‘American Psycho’ Director Baffled By Bro Worship For Patrick Bateman In ‘Very Gay’ Film

“American Psycho” director Mary Harron says she finds it bizarre to witness “Wall Street bros” idolizing Christian Bale ’s character Patrick Bateman, considering the film is “very clearly” poking fun at them. While marking the 25th anniversary of the satirical slasher in a conversation with Letterboxd Journal , Harron said she’s questioned whether she “failed” in her making the film after seeing men openly praise Bateman , a cocky New York investment banker by day and serial killer by night, on social media. “I’m always so mystified by it,” Harron explained.

“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?” She continued, “I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them.



” The Canadian film director also finds it ironic that Bateman is so beloved by “sigma males” on the internet. The 2000 film is an adaptation of the satirical novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, which the filmmakers saw as “a gay man’s satire.” “[Ellis’] being gay allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males, which is also true in sports, and it’s true in Wall Street, and all these things where men are prizing their extreme competition and their ‘elevating their prowess’ kind of thing,” Harron said.

“There’s something very, very gay about the way they’re fetishizing looks and the gym.” Harron pointed to a moment in the book that she wishes could’ve been included in the final version of the film, in which Bateman thinks to himself that his co-worker McDermott (Josh Lucas) appears “puffy.” “There was a reversal of alpha male culture, which was more like the culture of teenage girls,” she explained.

“It was about insecurity and vanity and competition and the way they gossip. The way they talk about each other is like teenage girls in a locker room at school.” The filmmaker told Letterboxd Journal she attributes some of the internet’s misplaced reverence for Bateman in recent years to the birth of memes and “TikTok, or whatever,” noting there’s appeal in “[Bateman] being handsome and wearing good suits and having money and power.

” “But at the same time, he’s played as somebody dorky and ridiculous. When he’s in a nightclub and he’s trying to speak to somebody about hip-hop — it’s so embarrassing when he’s trying to be cool,” she added. Elsewhere in the interview, Harron compared the 25-year-old film, which is set in the Reagan era, to “what we have in the White House” today.

“American Psycho” is “about a predatory society,” she said. “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.” Read the full interview on Letterboxd here. Related.

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