The Horror of ‘American Psycho’ Feels All Too Real Right Now

“I’m not weird, he’s weird,” Donald Trump whined during a campaign appearance last summer after Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz called Trump and JD Vance “weird.” Trump seemed genuinely upset at the imputation. “I mean we’re a lot of things,” he babbled, “but we’re not weird!”

Toxic masculine antiheroes from The Godfather’s Vito Corleone to Breaking Bad’s Walter White in popular culture are generally presented as hyper-violent and hyper-competent—at least up to the point where they lose control in the standard comeuppance bloodbath. Not many movies or TV shows manage to capture this Trumpian image of alpha male as a mewling conformist. Trump wants to dominate and control and win, but he also wants to fit in—to be seen as the standard of normality. Tony Montana, guns blazing at the end of Scarface screams, “You fuck with me, you fucking with the best!” He doesn’t scream, “You fuck with me, you fucking with the blandest!”  

The toxic antihero driven to be the best is a cliché; the toxic antihero driven by a terrifying fear of being odd or out of ordinary is less explored, in part because it’s less attractive, less fun, and harder to fit into a pulp story of rags to riches and/or revenge. But there is one antihero who captures Trump’s odd mix of aggressive bullying conventionality: Patrick Bateman, from American Psycho, adapted from the Bret Easton Ellis’s novel for film 25 years ago by screenwriters Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner, and directed by Harron. The women’s adaptation of American Psycho imagined toxic masculinity as an emptying out of personality, rather than as an assertion of power.

Bateman (Christian Bale), like most antiheroes, is wealthy; he sleeps with a lot of attractive women; he commits acts of grotesque violence. But director Harron relentlessly eviscerates the energy, the allure, and even the agency that twinkles and glints around most antiheroes. “There is no real me,” Bateman intones in a voiceover as he performs his obsessive personal grooming ritual. “Only an entity, something illusory … I simply am not there.” Like his favorite musician, Huey Lewis, Bateman is hip to be square—so not weird that he starts to be more than a little weird.

Bateman is relentlessly repulsive, and, even more so, relentlessly bland. As an investment banker in New York in 1987, Bateman is supposed to be doing important things, all day every day. Instead he spends his workday listening to his Walkman, planning lunch dates, and sizing up the relative merits of his co-workers’ attire. Outside of the office, he goes to tanning salons, watches porn, launches into lengthy critical exegeses of Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, and other mainstream pop stars, and … kills homeless people and sex workers.

He also murders his colleague, Paul Allen (Jared Leto), with an axe. His rage at Allen is initially triggered by the fact that the guy’s business card is swankier than Bateman’s; he’s also irritated by the fact that Allen keeps mistaking him for another one of the interchangeable office drones in their social circle. Killing those beneath him on the social hierarchy generally has few consequences for Bateman, but killing a peer—and a colleague—attracts attention, and that pushes Bateman into a psychotic spiral.

Harron’s satirical eye is gloriously vicious and unrelenting. When you consider iconic antiheroes like Corleone or White or the title character of Marvel’s The Punisher, they are appealing in part because they are magnificently competent in their quest for power and in their manipulation of carnage. 

Then there’s Bateman, who aspires to that level of mastery. But he is, even by his own metrics, a failure. He almost breaks down weeping when he discovers Paul Allen has a nicer apartment than his—and this is after he’s killed the man. He can’t get reservations at the most exclusive restaurant. He’s incredibly fit and sculpted, but when he’s having sex, he keeps posing and flexing like he’s waiting for applause; the sex workers surreptitiously roll their eyes. He can’t even manage violent homophobic panic revenge: When a colleague comes onto him, he loses his nerve and instead of strangling him, he starts to whimper and flees. He comes across, in other words, like Trump insisting he’s not weird, or like billionaire Elon Musk pleading with people to love him after he’s threatened to take away their Social Security benefits. “My companies make great products that people love and I’ve never physically hurt anyone,” Musk whimpered. “So why the hate and violence against me?”

Toxic masculinity, Harron insists, is not powerful. Instead, to aspire to patriarchal rule is to become so focused on being The Man that you are hollowed out, with no self other than a rampaging need to be someone—anyone—else. 

The thing is that even despicable, craven, toxic antiheroes can be weirdly seductive, if only because men, like Bateman, often miss the nuance amid the desirable trappings. Full Metal Jacket portrays Vietnam War boot camp and combat as an extended exercise in humiliation and bloody failure. But to many young men who saw it, according to one Marine who did, the film was “beautiful and profane and dangerous.” The abuse, and the portrayal of easy access to sex workers, seemed exciting and cool rather than nightmarish—or exciting and cool because it was nightmarish. 

Similarly, in the superhero satire The Boys, Homelander (Antony Starr) is presented as a psychotic murderer and Nazi with a milk fetish and a gaping need to be loved. But he is as strong and powerful as Superman, which led a lot of MAGA fans to think he was cool and awesome (at least until the show runners made it more and more explicit that he was a satire of Donald Trump). 

In each of these stories, the genre plot and pleasures end up overwriting, or undercutting, the warnings and the mockery of toxic masculinity. Full Metal Jacket is a story about guys learning to be soldiers and men; The Boys shows a superhero fighting and winning; Scarface, Breaking Bad, and Goodfellas depict a nobody climbing to the top and reveling, at least momentarily, in wealth and status and sexual conquests.

American Psycho avoids this problem by dispensing with the genre narrative. The film is episodic—and more than that, as it reaches its ends, it starts to erase itself. Bateman tries to confess to his many murders, but no one will believe him—in part because no one can remember who Bateman is, and in part because Paul Allen, we learn, doesn’t seem to be dead. Has Bateman hallucinated the whole thing? Are his dreams of blood and meat and death just dreams? Maybe he yearns to be a murderer the way he yearns to get into the best restaurant. Maybe he has failed at both.

Men often want to be dangerous and evil, so toxic masculine antiheroes who are dangerous and evil are often also attractive. That’s why Elon Musk stood up at Trump’s inauguration and gave a Nazi salute. But they also want to be seen as fitting in, which is why Musk whines about how people hate him and claimed that he wasn’t Sieg Heil-ing. Toxic masculinity is a dream of being able to indulge your wildest fantasies of violence while still being the average Joe. 

These contradictory desires, to be both special and all powerful and to be achingly normal, are irreconcilable. Bateman is so insecure, so out of touch with his own feelings and self, so desperate to be some perfect masculine icon of success and power, that he can’t figure out if he is dangerous and evil, or if he’s just another “boring, spineless lightweight,” as his own lawyer calls him. He doesn’t even know which story he’s in, or if he’s in a story at all.

The core of toxic masculinity, in American Psycho, is not violence, or power, or even misogyny. The core of toxic masculinity is not having a core. It is dreaming so hard of being someone else—someone powerful, someone not weird—that you forget to have a self. 

This emptiness is pitiful and ridiculous. But it’s also dangerous. Bateman is so destabilized and so needy that he might do, or might be made to do, anything. The impossibility of being both powerful and conventional, both hip and square, means he’s desperate to please and desperate to shock. There is no way to perform a perfect hip square masculinity, which means that Bateman is a vacuum filled with insecurity and rage. He’s just begging for some other hollow shell—Paul Allen, Ted Bundy, Donald Trump—to tell him what to do, and who to hurt.

Patrick Bateman is not the toxic masculine antihero everyone likes to identify with. He’s the nonentity who identifies with and wants to be that antihero. Harron presents masculinity as void. In the era in which so many want to see themselves in Trump and Musk, hers seems like an insight we still need.