It’s been 25 years since American Psycho slunk its way on to movie screens. Yet the film, starring Christian Bale as yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, has never quite managed to die.

The satirical horror film, directed by filmmaker Mary Harron and adapted from a 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, follows the exploits of a 26-year-old investment banker who spends his days competing with his friends about who has the coolest business cards and who can get into the nicest restaurants, and his nights wantonly murdering and torturing his victims.

Last fall, Lionsgate announced a new adaptation of Ellis’s novel, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Austin Butler. Online, meanwhile, smarmy, bloody Bateman is at the center of memes, reaction GIFs, and fancams galore. Something about the combination of his goofy, slightly inhuman facial expressions, his violent exploits, and his sharply tailored suits make him perfect fodder for the internet — especially among young men, who play with absurdist memes that revere Bateman as a “sigma male,” the pinnacle of aspirational masculinity.

In the more pathological corners of the manosphere, a “sigma male” is the alpha male’s introverted cousin. While the alpha male effortlessly commands the respect of his peers, the sigma is a lone wolf figure so hypermasculine and independent that he needs no human connection and thus is superior to everyone else. Bateman is considered so synonymous with the figure of the sigma that one of his expressions from the film — a smirky raised-eyebrow pout — is now called “sigma face.”

“I will never be Patrick Bateman,” a young poster mourns on a forum for lookmaxxers, an incel-derived subculture of men obsessed with optimizing their physical appearance. “I’ll never be a white, chadlite, 130 iq genius investment banker harvard graduate. Why even live at this point?”

Bateman is an expression of the most violent and depraved kinds of wealthy masculinity of which our culture can conceive, and depending on your relationship to that archetype, he becomes either antihero or villain. He was invented as a dark reflection of the Reagan moment, but there’s something about Trump’s America that makes him particularly, worryingly compelling.

Patrick Bateman began as a complicated yuppie satire

In Ellis’s novel, Bateman is a weird figure, positioned as a symbol of toxically masculine yuppie malaise, obsessively cataloging the designers he wears with the same half-blank, half-sensuous detail with which he obsessively catalogs the torments he inflicts on his victims, mostly women.

He was invented as a dark reflection of the Reagan moment, but there’s something about Trump’s America that makes him particularly, worryingly compelling.

The idea is that Bateman is what happens when a human being internalizes the priorities of the yuppie, luxuriating in meaningless status symbols. In the end, he becomes a shell of a human being, a monster who tortures, murders, and rapes out of sheer emptiness.

The yuppie as a cultural construction is a........

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