american psycho: he's just like me fr
By Andy Kim
In No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, there’s a passage where the main character, Yozo, who is ostensibly Dazai (it is a semi-autobiographical book), struggles to figure out exactly what the hell his Sister wants from him in a fairly obvious situation:
“One autumn evening as I was lying in bed reading a book, the older of my cousins–I always called her Sister–suddenly darted into my room quick as a bird, and collapsed over my bed. She whispered through her tears, “Yozo, you’ll help me, I know. I know you will. Let’s run away from this terrible house together. Oh, help me, please.”
She continued in this hysterical vein for a while only to burst into tears again. This was not the first time that a woman had put on such a scene before me, and Sister’s excessively emotional words did not surprise me much. I felt instead a certain boredom at their banality and emptiness. I slipped out of bed, went to my desk and picked up a persimmon. I peeled it and offered my Sister a section. She ate it, still sobbing, and said, “Have you any interesting books? Lend me something.”
I chose Soseki’s I am a Cat from my bookshelf and handed it to her.
“Thanks for the persimmon,” Sister said as she left the room, an embarrassed smile on her face…”
At this moment, Dazai/Yozo provides an accidentally hilarious moment through his lack of empathy. Even though Yozo faces similar despair, he is unable to connect sadness to the sadness of others. After several trials of this sort of situation where a girl comes to him crying for support (which despite his wishes is a recurring theme in his life), he has figured out a simple, effective solution—distract them with sweets, books, anything at hand, even a suicide pact.
Of course, this isn’t the correct “answer” to these situations. He could have just… talked to her! But this is impossible for Yozo because claims to be completely disconnected from her. And he’s too terrified to try to reach out. He imagines that all other people have a monster behind their mask, ready to attack him at will.
The entire book is like this, a person who doesn’t know how to interact with other people because he is actually terrified of everyone around him, which is all rooted in his feeling of spiritual isolation. The title is a direct statement of the narrator’s feeling towards the world around him—as someone who is just faking being human, what point did he have in existing when he has to live in fear of everyone around him, who is ostensibly better at this being “human” thing than him?
American Psycho was this to me, an attempt by another alien (Patrick Bateman) to decipher exactly what the hell is happening in 80’s yuppie corporate NYC. Or as he aptly puts it:
EVELYN
Well, you hate that job anyway. Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work.
BATEMAN
Because I...want...to...fit...in.
I think he wants to fit in!
Patrick Bateman has decided, unlike Yozo, that he will fit in. He—at least, consciously—believes that he is stronger than everyone around him. Christian Bale does an awesome job monologuing with the emphasis on monotone, dry, and powerful from his ability to seemingly separate himself from the riff-raff around him. This might be why a lot of men (from what I have heard, no citation given in this article) take from this movie that this is the way of a “sigma” male, one who is different from the rest of the pack.
(This is where I would submit my sigma male test score but I couldn’t find the screenshot.)
fear and anxiety
Because of all the (wrong) takes on American Psycho being anti-feminist because of its violence against women, or the idolization of Patrick Bateman because he can cull his competition, you would think Patrick is good at killing people. This is not true in the movie. Patrick Bateman is actually very, very bad at killing people. When he kills Paul Allen, he becomes a total wreck, running through his apartment to come up with some sort of alibi, slamming open closets and desperately packing together a cute little travel set. Not that I would know how to commit a murder, but you would think for someone who considers himself to be in control Patrick would have a better idea on how to proceed with this kind of thing. His answers to Detective Donald Kimball’s questions range from guilty to insane. When Detective Kimball asks him if he knew Paul Allen was missing, Patrick jumps to asking him if the “homicide squad” is deployed on the case.
He even panics out of a murder when Luis Carruthers hits on him because it’s so unexpected, ending with Patrick desperately looking for any reason to just leave (“I’ve gotta… I’ve gotta… return some videotapes.”—as a bonus, he uses this SEVERAL times in the movie to leave uncomfortable situations). He then washes his gloved hands in the bathroom in an attempt to try to return to a “normal” interaction. It’s not pride and power pushing him forward. It’s anxiety!
Like Yozo, Patrick is also afraid. When he lies to Jean that he got a reservation for two at Dorsia (his trigger word apparently), he decides that the only course of action is to kill Jean before they make it to the restaurant. To directly discuss the traditional idea of toxic masculinity (as referenced by the men who want to be Patrick), theory would say that Patrick kills to gain power over women or to flex his masculinity. But his pride isn’t on the line when he tells Jean that he got a reservation to Dorsia. And he’s not trying to be powerful and masculine when he decides that killing Jean is the only solution. His decision is a panicked answer to stay disconnected from Jean at any cost.
Just as Yozo accepts a suicide pact from a woman because he doesn’t know how else to comfort her while avoiding connection to her, Patrick decides with how smoothly he handled Paul Owen’s murder that staging another murder is a get-out-of-jail-free card from the impending doom of having to admit that he actually can’t get a reservation for Dorsia.
And his Dorsia fear manifests in reality as a personal hell when the maître d’ hysterically laughs at him, screeching, when he first calls for a reservation that night at 8:30 for a date with Courtney. The second time he calls he gets a normal response, with the maître d’ telling him that the restaurant is completely booked for the night. But Patrick’s fear response is already baked in from the first interaction he created with his own anxiety.
societal normalcy and self-acceptance
There’s something deeply relatable to the need to try to figure out what is “normal.” Especially, the further you might naturally be from “societal normal,” the harder it is to try to figure out how to get there. At this point, the proverb “be true to yourself” might seem to come into play. But our urge to be normal is because we want to connect to others. We want to not be alone, even if that’s at the cost of suppressing our true selves.
Patrick manages to fit in at the boy’s club at work by performing all of the gestures of the others, at lunch, at Christmas parties. But his true self is completely isolated from his coworkers. He’s someone who is unrecognized as his own person to the point that people mistake his identity for others in the group. His fiance knows nothing about him and doesn’t care to, even when Patrick is trying to tell her that he has homicidal urges. The only reason she’s even getting married to him is because they have the same friends and breaking up “wouldn’t work.” Even Carruthers only hits on him because of the clothing he wears.
But even when you fit in, you want people to understand you. So Patrick tries to connect with people over and over again. But when he does try, it’s unreciprocated. The only time he can talk about his interest in pop music is with prostitutes he hires for sex—almost as if the sex is just an excuse (which might be why his violence is also focused on them). His jokes constantly fall flat with his peers. His joke about Ed Gein sticking women’s heads on sticks could be inappropriate (and is given the rest of the context of Patrick’s personality), but it’s a very vulnerable moment for Patrick. He is purposefully revealing part of who he is and receives worse than a bad reaction—no reaction. When your friends rebuke you, it’s a decision to reach out and connect out of care. No reaction is the choice to pull away.
And when he finally does meet someone who is genuinely interested in him as who he is and is willing to reach out to him, he is unable to complete the connection. Jean is the only woman in the movie who isn’t willing to mask to just “fit in.” When Patrick takes her out and talks to her in his condo, we can immediately get a sense of who she is because she’s telling the truth. But Patrick takes this vulnerability and tries to push it away from him—thus the attempt to kill her with a nail gun—and fails as his own vulnerability (he’s cheating on his fiancee) is revealed via inopportune phone call (from said fiancee).
Silence. Jean is obviously embarrassed and upset.
JEAN
Was that...Evelyn?
Silence.
JEAN
Are you still seeing her?
Silence.
JEAN
I'm sorry, I have no right to ask that.
Silence.
JEAN
Do you want me to go?
A long pause.
BATEMAN
Yes. I don’t think I can...control myself.
JEAN
I know I should go. I know I have a tendency to get
involved with unavailable men, and...I mean, do you
want me to go?
Another long pause.
BATEMAN
If you stay, I think something bad will happen. I
think I might hurt you.
(Almost hopefully)
You don't want to get hurt, do you?
JEAN
No. No, I guess not. I don't want to get bruised.
You're right, I should go.
And at the end of the movie, Jean is the only one who is able to find Patrick’s “true nature” because she is worried about him after he calls her. Patrick doesn’t reveal who he is to her. She’s the one who searches his desk and finds the drawings he has made of his compulsions, of his real or imagined crimes against humanity.
violence
After violence, Patrick responds with desperation and panic. We even see this in Paul Allen’s murder, the one murder Patrick seemed to really enjoy, where Patrick scrambles to come up with something so that he avoids getting caught. Patrick claims to have killed Christie only because “she almost got away.” In the final chase scene, the consequences come for him at an amazing tempo; police cars surround him after the sound of the first shot dissipates into the air, he escapes but is surrounded again and forced into a shoot-off, then is chased down by helicopters.
But that’s ridiculous—it’s totally fantastical. Because these scenes are in Patrick’s view of reality, it suggests that he wants to get caught. Patrick wants to be held accountable because it’s the only way he could imagine others understanding the immense amount of pain he’s in.
Part of our connection to people who really like us for who we are is that they can help us understand when we feel off. We want our pain to be vindicated as something that’s not okay. In times of desperation, we want to be able to reach out to others and hear sympathy, or reassurance that we are right to feel that something is wrong and that we should go get it checked out.
Patrick describes his need to hurt other people as a consequence of being in pain in the first place at the end of the movie. It’s a call for help for someone to notice and get him arrested so he can get fixed. But Patrick is completely alienated. Beyond Jean, nobody else cares about him to bother being concerned. When he tells a woman that he’s into “murders and executions,” she mishears it as “mergers and acquisitions” due to the level of attention she’s giving that conversation. When he leaves a long, rambling confession of all of his murders to his lawyer, his lawyer first mistakes him for someone else, and then laughs it off as a silly joke. Even as Patrick tries to double down and tell him that he was telling the truth, his lawyer takes the reality of the situation (that Patrick is at least delusional, since Paul Allen is alive and kicking) and decides to tell Patrick off for taking the joke “too far.”
In Patrick’s last monologue after his conversation with his lawyer, he “surpasses” having anything in common with the least sympathizable people.
BATEMAN (V.O.)
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 toward
it, I have now surpassed...
INT. BATEMAN'S OFFICE - DAY
Jean is alone in Bateman's office, looking through his diary.
We see the pages that she is looking at. They are filled with
doodles of mutilated women and their names...Jean looks lost
and frightened, and begins to cry.
BATEMAN (V.O.)
My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better
world for anyone. I fact I want my pain to be inflicted on
others. I want no escape.
INT. HARRY'S BAR - EARLY EVENING
As the film ends the camera moves CLOSE on Bateman. He is
leaning back in his leather armchair, drinking a double Scotch,
his eyes blank.
BATEMAN (V.O.)
But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. I gain no
deeper knowledge about myself, no new knowledge can be extracted
from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any
of this. This confession has meant nothing...
He knows that losing his connection with even the most insane people will mean his internal pain will find no catharsis. Nobody can reach him and soothe his pain. So he inflicts his pain on others, even though it doesn’t help his pain, because it’s better than not doing anything. All he has left are the drawings that Jean has discovered, his last call for help.
Pain will always exist. But connection makes us understand that our pain is human, even our pain seems to come out of us in terrifying ways. In this way, Mary Harron has created a feminist movie by simply letting guys have emotions. The consequence of allowing men to have feelings is that they want to find other people who truly understand them. Patrick and his coworkers simply “fit in” but they don’t belong to each other, to anything at all beyond a sheer facade, a mask that can be put on and peeled off at the end of each day.
Then maybe we can rework toxic masculinity from being a way to have power in social situations to wanting to just “fit in” as a way to get some sort of connection to others, even if the people you hang out with don’t really understand you. But the consequence of this is that these shallow connections don’t fulfill us, and when we undergo pain, it becomes easier to take it out on these people that you don’t even like anyway, or people who aren’t even in your ingroup. When men see Patrick Bateman as a sigma male, is it that they see someone in control? Or is it that they see someone who shows a way to cope with the pain they feel, even if the method is violent and doesn’t even work, but at least it seems cathartic on the movie screen?