman notices in horror, the sex scene abruptly stops and turns into a “spectacle of murder”. As the second prostitute begins to flee out of the apartment (Paul Allen’s apartment) Bateman enters the scene, fully naked except for a fresh pair of white sneakers and doing his best Leather-face impression by wielding a buzzing chainsaw, covering his penis the entire time. This scene is a nod to Texas Chainsaw Massacre he misunderstands the purpose of horror movies, instead of being invested in the story in the atmosphere, Bateman simply puts it on in the background while he works out showing how desensitized to the violence he is. This is also how he treats pornography, casually watching it. The “chainsaw-murder” scene also has paradoxical framing, when relating the phallic symbol of the chainsaw with it blocking Bateman’s phallus, both used to “slay” women.

Bateman’s Obsession With Himself is Rivalled With What Others Think of Him

When asked by his girlfriend (played by Reese Witherspoon) why he wants to stay at his father’s firm he answers aggressively, “ Because… I… want… to… fit… in” This is first noticed when before the audience even learns Bateman’s first name, him and his coworkers all have the same fashion style and credit card when paying at the lunch and Bateman introduces himself through where he lives; “I live in the American Gardens building on W. 81st St. on the 11th floor…my name is Patrick Bateman.” The film is littered with consumerism, from every one of Bateman’s “identikit colleagues” to Bateman trying to get a dinner reservation at an exclusive restaurant. Consumerism and greed are large themes throughout the film and so is a simple appearance vs reality narrative. However, after viewing the ending multiple times, once can notice the ending is the perfect embodiment of the central theme of personal vs collective identity. The ambiguity involved with the ending gives the audience two choices: either Patrick committed all of the murders shown (and most importantly Paul Allen) or he did not and the scenes of murder that the audience witnessed were merely delusions of violence within Bateman’s mind.

Theorist David Greven believes Bateman “undoubtedly committed the murders and everything that the audience saw in the film happened as presented”, except of course moments like the ATM needing a stray cat. If Patrick Bateman actually killed all the people in the film, how does the lawyer make it clear he had dinner with Paul Allen in London? The answer is a constant misidentification. This abundant recurrence in the plot occurs in a world in which everyone is part of the materialistic and yuppie culture. Everyone is easily mistaken for someone else or, more interestingly, everyone that is presented has their personal identity synonymous with that of their collective identity. Personal identity is fairly self-explanatory, it is how people identify themselves apart from others, it is what makes us unique independent actors on the earth. Collective identity then is the antithesis of what makes a person unique it is a shared sense of belonging to a certain group. “Collective identity is the phenomenon in which a group can be defined by a common set of characteristics”. For example, once someone identifies with a certain sports team, that person defines themselves as a fan of said team. There is an unspoken pledge that a Leafs has to hate the Bruins, it is what identifies someone as a Leafs fan. In American psycho, virtually everyone in the film looks similar, therefore it is not that surprising that everyone in the film is mistaken for another person at some point. This is not just a case of “someone dressing the same way” or “going to the same barber,” in the yuppie world that is presented in American Psycho, all of these young, sharply dressed, well-groomed white men look the same, behave the same and think the same. All these commonalities combined with all of the instances of misidentification that occur in the film suggests how these characters think and feel as independent humans are meaningless since they have lost what makes them distinguishable from one another. This point is made over and over again in the film starting with Bateman’s opening monologue, “I have all the characteristics of a human being flesh blood skin but not a single clear identifiable emotion except for greed and disgust.” The most explicit example of this comes in the business card scene, where the audience is shown a series of business cards that look pretty much identical. This scene perfectly symbolizes that the unique identities presented bleed into one another regardless of any slight differences there are between them. They are all essentially the same, same job same title, same card layout, and ostensibly the same identity. American Psycho masterfully represents the loss of personal identity, in the film’s world it does not matter what someone independently thinks and feels, when someone’s entire life is composed of collective identity (as the film’s plot suggests) that person could even be a serial killer and no one would notice or would even care.

With all this information laid out, how does the ending of the film perfectly embody the theory of collective identity? Patrick Bateman murdered Paul Allen, and Bateman’s lawyer Howard did not see Paul Allen in London because he mistook him for someone else when he was supposedly in London. Even when Bateman owns up to killing him, detailing every explicit detail yet, he is not taken seriously by his lawyer and even Bateman is ingrained in this culture of collective identity that has been displayed throughout the entire film. Because of this pervasive sense of collective identity, Patrick Bateman—the vicious, narcissistic, psychopath serial killer—is immediately absolved of all the sins he has committed. The collective identity of wall street yuppies that he had become defined by has allowed Bateman to get away with all of his heinous acts, all that matters is a universal appearance and in that way, Bateman realizes “that his own life is even more devoid of catharsis than he thought”. A lie that Bateman constructed to give himself an alibi for murdering Paul Allen, is the very thing that pardons him from his crime when Halberstram mistakes someone he was with, for Patrick Bateman.

Conclusion

The world American Psycho takes place in is so detached that when the collection of bodies is discovered at Paul Allen’s apartment, all that matters is that it is a beautiful apartment overlooking Central Park and its material value supersedes the moral value of the collection of corpses hung up in the closet. yuppies, it's rather ironic that Bateman is the only person in the film to realize this considering that he is a murderous sociopath and this has made even more clear following Timmothy Bryce (Justin Theroux) talks about President Ronald Reagan while seeing him on television, “He presents himself as this harmless old codger, but inside…but inside…” Bateman continues Bryce’s point but inside his head about himself, through a simple line, “but inside doesn’t matter.” By the end of the film, the audience realizes that Patrick Bateman’s identity is only composed of the worst elements of humanity; greed, disgust, hate, envy, hunger, lust, vanity and indifference. Through this lens, American Psycho can be viewed as a cautionary film of sorts, telling the viewer that superficiality only leads to contempt to be wary of the implications of collective identity and not to lose what makes you unique. An existence based solely on collective identity, is one that is cold and meaningless, a point that Patrick Bateman drives home as the film concludes.