Mary Harron, the director of American Pyscho, has said she remains “mystified” by the enduring idolisation of the film’s psychopathic serial killer Patrick Bateman.
The director, reflecting on the film in celebration of its 25th anniversary, questioned the love for Bateman, particularly among the very demographic the film set out to skewer and ridicule.
Speaking to Letterboxd Journal, Harron addressed the cultural afterlife of the 2000 cult classic — especially its adoption by a new generation of men on platforms like TikTok, where Bateman is often idolised in the same breath as figures like Andrew Tate.
“There’s [Bateman] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power,” Harron acknowledged. “But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous … It’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool.”
For Harron, Bateman was always a satire of toxic masculinity — not a champion of it. “I’m always so mystified by it,” she said of the character’s rebranding as a “sigma male” icon. “I don’t think that [co-writer Guinevere Turner] and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them.”
American Psycho, adapted from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel, follows Bateman, a wealthy New York investment banker who doubles as a serial killer. Christian Bale’s portrayal, chilling and absurd, was intended to lampoon hyper-masculinity, materialism and the grotesque competitiveness of the corporate elite.
That many young men now quote Bateman alongside figures like Tate — the ‘influencer’ currently facing rape and human trafficking charges – speaks to what GQ once called “TikTok’s toxic worshipping of Patrick Bateman”, and to what Harron sees as a dangerous cultural disconnect.
“People read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read The Catcher in the Rye and decide to shoot the president,” she noted, pointing to how audiences can misinterpret.
Part of that misreading, Harron believes, is down to a missing piece of the puzzle: “I always saw American Psycho as a gay man’s satire on masculinity,” she said, referring to Ellis’s original novel. “[Ellis] being gay allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males … in Wall Street, in sports, in all these spaces where men are prizing their extreme competition. There’s something very, very gay about the way they’re fetishising looks and the gym.”
Harron also reflected on how the film’s themes feel even more urgent now. “American Psycho is about a predatory society,” she said. “And that society is actually much worse today. The rich are much richer, the poor are poorer. I would never have imagined that there would be a celebration of racism and white supremacy, which is basically what we have in the White House. I would never have imagined that we would live through that.”
Meanwhile, a new film adaptation of American Psycho is reportedly in the works, helmed by Challengers director Luca Guadagnino, with a script from Scott Z Burns. Austin Butler has been rumoured to take on the role of Bateman, although no official casting has been confirmed.
