The title of this post was actually my Tinder bio for a little bit until I realized that is a terrible idea. I got the term from ChimpKiller69 , one of my favorite TikTokers (who uses it ironically, in case that’s not clear). And while I do think that saying “Sigma Patrick Bateman Gigachad” is gold-tier humor, I also have to sigh and understand that not everyone will realize that I am joking. That’s because a lot of people aren’t when they compare themselves to Patrick Bateman.
You search “Patrick Bateman” on Tik Tok and you’re in for a miserable time. You’ll find countless edits of people glamorizing the main character of the film, mixing shots of him looking sexy with shots of him violently murdering people. As heavy handed as American Psycho is (and I say that lovingly), people still managed to come away from the filming unironically loving Patrick Bateman. The question I want to explore is: Why?
Patrick Bateman, at his core, is a terrified and delusional character. He works a job he doesn’t really need to work because he wants to “fit in.” He cares so much about how his business card looks that he is driven to murderous fantasies (that may or may not happen in real life). The business card is a perfect symbol of vanity: one’s all important name, written in tiny letters at the center of a tiny card. He is pathetic.
After reading bell hooks’ popular self-help/criticism book all about love, I finally understood the cliché: “If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else.” When you do not have a means of validating yourself internally, you will seek external validation. The problem that our society is founded upon systems of domination, so to seek validation from that society is to seek to dominate.
“Patriarchy, like any system of domination (for example, racism), relies on socializing everyone to believe that in all human relations there is an inferior and superior party, on person is strong, the other weak, and that it is therefore natural for the powerful to rule over the powerless.”
bell hooks, all about love, p. 97.
Patrick Bateman hates himself and seeks all forms of external validation, from looking beautiful to rehearsing progressive political talking points. This search for external validation is also a search for power: he feels powerless and so wants to violently exert his power over others.
Understanding Patrick Bateman in these terms can give us a better understanding as to why lonely Tik Tokers relate to the character. @patrickbateman_200 is a textbook case here. I don’t pretend to understand this person’s situation, nor do I want to condone their behavior. Their Tik Toks, however, draw a very clear line between “I lack validation” and “I want to kill people the way Patrick Bateman does.”
When one has no internal nor external validation, the only option left is to put on the rain coat and get ready for bloody domination. It’s also clear that this person is being somewhat ironic— I don’t think this person fully wants to kill people— but the feeling expressed is very real.
Self-hatred can lead to violent fantasies. To draw that point out a bit further, I’d like to conclude on a little comparison between American Psycho and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The scenes with Willem Dafoe’s Donald Kimball so closely resemble the scenes with Porfiry Petrovich that they must be intentional allusions. The first time Kimball meets Bateman, the latter pretends he is joking around on the phone with a good friend to be casual. Likewise, the first time Porfiry meets Raskolnikov, the latter enters the room intentionally joking with his friend to come off as casual (compare this scene with Part 3, Chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment). Both Kimball and Porfiry see right through the tricks and toy with the guilty party . Raskolnikov is quite like Bateman as well. He hates himself yet also imagines himself as a Napoleon, better than everyone, who has a right to dominate others.
The phenomenon of people resorting the violent fantasies to cope with their feeling of powerlessness has been around since at least the 19th century. These TikToks are more evidence of how systems of domination in Western society still hold a firm grip on us.
P.S.
One last thought that could not find a place in this piece but which you still might find provoking. In the scene where Patrick is filming himself with two sex workers, he tells one of them to say hi to the camera. She spikes the camera and waves. The feminist filmmaking tradition of the women looking back at the male gaze of the camera has its roots in Laura Mulvey’s essay, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, in which she coins the term “male gaze.” Camera spikes are a way for women to strike back at the men objectifying them with their eyes, reminding viewers of their humanity, their subjectivity. Even though Patrick is the one who commands Christie to look at the camera, the effect is that the spectator remembers Christie’s subjectivity. What do you think?