American Psycho

American Psycho

By Stacey Hrubesky

3/09/13

The main character, Patrick Bateman, is a 27 year old man who makes his living working on Wall Street at a company called Pierce and Pierce as a young and self-obsessed investment banker in the field of Mergers and Acquisitions or according to his own admissions throughout the movie, “Murders and Executions”. A comment that falls on deaf ears because nobody is really paying attention, just going through the motions of their shallow society. Bateman has a deeply rooted hatred of himself. He dislikes himself because he knows just how shallow and empty a person he has become and he recognizes the kind of shallow empty society he is part of. We can see that it is his identity that sets him apart from the crowd he so desperately wants to be in.

His character represents the stereotypical yuppie from the 1980’s. The type that only cares about fashion, wearing the latest trends, and the most expensive brands. He is obsessed with self-image and status. Although family is rarely mentioned in the movie, Bateman does tell us that he has a narcotic obsessed brother who attends an Ivy League school and that his parents have been divorced for some time.

Bateman goes around killing innocent people because he doesn’t agree with who they are. He hates himself and the world that he lives in so much, that he simply has to murder all those whom he considers a detriment to society.

One main point of the film is when Bateman states “…there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” With this statement we can see that Bateman lacks affect and is unable to empathize with others. We could say that he has a psychopathic personality. With these traits he is prone to drug abuse, sexual promiscuity and violence. Which, in the movie, we see him do cocaine in the bathroom at a club, sexual promiscuity by having a three some with the strippers and of course violence by killing people.

Another main point of the film is, although was noted once, his parents being divorced. We can link this to Developmental Criminology. Our textbook states “….a number of personal and social factors related to persistent offending, the most important of which was family relations. This factor was considered in terms of quality of discipline