Sameer Ahsan | ENG 2100

American Psycho: Rhetorical Analysis 

Society tends to create trends that people tend not to understand and recently there’s been a trend of people attempting to show how they relate to Patrick Bateman without understanding the reasoning behind the actions he takes. Patrick Bateman is a sociopath in the business industry. He’s an egotistical man who desperately seeks the attention of his peers and being better than them at everything. Desperate to be the best Patrick seems to go to extreme lengths to be the best, In a scene with his peers, Patrick shows them his new business card. Afterward, each of his peers would seemingly one-up him and show off their own business cards, you can tell how annoyed and upset Patrick is whilst this is all going on. This shows how far to lengths these men would go to one-up each other even over the littlest thing such as a business card. He’s obsessed with himself and how he’s viewed by society with not a care in the world about anyone else besides himself who thinks is competition. 

Patrick gets to the dry cleaners as he is in a fight with the worker about his suit (once again proving how obsessed he is with his appearance and work) A woman enters the store and begins to attempt to make small talk with him and he begins to make many excuses of why he cannot meet up with her for dinner and speeds off. Another example of this is he begins to get intimate with his fiancé and instead of looking at her or giving her any intention, he’s looking at himself in the mirror. He watches everything he eats, and wears, he does ab workouts every morning. “I believe in taking care of myself: I eat a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine.” The director shows us this to give us an idea of how obsessed Patrick Bateman is with himself. His apartment is completely white, when you show different colors you can tell emotions with blue, red, yellow, and green. Bret Easton Ellis shows off Patrick’s apartment as all white to symbolize how Patrick has no emotions towards anyone or anything besides his work. They show this when Patrick begins to walk threw an ally and sees a homeless man, instead of helping the man by giving him maybe any spare change that he might have on him, Patrick instead begins to insult him for smelling bad and spits on him showing the homeless man no sympathy just because he’s in a bad mood after he was shown up by his peers business cards. Also, he picks up a prostitute from the street and takes her back to his place and physically hurts her, and rapes her. They do this to show that Patrick thinks he’s better than these people, that he pities them and can do whatever he pleases with them. 

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” Bret Easton Ellis has Patrick say this to show his identity and belief issues. Patrick Bateman’s identity to the public, his “friends”, coworkers, and girlfriend a respectable young man is all an illusion to the true sociopath that he is. However, it does show now and then an example of that is when he’s talking to his assistant who clearly has a thing for him. He goes on to tell his assistant who’s been nothing but sweet and try to impress him with the clothing she wears to “never wear that again” this is done to show how Patrick’s unaware of personal feelings affecting someone and a teaser of him being a sociopath. Another example of that is when they direct a scene where Patrick is at dinner with his fiancé Evelyn and he tells her right there that they should cancel the engagement and break up, this leads to Evelyn trying and Patrick clearly upset that she’s crying because it makes HIM look bad.  

It’s clear throughout the movie that Patrick isn’t very well known to everyone in his business and people in the movie mistake him for others, the author did this to show everyone what contributes to Patrick being a sociopath. He “kills” Paul Allen due to not only Paul talking disrespectfully about him but also because of his obsession with the “Fisher account.” The author does this to once again show how much Patrick is obsessed with his work and to continue gaining power or rank among his colleagues. Jean, his assistant finds his journal where he draws his thoughts and it enlightens Jean on who Patrick really is. They show us his drawings to have us understand the actions that he takes, he’s proud of them and thinks they are justifiable at the time of doing them. 

The author and director show us after a while how obsession can lead to bad habits as Patrick begins to have a heavy addiction to cocaine to shy away from his serious problems and starts killing people who have nothing to do with his purposes, just because they slightly inconvenience him. Such as killing a security guard who calls him “Mr. Smith” to which he takes to offense.  Patrick begins to realize what he’s done wrong after he tries to murder Jean and couldn’t bare to do it, so he tries to make his colleagues aware of the situation, his colleague begins to laugh at him thinking of it as a sick joke. The movie and book do this to show awareness and growth of Patrick’s emotions from the start of the film to the end of the film.

Patrick Bateman is a sick man who clearly needs to seek him for not only himself but the ones who he lets close to him. His actions are unjustifiable and he should not be a free man with the actions that he has committed throughout the film. It shows what obsessions can lead to and how the culture of the business world is toxic due to the standards that everyone in the film put themselves to. 

Source: Mauriello, Mark. “American Psycho.” LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 13 Mar 2017. Web. 19 Oct 2022.