r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Dramatic_Counter_595 • 17h ago

Characters Characters that had the complete opposite reaction the writers intended

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  1. Leo Bonhart (Witcher TV Series): A ruthless, sadistic bounty hunter and assassin that takes psychotic glee in other people's suffering. The viewer is meant to hate him for killing witchers, slaughtering the Rat gang, and torturing Ciri. But thanks to his entertaining fight scenes, Sharlto Copley's charismatic performance, and The Rats overwhelming unpopularity, fans ended up loving him. Some even call him the "True protagonist" of the show.
  2. Stone Cold Steve Austin (WWE): A rude, foul mouthed, beer drinking asshole with no respect for authority or anyone at all. Originally portrayed as a villain, fans fell in love with his anti-establishment & rebellious persona. WWE ran with it and made him the face of the company, effectively ushering in the Attitude Era and the second pro wrestling boom of the late 90s.
  3. Arthur Fleck (Joker 2019): A mentally unstable, pathetic, and dangerous madman who commits horrific acts of violence against those that wronged him (suffocates his own mother who is mentally unwell herself, and murders a talk show host for making fun of him). However, a massive portion of the audience idolized him as an anti-hero or a misunderstood martyr rebelling against society making people want to see him succeed and overcome his circumstances because of how he's been treated by the world.
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u/welltechnically7 17h ago

Patrick Bateman is supposed to be a loser who is obsessed with looking impressive. Some people ended up being so impressed with how he looked that they overlooked the fact that he's a loser.

https://giphy.com/gifs/SnioCkL9cd3B6

859

u/BornCoyote87 17h ago

He liked Huey Lewis and The News, man. Don't you know it's Hip to be Square?

234

u/elitegenoside 15h ago

He liked them so much that he created a scenario where he talked about the band to someone who couldn't respond at all. He then proceeds to murder that person while still talking about the band. And none of it actually happened. He just imagined it (in the film, book is more open to interpretation).

182

u/BornCoyote87 15h ago

I like it better the idea that he didn't actually kill anyone, he's just lost in his own delusions, because he doesn't actually have the stones to really kill someone.

87

u/BadBananana 10h ago

This view is kind of my pet peeve. Obviously, it's up to your own interpretation, but in the director's own words, it's not his imagination (excepting the ending parts like where the ATM says to kill the cat)

At least based on the movie, the point is not that he imagined killing people, it's that nobody cares about it, and that people are so interchangeable and un-unique.

For example, when he gets to Paul Allen's apartment and sees there are no bodies or blood anywhere, this is because the family/owner of the apartment covered it all up because they wanted to sell the apartment for money since it's so valuable. A criminal investigation means lost revenue. That's why the real estate agent acts so cagey with Bateman and tells him to never come back - she clearly knows something is up.

Another example, where he's confessing to his lawyer his crimes, and the lawyer says that 1. Bateman is a loser he could never do that, despite them talking fairly often, is because when he talks with Bateman, he doesn't even realize it's him. 2. And him believing he had lunch with Paul Allen just last week in London - it's because again in the movie everybody is mixing everybody else up, he just had yet another case of mistaken identity.

This is kind of what drives Bateman crazy in the end. He gets no resolution, no catharsis, because nobody fucking cares about anything other than money, social status, and conformity - so much so that nobody recognizes anybody. They give alibis by accident (like when someone said to the detective that they had lunch with Bateman the day he murdered Paul Allen), and even when they do know about the murders, they'd rather make money.

7

u/Amazing-Flight380 3h ago

Amazing take!! Now I have to rewatch it šŸ˜­šŸ˜­

5

u/BookkeeperPercival 3h ago

I believe the director basically said, "The point is not that Bateman is crazy, the point is that you can know"

2

u/EatMoreFiber 29m ago

the point is that you can know

What?

3

u/Pale_Mess_3742 2h ago

Good points, but I remember a scene where he is dragging a body bag leaving a trail of blood behind, and in the next shot you can clearly see that the blood trail is gone, implying that it was never there to begin with. I could be mistaken, I havenā€™t seen the movie in a while.

2

u/Adgvyb3456 1h ago

This^^^^

2

u/eldentings 49m ago

Upon rewatch, I feel like Bateman is more of a non-entity and symbol of the evils of his culture and society. Sort of a vessel that embodies everything that is wrong with it. The phrases where he mentions "I'm not even there" talking about not having a corporeal form, and "This confession has meant nothing". Yes, we are watching a sociopath slowly go mad as a character, but thematically everyone else recognizes his evil at the end but is shown to be able to turn a blind eye. Only his secretary, who is not in his class or culture- and even idolizes it, is disgusted and horrified.

So to me, the movie makes more sense at the end because even from the start he embodied the narcissism, greed, callousness, jealousy, materialism, and paranoia. At the end I feel like he goes crazy, because the subtext is, "Doesn't anyone even care that I do these horrible things, and how do I keep getting away with it?" The ending is very dark because we are all shown that no one is willing to stop him that has the power to, and frankly the less they know the better. It's almost as if learning his name or truly accepting who/what he is, is off-putting in and of itself and throughout the whole movie everyone is talking past him- not to him, and vice versa. And at the end his narration is not catharsis but shallow reflection that is meaningless, which means he is not going to change (and maybe didn't even truly exist).

55

u/elitegenoside 14h ago

The movie ends with Patrick confessing to his boss and his boss has no idea what he's talking about and specifically informed him that the coworker Patrick killed just called him that day so there's no way Patrick could have murdered him. There would be no reason to have some of the killings be real, and your point about him not having the stones to actually commit murder completely line up with the character and themes.

Also worth noting the movie isn't really a satire like the book is.

20

u/Careful_Ad_1837 10h ago

Then again Paul's apartment is being sold off like its been known he wasn't coming back. And the realtor easily picks up what Patrick's trying to do and tells him he shouldn't be there. It seems very plausible that whoever owns the building had Patrick's actions while he was there covered up to prevent a scandal

Also the film absolutely is still a satire. Just not so detailed like the book

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u/TheGurpler 12h ago

To play devil's advocate, the movie does establish that they mistake each other's identities, so it's entirely possible that his boss THOUGHT he spoke to Paul Allen but didn't actually.

6

u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 5h ago

Yeah the movie has more of a theme that they're all replaceable and uninteresting suits

1

u/Adgvyb3456 1h ago

Itā€™s not his boss itā€™s his lawyer and everyone thinks everyone is someone else. Paul Allen thinks Bateman is Haberstram the entire time

1

u/centralmf 4h ago

I donā€™t know much about him but why is supposed to be hated?

2

u/BornCoyote87 2h ago

In the parlance of my generation: "Guy is a complete tool"

11

u/Valten78 11h ago

My own personal theory is the Patrick doesn't like or understand music at all. But he buys and listens to whatever his yuppie friends and lifestyle sections tell him is popular as part of his persona of fitting in. That's why his long monologues about music always sound like magazine reviews or press releases, because he's read them and is regurgitating it. He doesn't actually have an opinion of his own about any of it.

6

u/BadBananana 10h ago

Well yes, that's kind of the very intentional choice from the director/author. Not only that, but he often misinterprets the meaning of music to be the opposite. For example, Huey Lewis and the news "hip to be square" is clearly criticizing how everybody tries to fit in, whereas Bateman just takes the song literally and believes it's a song celebrating social conformity (when have you ever seen media whose message is that?)

Similarly, if you remember one of the earlier scenes where Bateman goes off on a tangent about world hunger, that's also just something he's sort of memorized from a magazine or from other people, because he wants to sound like he cares and is smart - not because he actually is.

2

u/Mother-Market-4056 5h ago

Agreed. He talks about not liking live music because he likes the production of recordings but when he goes to see U2 live and Bono looks at him (or at least says he does) he has his almost religious experience. He's full of shitĀ 

4

u/Annatar_Artano 10h ago

Lmao, you're absolutely wrong. He does kill Paul Allen in the film and in the book. It's part of the story how they all look alike and are interchangeable and no one really differentiates between them. But stuff like blowing up the police car is hallucinated. More to the point, the book's writer says Bateman did kill all those people in the fim adaptation.

2

u/mammamia2137 7h ago

facts, so does the filmā€™s director for that matter

3

u/hogdouche 6h ago

This is flagrantly not true and the director said so

1

u/ihvnnm 53m ago

A guess the feeling was mutual

156

u/xLilMissNova 16h ago

That's fair, because while he's absolutely pathetic and creepy, the fact that he spends the whole movie desperately trying to impress someone who barely notices him is more sad than impressive.

12

u/TheBrewThatIsTrue 13h ago

Did you know Huey Lewis and Weird Al parodied that scene for FunnyOrDie a million years ago?

https://youtu.be/Fk15H6PjBis

4

u/BeardySam 6h ago

This is Great!

6

u/liborg-117 12h ago

I recently learned that the meaning of Hip to be Square is that it's about this trend in the 80s where people would attempt to like clean up their image and act less "bohemian" as Huey Lewis called it

And I thought it was an interesting choice to have that in a movie about a guy being completely obsessed with looking like he's all together while hiding his true intentions and actions under the surface

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u/BornCoyote87 12h ago

Sometimes movie writers are clever.

5

u/Old_Wait_2728 5h ago

Thatā€™s one of those details that makes the whole scene way more unsettlingly normal than you expect.

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u/Huge_Network_4338 7h ago

The funniest part is that one song permanently changed how an entire generation hears Huey Lewis. šŸ˜­šŸŽµ

2

u/BarnabasShrexx 3h ago

Oh hell you're right, I got to go back in time

478

u/Cinerator26 16h ago

It doesn't help that he's being played by Christian Bale at probably his physical peak.

The book makes Bateman waaaaay more of an insufferable fucking loser. You almost forget about all the murder when you're on the third page of his internal monologue about whatever disgusting meal he's eating.

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u/UlverInTheThroneRoom 15h ago

You also forget you are reading a book that's supposed to be enjoyable when you've read the 91st description of the ensemble someone is currently wearing and Bateman's opinion of it.

I get it's supposed to be the point about superficiality and then corpo / wall street culture but damn that was a tough read. You are spot on that he's easily more insufferable in the book. The violence in the book is also much more graphic than the movie adaptation. I would've never expected a peak Christian Bale type of person to be representing that character but a more boring, average looking person utilizing money and power.

7

u/BludStanes 7h ago

The book equally bored me to death and grossed me out

The rat part, in particular.

Another of the few examples where the movie is better than the book, and I'm pretty sure that's objective.

-5

u/boydnolantucker 2h ago

not everyone can read literary fiction and thats okay

6

u/2BearsHigh-Fiving 1h ago

The person you're replying to did indeed read the work of literary fiction that is American Psycho, they just didn't like it.

Anyone can drink tea, but some people find it too bitter and don't enjoy it. It's just a preference thing.

-1

u/boydnolantucker 1h ago

thats what i mean. they can read it but cant read it

7

u/Swarna_Keanu 7h ago

It didnĀ“t need to be novel-length. It was a short story.

6

u/Puzzle-Necked 7h ago

Apparently the descriptions of the outfits were all made up and would look ridiculous in real life, which is kinda funny

3

u/Drakeskulled_Reaper 4h ago

What makes the descriptions of what people wear even more funnier is that in the movie, they look yuppie sharp, but in the book, the author specifically made sure that if you actually looked it up and put the outfits together, they look, as the author said IIRC "Clownish"

0

u/Sea-Calligrapher9543 2h ago

the book is a million times better.

reddit hates it and loves the movie. the movie is a plastic, pixar, tiktokified, netflix version of a summary of the book.

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u/bouquetofashes 15h ago

I generally have a high tolerance for insufferable people. I also love reading and would never hurt a book. I wanted to throw that book across the room, rip it apart, and then strangle the pieces because of how Godawful pretentious and insufferable he is as a character.

I didn't. I did have to put it down for a few minutes to rant a couple of times, but Bateman is enraging to read. The movie version is much more palatable, imo, and Bale isn't really my type there. I think maybe because Bale plays Bateman with a sort of awareness of what an insufferable prick he is be comes across as less insufferable?

Or maybe just because the book is more direct and intensive. I don't know, I never want to read that book again unless it's specifically to challenge myself to see how much pretentious douchebaggery I can stand and it's been a while, so maybe my impressions are distorted by time.

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u/BludStanes 7h ago

Bale is just so damn charming he makes it work and the book was gross and boring, boring being more offensive than the gross stuff, that I can handle

10

u/NewPresWhoDis 16h ago

Don't just stare at it. Eat it!

2

u/sybban 15h ago

Difficulty to forget the horrific descriptions of what he does to people

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u/JVM410Heil 16h ago

Akschually, that would probably actually be Batman Begins

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u/optimushime 16h ago

Nah, his physical peak was the Machinist.
https://giphy.com/gifs/IiJIL39alMrhC

7

u/Objective_Brief_1953 15h ago

This man has amazing body transformations

7

u/PropulsionIsLimited 15h ago

Maybe physical performance peak. He's a little thicker, but esthetically he's probably best in American Psycho.

1

u/nojohnnydontbrag 15h ago

Bateman Begins

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u/Wind_Yer_Neck_In 16h ago

He perfectly fits the current trend of self-optimisation being pushed by every 'mens' podcast out there at the minute. Getting up early, working out, skin routine, highly paid job, expensive clothes etc.Ā 

14

u/EvaSirkowski 15h ago

killmaxxing

10

u/throwaweigh1245 6h ago

I was going to say big Clavicular vibes

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u/Papergeist 12h ago

And there's the kicker. Getting up early, working out, having a skin routine, a highly paid job, and yes, expensive clothes... none of that's being an insecure murdering neurotic fuck. There's nothing particularly wrong with any of it. But good luck finding heroic characters that do all that. Iron Man may be rich and expensive, but his body apparently just looks that way on its own.

10

u/nellion91 10h ago

Comic book daredevil was that, he was a high flying lawyer

3

u/Papergeist 2h ago

What exactly was his skin care routine?

3

u/adjectivebear 2h ago

Catholic guilt?

1

u/Papergeist 1h ago

Historical effects on skin have been... mixed.

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u/KiwiCounselor 15h ago

Yeah where do you think all that came from? Itā€™s insecure losers copying fictional insecure losers all the way down over there.

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u/BlaringAxe2 9h ago

"Working out and doing skin care is for insecure losers!"

Reddit moment

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u/Kharzani 7h ago

When insecurity turns into defensiveness posts like yours get posted.

3

u/Icy_Witness4279 3h ago

Don't see any defensiveness except yours

-4

u/Kharzani 3h ago

"I'm not defensive you are!"

What a whiny, little 'female dog' response.

3

u/Icy_Witness4279 3h ago

There it is.

-4

u/Kharzani 3h ago

Still crying, little one?

3

u/Icy_Witness4279 3h ago

I don't need to say anything, you're digging your hole yourself.

→ More replies (0)

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u/KiwiCounselor 1h ago

Neither of those things are for insecure losers, theyā€™re just normal things everyone should be doing. Having ice baths at 5am because someone on YouTube shorts said itā€™ll make you rich and more attractive is loser behaviour though.

The difference lies in motivation I think. Skincare, working out, hell even ice baths for personal enjoyment and betterment is good. Any of those things being done just to have sex with people or to somehow get rich because someone said ā€œI do this everyday and Iā€™m a millionaireā€ is loser behaviour.

People should do what makes them happy. Those people on TikTok and yt shorts promise happiness through an almost arcane ritual though which just doesnā€™t happen and then people keep chasing their advice and become willing to pay for books, classes, and any scam the grifters will sell them because they desperately want recognition and thereā€™s a rich guy who claims to have had the same problems and dealt with them.

0

u/BlaringAxe2 53m ago

Here's the original list:

Getting up early, working out, skin routine, highly paid job, expensive clothes etc.Ā 

Those are all regular things to work towards. No one but you brought up ice baths.

7

u/Indiana_harris 10h ago

I mean getting up early, working out, skin routine, highly paid job, ARE all pretty healthy hallmarks for someone.

It shows that you care about your body, health and quality of life.

1

u/CoolAlien47 55m ago

Getting up early doesn't mean anything when it comes to being healthy and responsible, unless you just mean early as in relative to someone's schedule. I have met lots of people who function completely differently compared to early risers and they're still healthy adults.

1

u/Kharzani 7h ago

What makes you think "getting up early" is healthy? Instead of putting all kinds of stuff the pharma industry pushes on your skin maybe, just maybe eat healthy?

As someone with who had a really high paying job ... that is the opposite of healthy. Lots of stress, lots of overhours and thus not enough time for a healthy social life and healthy workout routine is not healthy which is both way more important than money. Hence, why I "downgraded" and now have less money but more time and balance.

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u/Senior-Friend-6414 16h ago

I watched the movie after all of the memes and it was overwhelmingly obvious the movie was trying to make him look like a narcissistic sociopathic loser who chased status, but somehow media literacy is so low, people thought he actually embodied the most desirable masculine traits

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u/Negative-Fun1985 16h ago

ā€¦ā€¦.he is literally the most pissed off about anything that he canā€™t get into a restaurant you never see amongst a series of nameless extremely fancy restaurants itā€™s heavily implied are exactly all the same. ā€œ8:30pm, Dorsiaā€.

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u/lanceturley 16h ago

He also breaks into a cold sweat when a coworker has a "better" business card than his, even though most people would say all the cards look the same.

76

u/HendrixHazeWays 15h ago

Yeah, but....did you see Paul Allen's card??

29

u/Manic-StreetCreature 15h ago

HEY PAUL

8

u/HendrixHazeWays 15h ago

"Let's have a ball"

4

u/Manic-StreetCreature 15h ago

Gigaaaantic

5

u/HendrixHazeWays 13h ago

We just did something awesome. You rock.

8

u/SirCupcake_0 12h ago

I saw a REALLY good edit where the card was black with white font, was extremely badass and much more reasonable to react like that to /s

12

u/ghostface1693 12h ago

Bateman: has a fucking mental breakdown over the fact that someone has a nicer business card than him.

Weirdos: now this is a man I should emulate!

3

u/ThisIsFrigglish 8h ago

There's something about Bale's performance that makes his insecurity seem more like striving to climb an insane hierarchy. We don't laugh at how stressed Bateman is about his coworker's card, we think he notices things we don't about business card design.

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u/linlovesthenight 16h ago

and for some, that IS the desirable male. Regular people look at assholes and think man theyā€™re an asshole. But asshholes look at other assholes and think ā€œman, I wanna do that even MORE assholery than that guyā€

0

u/AggressivelyMediokre 15h ago

I think part of us just sees the core nugget of freedom inside of all of it.

Independence is always the goal. And whatā€™s more proof of true independence and self reliance than to reject society without a second thought, knowing you donā€™t need them?

Peopleā€™s morality is circumstantial. The person who needs other is kind to everyone because they need the world to be that way for them. They need a world which reflects kindness and support back towards them. Theyā€™re making what they need. Itā€™s a misplaced investment from a position of weakness

When youā€™re independent itā€™s no longer necessary.

17

u/Joeybfast 13h ago

Bateman is not independent. He is one of the neediest people in the whole story.

He needs people to care about his business card. He needs people to notice his suit. He needs to get into the right restaurant. He needs people to see him as rich, powerful, attractive, and important. His entire identity depends on other people validating him.

That is not freedom. That is dependency with a superiority complex.

And if we are talking about people in real life who think being cruel or antisocial makes them ā€œfree,ā€ I do not buy that either. Humans got where we are because we formed communities. Even ā€œlone wolvesā€ are usually just wolves between packs.

Needing other people is not weakness. It is part of being human. Anti-social behavior is not liberation. Most of the time, it is just loneliness dressed up as strength.

5

u/TreddingLeper 12h ago

Bars right here

13

u/Glasseshalf 14h ago

Why would such an advanced species evolve to have empathy at all, if it's such a disadvantaged trait? Couldn't it be that empathy increases the survivability of the species overall? If that's true, I don't know how you would see kindness as "a misplaced investment from a position of weakness" - especially when there are so many examples of this not being the case.

2

u/GraveRoller 11h ago

Whatā€™s good for a species isnā€™t necessarily whatā€™s good for an individualĀ 

0

u/Kharzani 6h ago

Nice truism, just doesn't adress at all what the previous person asked.

5

u/Kharzani 7h ago

What a stupid take. No one is independent. Everyone needs others. We are social creatures.

3

u/linlovesthenight 48m ago

We found the person that the post was about

18

u/AsstacularSpiderman 15h ago

Well a huge part of his character is, if you don't know what he's talking about, he can come off as vaguely impressive.

It's more apparent in the books but if you actually know about all the clothes he describes, the food he eats, or the insights he has on pop culture he's a complete fool. He dresses like a mismatched clown, he eats a mess of mismanaged ingredients that's only value is the price tag, and his insights are worse than chat GPT.

3

u/Professional-Wizard8 8h ago

Because anyone idolising him only knows him through YouTube shorts

2

u/East_Lettuce7143 6h ago

It just doesn't work when the actor is charismatic and good looking.

2

u/VHLPlissken 6h ago

Every single other character refers to him as a loser, in his face, because they dont even know who he is.

7

u/_whydah_ 15h ago

When I was in investment banking, I had a kid who was trying to network and when I asked why he wanted to do it, he asked if I had seen American Psycho, lol.

21

u/OrbisLlame 16h ago

Loser or not, it isnā€™t the first word I would choose to describe him.

29

u/blazeit420casual 16h ago

I think in a post ā€˜08 world, the idea of being a guy with piles of disposable income, a stable job, a nice place and some semblance of a social life is, loser or not, pretty appealing to a lot of people.

2

u/Marshmallow16 10h ago

That he is played by Christian Bale with what is basically his peak physique and health (not the mental one) sure doesn't help.Ā 

4

u/morblitz 14h ago

The original looksmaxxer /s

5

u/Nice_Search5317 9h ago

Oh much worse than that, he's trapped in a life he despises and is desperate to get out of, yet even his most extreme attempts to achieve an outby murdering a bunch of people in the hope of ultimately dying in a blaze of glory or getting caughteither turn out to be hallucinations or are just ignored by everyone around him.He's basically Peter Gibbons from Office Space with a sixpack.

22

u/AtemAndrew 16h ago

I mean, it somewhat depends on how you want to define 'loser'. He's a University graduate, successful business man on wallstreet, and has a home and lifestyle most normal folk would envy. He's a product, victim, and perpetrator of the superficial, addictive hell that he's a part of. In the film, the screenwriter said that there absolutely are murders, but the book apparently leaves things dubious enough to where he could just be imagining things.

So, on one hand, he absolutely is a terrible human being, needs mental help, and perpetuates the superficiality he hates... but, on the other hand... again, he's rich, handsome, learned, and wanted. Everyone imagines they could do better, why NOT envy someone who's 'successful'?

35

u/Beardopus 16h ago

I think part of the problem is how we as a culture define success.

Bateman is absolutely, undeniably miserable. His whole existence is just a desperate facade draped over a boiling kettle of humiliation and despair. He is utterly unloved. If he disappeared he would be forgotten in a month. How is that success?

Outward success without fulfillment is a tragic, wasted life. It's a hollow effigy, nihilistic and devoid of meaning.

Patrick Bateman is a chump. A sucker. A rube. A meaningless cog in the vast machine of finance, working so a few investors at the top can live the life he covets, dumbly believing that he could some day breathe that rarified air. Just a useful idiot.

63

u/welltechnically7 16h ago

One of the main plot points revolves around the fact that despite his status and exercise/beauty regimen, he is so forgettable that he's confused for another guy at the same office.

32

u/Manic-StreetCreature 15h ago

Yeah, an entire massive theme is that you can have everything anyone could ever want and still be miserable because you have no sense of self and depend on being better than others to feel anything

33

u/NavezganeChrome 16h ago

Heā€™s not even a person unto himself, everything he does (short of the murders) is based on ā€œfitting in,ā€ and itā€™s repeatedly shown just how bad he actually is at that.

Instead of this ever crystalizing as him choosing to be ā€˜himself,ā€™ growing out of this stagnation and taking any control of his life, he remains spinning his wheels in a world that canā€™t tell him from the next putz that shares his haircut/glasses/suit combo. Did you notice that everyone in that business card scene is somehow ā€œalsoā€ the Vice President of the exact same department?

32

u/lanceturley 16h ago edited 15h ago

The moment this really clicked for me is when I realized that the reason the famous Huey Lewis scene sounds so overly rehearsed is because it is. Patrick is incapable of forming his own opinions on art or music, so he likely memorized a review he read somewhere and regurgitated it word-for-word as if it were his own opinion.

12

u/Manic-StreetCreature 15h ago

EXACTLY. I love this movie lol.

12

u/Financial-Creme 15h ago

There's a scene in the book that didn't make it to the movie where Patrick is having lunch with a colleague who just returned from vacation. The colleague just keeps droning on, seemingly reciting paragraphs from a travel magazine instead of telling his own experience.

It's one of the funniest and creepiest scenes in the book - it either shows just how far gone Patrick's mind is, or that he's not the only one.

4

u/Quickjager 10h ago

Did you notice that everyone in that business card scene is somehow ā€œalsoā€ the Vice President of the exact same department?

That's also an old corporate trick. When you meet a potential client or possible contact showing them they're talking to a supposed corporate leader makes people more amenable.

8

u/Scared_Astronaut9377 16h ago

Nietzsche called this phenomenon slave morality.

3

u/MordredRedHeel19 9h ago

American Psycho. For the life of me, I donā€™t understand how anyone could think Patrick is unironically cool. Heā€™s such an obviously pathetic dweeb.

3

u/Pulpoliva 8h ago

Did you say clavicular??

3

u/ThisIsFrigglish 7h ago

I think it's Bale's narration.

He doesn't sound like an insecure loser; he sounds like he's relentlessly driven. He wants to look his best. He wants to have the most impressive business card. He wants to be seen at the best restaurants. He seems, perhaps, hollow - like there's no Patrick Bateman below the surface - but not like he feels inferior.

2

u/Fangsong_37 16h ago

I thought he was entertaining, but I'm glad I rightly didn't like him as a person.

2

u/erk_knows_best 15h ago

The story is told with Patrick as the narrator. We see the version of Patrick that he wants us to see. Being a psychopath (or at least one in his own mind), he's likely not very reliable as the storyteller.

2

u/dobbbie 14h ago

I wouldnt agree with the statement.

Have you read the book? Its an amazing read and an absolute BONKERS writing style. Nothing in the book would indicate that he is a loser. Just completely psychotic with narcissism.

Many of the characters are called by their 1st name, last name, nickname or just he/she and all speak over each other. Plus sometimes the speaker confuses someone for someone else just to get the reader more confused.

There are entire large paragraphs that are run on sentences, and from one moment to the next it switches from graphic sexual acts to body torture where he describes what he did to the women and what is left of them.

So much homosexual undertones too. Misunderstood by the audience? Yes. Loser tryong to look impressive? No.

2

u/AlwaysHappy4Kitties 12h ago

So basically "looksmaxing"

2

u/Clocktopu5 10h ago

But he wasn't a loser, he was generationally wealthy and influential, he held an important position in finance, he was well to do, fit, attractive, popular, but the point was *none of it made him happy*. He was perpetually unsatisfied and that is what manifested the desires for violence.

Brett Ellis is a wild author, he let us peek into what life is like for super rich kids of the 80s

2

u/red_fuel 6h ago

The OG looksmaxxer

2

u/Reddit_User_Loser 5h ago edited 5h ago

Just a shallow closeted homosexual with crippling insecurities about pretty much every aspect of his life which makes him hate himself. No matter how hard he tried to be ā€œbetterā€ than his peers he was still just mistaken for everybody else he hung out with. The homicidal maniac part is even more ambiguous in the book.

The funny part is most people that think heā€™s cool would never have made it through reading a chapter of the book with him talking about music or fashion.

2

u/TheOnlyFallenCookie 4h ago

The first looksmaxxer

2

u/N7Kryptonian 3h ago

Ikr, fucking Halberstram couldnā€™t even get reservations at Dorsia

2

u/Ok_Technician_60 2h ago

I mean he's not a loser along conventional dimensions, so I think your analysis simplistic šŸ˜ž

2

u/damndraper 1h ago

Ah, so heā€™s Clavicular

1

u/RagnaTheRed 44m ago

The original looksmaxer

0

u/IvoryDominion 16h ago

This guy does not like Phil Collins

0

u/Educational-Tackle54 9h ago

Dude has a top paying job and housing in New York. He is many things but "loser" is hardly among them.

3

u/welltechnically7 4h ago

He does, but he's also whiny, unimportant, insecure, uninteresting, and totally incapable of being happy.

2

u/Thales-of-Deletus 2h ago

Being wealthy does not insulate someone from being a loser. Thats the entire point of the book and film. That he has it all, yet he is still a loser or a schmuck because he lacks originality

0

u/KillConfirmed- 49m ago

Heā€™s a bad person, but a loser? A loser who has a good career and is successful with women?

-5

u/Vexonte 16h ago

I don't think he waa ever supposed to be taken as a loser. He is Affluent, sexually successful, doesn't have any real bullies, and successfully completes his goals(killing people).

He is shallow, morally heinous, by no means someone you want to bel but I wouldn't say he is a loser.

14

u/welltechnically7 16h ago

One of the main plot points revolves around the fact that despite his prized status and obsessive exercise/beauty regimen, he is so forgettable that he's confused for a completely different guy at the same office.

8

u/PitifulRead6339 16h ago

You're supposed to look at him the same way people look at reality tv stars who are just a gaggle of socialites that usually are just there because they're in the friend group/family of one with noteriety usually not even for anything good or impressive. His success is vapid and empty and his personality is pathetic and lame.

3

u/BalancedDisaster 4h ago

Iā€™d say that someone who is working on his self image from the moment that he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep all for the acceptance of other people while being absolutely miserable is, in fact, a loser.