this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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People who like American Psycho because it is a brilliant satire of the sociopathy of the elite.
vs
People who like American Psycho because 'I'm just like Patrick Bateman, fr fr.'
...
Its the same with Fight Club, Falling Down, Taxi Driver...
Its possible to enjoy and be a fan of these movies without actually idolizing a psycopath... maybe you sympathize or empathize with them to varying degrees, but you don't hold them up as idealized character role models, you realize these are all very flawed, often tragic characters who ... basically become villains in (semi?) plausible ways, that showcase how brutal and broken society is...
But, so many people do actually idolize these trainwreck characters that now we've spent basically the entire era of internet based cultural dominance/exchange where any kind of admiration of these 'cautionary morality tale about a disaffected man' type movies is just immediately, often instantly viewed as a red flag by a whole lot of people.
I mean... your plot notes are on point... but 'yuppie' derives from 'YUP', which means 'Young Urban Professional'.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with ... the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc... stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don't see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich... are any different, I don't get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era ... were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath... or at least, he seems to think he is... he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is ... he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms... which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the 'perfect' yuppie... and he cannot maintain sanity as a 'perfect' yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we're seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole... all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I'm trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class... of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman's interactions with others in that culture)
To people who like American psycho: read the book and get cured, it's one of the worst books I have ever read (long story short, I only had that one book over like months, so I finished it. A scoolkid could have written it + some unnecessary ultra violence, IMO).