Being Patrick Bateman

How the system cons us into conformity

This month will mark the ten-year anniversary of my first full year living in a big city and working for a large corporate entity. But more importantly it marks a decade since I became part of the machine. By April 2012, I had successfully transformed myself from one walking cliché into another: from the cynical, anti-establishment student-cum-musician; to the suited and booted, American Express brandishing Patrick Bateman wannabe.

Looking back now, I find it significant on several levels that I chose this character to emulate. He would soon be replaced by Don Draper – perhaps a more refined, less caustic manifestation of the post-WWII Liberal World Order, but essentially the same guy.

What’s most interesting about my emulation of Bateman, as portrayed by Christian Bale in the 2000 film adaption of Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho, is that I had felt drawn to the Patrick Bateman character since the movie’s release, 11 years before I ever sat in a boardroom and compared my new business cards to those of my colleagues (yes, we did do that – cringe, I know).

So, I sustained the attraction all the way through my anti-establishment punk rock and hip-hop student years. This suggests to me that while I was raging against the machine, deep down, I wanted desperately to be a part of it.

I maintained this affinity with our culture’s most lurid depiction of corporate nihilism through a subsequent reading of the novel itself, and then a re-reading – somewhat disturbing given that the nature of Bateman in the book is an order of magnitude more repugnant than the movie, in which Bale’s performance is so off-the-wall, punctuated with moments of such jocund frivolity, that the whole thing takes on the form of black comedy.

Perhaps it is this carnival caricature, so successfully conjured by Bale, that kept me drawn to Patrick Bateman, even having read the book – and I should add that I was by no means the only one: Many others, perhaps even a whole generation of young graduates including close associates of mine also fashioned their own versions of the ab-crunching, coke-snorting, Wall Street wonk, in some cases far more successfully than I ever did.

Speaking on behalf of that generation of lawyers, bankers, accountants, and marketers, it was not Bateman’s murderous moonlighting that inspired us to dress for success and clamour for reservations at Dorsia – although who didn’t get a secret thrill of satisfaction when he dispatched the insufferable Paul Allen? Part of Bateman’s appeal if we are to be brutally honest, was that dark side, the rage that nests, mostly dormant, in so many young men, and which in most cases only ever finds expression within the confines of the mind. And let’s not forget that the general literary consensus is that Patrick Bateman’s killings were indeed just this – a fantasy born of a sick and corrupted soul; fictional events that juxtapose his utterly banal and pointless existence.

The art of literature and film is in the relatable hyperbole, and in this respect – yes, perhaps part of the reason we, the young male professionals of the new millennium fancied ourselves as scions of Bale’s Bateman is that dim, wretched rage and the dark fantasies it drove. I myself never went for chainsaws and axes, nor do I believe did any of my contemporaries – but herein lies the hyperbole. For which man has not had violent imaginings of one sort or another? And where do these come from? Is it the great chasm in our lives? The void where God, family and community used to be and where now only exists Instagram, UberEATS and Netflix? None of these things existed when Easton Ellis was writing his landmark novel, but really, are they so different to the things that filled Patrick Bateman’s life?

Aside from the existential angst though, what was it that made Bateman such an antihero? Why did I try to dress like him? Post quotes of his on my Facebook wall, and pronounce, any time someone suggested eating out: “I’m not going anywhere unless we have a reservation” (a quip I still occasionally enjoy using, I must admit).

The answer is somewhat of a paradox, and it has taken me many years to work this out. Apart from his obvious socioeconomic status, the reason Bateman was a desirable object of imitation for me was his complete superficiality and indistinguishableness. He was part of the club. He was part of the machine – and the machine likes its cogs to be uniform. In the words of Bateman himself, when his fiancé says to him, “You hate that job anyway. I don't see why you don't just quit.” He replies, “Because I want to fit in.”

This is a core theme in the book and the movie, and Patrick Bateman discusses the concept further as he rhapsodises about Huey Lewis and the News just before killing Paul Allen when he acknowledges “the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends” as expressed in the lyrics of “Hip To Be Square”.

I rejected my traditional middleclass upbringing in my late teens and bummed around smoking weed and making angry music for ten years because I had tapped into the rage element our modern existential crisis, and I acted out in the best tradition of Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, but deep down, all those years, I really wanted to fit in.

The same held true when I finally did enter the corporate world and got my Brooks Brothers suits and embossed business cards – I hated my job, but I wanted to fit in. The job was the necessary penance which furnished the oysters and Moët, the $55 dollar haircuts and the trips to Europe, the strip clubs and drugs, the patent leather gloves and camelhair coat, the martinis and the endless brunches, lunches and dinners.

At the time I saw myself as very special – a class act. A brooding creative genius like Don Draper. And indeed, in time, a Gatsby-like figure who threw wild parties and defied conventional expectations. Here again we see the adoption of two more classic depictions of the corrupted American Dream. And again, at the heart of both these characters we find a paradox – a desperate need to fit in.

I don’t believe it is accidental that my corporate journey took me from Patrick Bateman to Don Draper, to Jay Gatsby. Like these three men, I presented myself as something shining and enigmatic, but in reality, I was rather unremarkable: just as prone to alcoholism or tragic lovesickness; just as desperate to escape my past and be something more; equally likely to take advantage of others for my own selfish ends; indeed, just as indistinguishable from my colleagues as Patrick Bateman was from Marcus Halberstram.

This actually played itself out in an eerie pastiche of American Psycho: Myself and an ex-colleague were always being confused for one another – people would get in the elevator with me and say, “Hello Sean, how are things?” It seemed logical because Sean did the same exact thing I did and he also had a penchant for Brooks Brothers suits and silk pocket squares. Sean and I even went to the same barber, although I had a slightly better haircut.

And this, I believe, is much of what these characters are about and why I and others have invested such time and energy, whether consciously or not, in emulating them. We believe it is because we are aiming for greatness, for status and distinction. What we are really chasing is a form of anonymity. Security within the machine. The status we achieve is membership of the club.

Whatever it is we are running from or chasing, the machine can provide a haven where these things we seek can be attained. For Dick Whitman to escape the shame of his impoverished past he had to become Don Draper – literally taking the identity of another man. Even Gatsby, his tremendous charisma and sensitivity notwithstanding, is motivated by the mundane. He too is running from his penniless roots, but he also covets the love of Daisy. To get this, he believes he must become at least as rich and influential as her husband, Tom Buchanan – saying to Tom “The only respectable thing about you, old sport, is your money... Now I've just as much as you. That means we're equal.”

What happens to Draper and Gatsby at the end of their respective pantomimes? They are forgotten and replaced. Having acquired Don’s advertising agency, the McCann executives express disappointment at his long, unexplained absence, but business continues happily without him. And after being shot by Wilson, no one attends Gatsby’s funeral. The machine granted them their wishes, but it did not bring them peace or immortality.

And what of Patrick Bateman? As far as I can tell, he sought meaning. This he finds in the machine – it gives him what he thinks he needs, and his gross consumerism is an enduring symbol of the worst aspects of our culture. But, in the end, like Draper and Gatsby “there is no catharsis”, and he gains “no deeper knowledge” of himself.

My journey into the machine brought me to this same desolate precipice and left me staring into the inky abyss of my own complete lack of originality or purpose.

Where does one go from there? Unlike American Psycho, and Mad Men, there is no neat little closing scene. Our stories go on. I have much more to say about the machine – about the corporate clone world where I once sought meaning – suffice to say for now, that the big lesson I learned is the machine can give you many things, but it cannot make you – you.

These roles we play, the status we pursue, it’s a con. It’s set up this way to mould us into what the machine needs us to be. And the one thing the machine must not allow, under any circumstance, is for us to be ourselves. And it does all this so well, that even as we’re raging against it, twenty-two and stoned, pretending to be Sid Vicious, in our heart of hearts, we actually just want to fit in.

Who then does one emulate, once in possession of this unsettling knowledge? The answer is obvious and not at all profound. It brings us, in fact, to the tritest of cliches: To be oneself.

I still own my Brooks Brothers suits and my patent leather gloves. And I still work for the machine, albeit from home now, so I don’t often wear my suits these days. But when I do, I try to wear them simply because it’s nice to look smart from time to time, and not because I’m trying to be Patrick Bateman or Don Draper.

Who am I trying to be? Who am I going to be now? Well, to quote Forrest Gump: “Aren’t I going to be me?”

This is the hard part, and the machine can’t give it to me. But as I type the final words of this article, making sense of the problem I’ve been trying to pick apart, I feel that elusive essence, that thing which is entirely and unabashedly – me.

In Dead Poets Society, teacher John Keating, played by the late great Robin Williams, quotes this Walt Whitman poem to his students:

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,

Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

                                       Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Keating repeats the final line and looks around at the boys and says, “What will your verse be?”