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This Pure Evil was Headlined on March, 2024. | ||
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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| NOTE: This page is only about the novel and film versions of Patrick Bateman, as his musical counterpart was not voted Pure Evil. Also, this page is a composite profile of his original novel and film versions. |
| “ | 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. | „ |
| ~ Patrick's infamous monologue in the film. |
| “ | I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip. | „ |
| ~ Patrick Bateman describing the decline of his sanity. |
| “ | Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I'm suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It's so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child's would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I'm automatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knife the boy's mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slap her face harshly and shout for her to calm down. | „ |
| ~ Patrick Bateman's thoughts while murdering a small child in front of his grieving mother. |
Patrick Bateman is the titular main protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel American Psycho and its 2000 film adaptation of the same name.
Patrick is a wealthy, materialistic Wall Street investment banker who moonlights as one of the most vicious and sadistic serial killers in fiction, as his tortures and defilements of women are described in graphic detail and at times span almost entire chapters; he is also cannibalistic, necrophilic, and habitually cruel to animals.
His depraved nature notwithstanding, he embodies the worst aspects of capitalism, all aspects of discrimination, and nearly every stereotype of 1980s yuppies through his greed, superficiality (from which he ironically accuses everyone else in his environment of suffering), and conspicuous consumption as he obsessively details virtually every feature of his (and others') designer clothes, daily routines, home possessions, and so forth throughout the novel. In addition to this, he occasionally goes off on lengthy, hollow, or even plagiarized tangents regarding subjects such as politics and popular music (the latter seemingly to himself as memorization)—most likely in an attempt to conform or to impress his peers via this contrived veneer of sophistication and contemporaneity.
As he seeks to in some way escape the mundanity of both of the lives he leads while striving to "fit in," his sanity deteriorates and his violence intensifies, while his even shallower peers and even his fiancé strangely either overlook or outright disregard his malevolent tendencies and the obvious hints thereof, suggesting that they are as apathetic and devoid of empathy as he is. Furthermore, he is virulently racist, homophobic, misogynistic/sexist, xenophobic, ableist, and anti-Semitic, but he harbors bitter, violent malice towards seemingly all living things nevertheless. A nihilistic capitalist to the extreme, his consumption of invaluable life is no different from that of products.
He was voiced by Pablo Schreiber in the audiobook, who also portrayed William Lewis in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the film, he was portrayed by Christian Bale.
What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]
Both Versions[]
In General[]
- While unambiguously insane and certifiable, Patrick is fully aware of his actions and intentions and knows that what he does is wrong, but still continues doing so, showing he still has a functioning moral agency.
- While there is minor ambiguity presented as to whether all of the depicted atrocities were actually committed and not mere figments of his psychotic episodes or otherwise unreliable narration, at least some of his crimes can be confirmed to have some basis in reality given their visible consequences—particularly his murders of Paul (whose apartment keys Patrick couldn't have acquired if he was alive, plus the aforementioned points regarding Wolfe and Carnes), and in the novel, Evelyn's neighbor (whom she notices has gone missing) and the taxi driver whose friend confronts and mugs Patrick for said murder near the end of it; his mental deterioration is, if anything, both a red herring from these atrocities and a consequence of his self-imposed hell wherein, despite his actions, he is still not distinguished from his peers.
- While he has some moments in both versions that may resemble genuine altruism, this is not the case.
- In the novel, he hands a $100 bill to a college girl whom he had mistaken for a vagrant and lets one of his dates go instead of harming her. However, seeing as this is a man who constantly sexualizes women and wishes his pain upon everyone around him, the former was done only because he found the girl attractive (and possibly in an attempt to feel a positive emotion rather than for her own sake), with the latter seemingly out of concern for his own mental decline as a result of his severely deviant behavior. If he simply had so much of an impulse to torture the date to death at that moment, he undoubtedly would've done so without hesitation.
- In the film, he attempted to kill Jean with a nail gun but got interrupted by his fiancée Evelyn's voicemail for him. After that, he spares her on his own, even though she asked if he wanted her to stay or not, and doesn't kill her, but judging by his tone when he tells her to leave, it's clear he wanted to kill her but was angry that his kill was interrupted (and the fact that the nail gun was not functioning), which ruined the moment. Later at the end of the film, he even insults her in murderous rage, calling her a "dumb b*tch."
- Throughout the novel, Patrick appears to have at least some genuinely feelings to Jean, even going so far as to label her as "the only real person" in his life and refusing to mutilate or rape her. However, giving his extreme and low views on women, it is clear that he is merely obsessed with her as a means to receive sincere attention and love (something which he desperately craves in the society of vapid people), hence why he tries to not lose the only person who indulges his narcissism, especially since it does not prevent him from constantly mistreating and belittling her (often for no objective reason, other than his aforementioned misanthropy).
- He has disturbing, murderous, or torturous thoughts and fantasies throughout the entire story, even when not acting upon them, and oftentimes persecutes, bullies, or abuses men of color, queer men, Jews, disabled people, ethnic groups, vagrants, or other such groups. He also regularly treats women with misogynistic/sexist condescending tones.
- It may be worth noting, however, that such prejudiced and classist acts are common within his circle—yet none of his fellow yuppies go as far as to mutilate, murder, or harass them. Furthermore, while said yuppies are overtly chauvinistic and discriminatory, Patrick goes greater lengths to feign concern for social justice and equity for the sake of his public image of modernity—perhaps also to appear more "with it" than his peers—yet ironically has committed the most grievous hate crimes, proving himself to be the most sycophantic of his group whereas the others are at least upfront in their beliefs.
- He murders someone (in the film, a woman who Patrick walked beside and talked to in the night) offscreen, as evidenced by the bloodstained sheets he takes to his dry cleaners, he then threatens to kill a Chinese woman who works there for yipping at him.
- He mutilates a black beggar named Al, and his dog, after giving him a (rather backhanded and abusive) pep talk. In the novel, he leaves them alive and spitefully tosses a quarter onto his mangled face while laughing at their pain, and calls him a "crazy f***ing n****r". In the film, he kills them both.
- When he re-encounters Al and his dog near the end of the novel, who are suffering more than ever (although the former holds a sign falsely claiming to be a Vietnam veteran for sympathy), Patrick hisses at him, causing Al to wet himself from fear, and looks down on them with disgust, deems them not worth his time.
- He nonchalantly murders Paul Owen/Allen by mangling his face with an axe, leaving him to die slowly within five minutes, then leaves his corpse in an abandoned building. In the book, it was presumably over a Fisher account, if not simply from impulse. In the film, Patrick did it out of spite and because Paul’s business card was better than his.
- He invites the prostitutes Sabrina and Christie to his apartment, and later harms them in lewd and perverted ways, forcing them to see a doctor and a lawyer for whatever he did to them.
- He attempts to strangle Luis Carruthers to death (and even has the sadistic intent to boast his affair with Luis's girlfriend Courtney as he dies in the book), desisting only out of revulsion for Luis misinterpreting his assault as homosexual contact. In the book, he later pulls a knife on Luis to keep him away, and he also abuses and threatens him for his infatuation (such as by calling him a "fa**ot").
- This perhaps goes to show that Patrick is an almost-textbook psychotic killer that acts primarily on impulse; he may lose interest if his blood-lusting impulse is deadened for any reason, which also explains why he spared Jean in the film.
- He murders his ex-girlfriend Bethany with a nail gun. In the film, Patrick confesses that he did it offscreen, but in the novel, it's shown that he brutally tortured her as well.
- He picks up Christie again, along with a lady friend of his named Elizabeth. He then drugs their wine, rapes and kills them both, and in the novel, also tortures them.
- In the film, he chases Christie with a chainsaw, and she discovers the bodies of other girls Patrick killed (likely prostitutes) hanging in the closet.
- He seemingly snaps and goes on a slaughter spree, eventually killing several policemen by shooting the gas tank of one of their cars and causing the vehicle to explode. As he scrambles back home, he enters the wrong apartment, shooting the night watchman and then the janitor out of frustration.
- Beforehand, in the novel, he shoots a street saxophonist in the face, enters a cab, shoots the driver in the face when he's too terrified to drive and begs to be spared, hijacks the vehicle and crashes it into a Korean delicatessen, injuring a cashier. In the film, he shoots an old woman after nearly killing a stray cat.
- After his rampage, he leaves a voice message to his lawyer and admits that he killed at least 40 people in total, and in the novel, at most 100 people.
- Although he does breakdown after his rampage, this is more seen as him panicking after almost getting caught, especially since he regained his composure afterwards, and in the film, listlessly monologues his disdain for other people's blithe happiness.
- A possible factor in Patrick's evil is the dehumanization of both him and those around him in his apathetic and materialistic environment, which apparently causes him to consider humans as fungible as the countless products he consumes; however, this would not expiate nor even explain his absurd degrees of unwarranted brutality towards both other human beings and defenseless animals in the slightest, especially seeing as he chooses to remain in such a corrupt setting. Given that American Psycho is essentially a scathing commentary on '80s yuppie culture, he is likely written to be as violent as possible, both to denote his moral and mental degradation as a consequence of his gray, lifeless world and to spite said culture by depicting a fictitious member thereof to be as horrible as possible, while those he surrounds himself with are similarly indifferent and devoid of empathy.
- It is even implicated that Paul's murder is being covered up if Mrs. Wolfe's (his apartment's real estate agent's) ominous warning to Patrick is anything to go by: "Don't make any trouble." It could therefore be inferred from this that Harold Carnes, Patrick's attorney, who passes his confession off as a joke, could be in on it as well for the sake of PR—and if not that, Carnes's alleged dinners with Paul are just as likely to be the result of the former confusing another yuppie for him, which is a recurring mistake made by nearly every character. Patrick is defeated by his own wealth, position, and success, which he prides himself on, and the apathy of his world.
Exclusive to the Novel[]
- According to him, when he was 14 years old, he raped one of his family's servants when he was in a chalet.
- He possibly decapitates Evelyn's neighbor, outright telling a horrified Evelyn that the woman's head was in his freezer. She does not appear to notice this confession, however.
- He casually mentions having bought a small dog and torturing it to death not even a week later. Despite having no onscreen evidence of it, his future and past actions show that he would be completely capable of it.
- He converses with an "old queer" about his Shar Pei, only to disembowel the dog, before stabbing its owner to death, and shooting at his face with a suppressed gun twice to ensure his death.
- He is implied to have pedophilic thoughts and tendencies as, at the end of the chapter "Shopping", he stares at a 10 year old and thinks to himself "not bad". Considering however that the setting is an expensive clothing shop, it is just as likely this moment was showing his materialism and he was only seeing the child for the obscenely expensive clothes it wore. In another chapter, he gets off on watching "beautiful teenage lesbians" on 'The Patty Winters' show as well as later being so excited as to almost cancel an elite meeting to watch a documentary about 4th grade girls giving sex in exchange for crack. Though it should be noted that it is not stated that the teenagers were under 18 and the latter excitement for the documentary could be mere sadism about morbit topics, as Bateman's thoughts at the time don't describe his excitement as sexual. Also, during the chapter in which he murders a 5-year-old boy in the zoo, he described a little girl (of approximately the same age as said boy) as "pretty" and even put his hand on her shoulder. And while his remark about the girl being pretty can be seen as a simple and harmless compliment, putting his hand on a stranger's kid is still a weird thing to do, especially considering who he is. Regardless on if Patrick does harbor pedophilic thoughts and tendencies or not, the above moments still make him and despicable human being and showcase his rotten personality, one way or another.
- He slits the throat of a random Asian delivery boy who was passing by, simply because Patrick had erroneously heard that the Japanese had bought the Empire State Building and Nell's—only to find that his victim wasn't even Japanese; he was Chinese. Patrick only reacts to this with indifference.
- While talking to a model, he claims to have beaten up a girl who was asking people on the street for money (and allegedly also had a child) because "she was too ugly to rape." It is unknown if this actually happened, but this is still an exceedingly revolting thing to say.
- He murders numerous women, usually by luring dates or prostitutes to his apartment, before inflicting the most brutal conceivable tortures and rapes them, which only worsen as the novel progresses. In addition, he cannibalizes some of his victims and sexually violates or mutilates their corpses.
- In fact, the way he tortures his victims is so excessively brutal and horrifying, they can’t even be described here.
- He drowns a puppy he had bought for Evelyn before wrapping it in one of her sweaters and throwing it into their freezer, for no apparent reason.
- Around that time, he claims to find himself standing over his and Evelyn's bed in the hours before dawn with an icepick gripped in his fist as she sleeps, waiting for Evelyn to open her eyes, implicating that he'd have no qualms with murdering her as well. He most likely doesn't, due to her wealth and status.
- When at a zoo, upon seeing the plaque of the seal exhibit warn that coins may lodge in the animals' stomachs and cause ulcers, infections, and death, Patrick spitefully tosses a handful of change into the seals' tank, reasoning that the audience's enjoyment of them bothers him.
- He stealthily stabs a five-year-old child in the throat at said zoo, then poses as a doctor when the bleeding and choking child's mother cries out for help, only to ensure her son's slow death via inaction. He does this simply to see whether he would enjoy it, disappointed due to his conclusion that doing so spreads less suffering and severs less connections than would the death of a person with a full history, who would have more to lose. In essence, child murder isn't evil enough for him.
- The story makes it clear that he wanted to kill the boy's mother too, and he just didn't as he was in the middle of a crowd and would draw the attention of witnesses.
- Upon trapping a giant rat that he found in his bathroom, he contemplates how he would torture girls with it and eventually does so while murdering an unnamed prostitute.
- He stomps the rat to death after it emerged from Patrick having used it to torture the girl via it eating them from the inside, and finally cooks the girl's remains.
- Eventually, his own bedroom is ridden with gore. He devours the remains of the girl (presumably that whom he tortured with the rat) as his sanity further deteriorates, reassuring himself that "this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is sh*t" once the iniquity of his behavior occurs to him.
- He spends an entire chapter finally engaging in introspection during his date with Jean, showing awareness of his heartlessness and admitting his limitless malice, yet in spite of this, he does not decide to change in the slightest; he appears to discover the closest thing to an epiphany he ever has and simply ignores it, continuing to be a monster with total indifference.
- He has given Jeanette a black eye and claims to have had five children aborted—two of whom he aborted himself.
- He treats Evelyn and Jean, his own fiancé and secretary, respectively, horribly—despite seeing Jean as the only "real" person in his life. For instance, he once covers a urinal cake in chocolate and spitefully deceives Evelyn into eating it, then eventually coldly dumps her in public before FedExing her a box of flies with a note telling her to go on a diet (despite not needing one), and gives Jean nothing much more than orders as one would to a servant while disregarding her feelings for him. Furthermore, he has an affair with Courtney, one of Evelyn's closest friends, in which he beats her on one occasion. This further proves that Patrick is incapable of (or unwilling to provide) affection.
- While his family is mentioned in certain chapters, i.e., his brother Sean, his mother, and his deceased father, later on, this is not done of his own volition, and he only ever expresses either obvious hatred (particularly towards Sean) or indifference towards them therein.
- His actions were so harrowing that in the metafictional Lunar Park, a fictional Ellis grew disdainful of his own creation and killed off Bateman by writing him to die in a boat fire, needless to say, it is not played for sympathy but more so of reveling.
Exclusive to the Film[]
- While he has plenty of comedic moments throughout the story, they're typically played for black comedy and do not at all detract from his heinousness, and are in no way played for light comedy—e.g., his completely arbitrary and oftentimes grotesque insults or threats towards those he is talking to that go unnoticed, his tendency to blurt out blatant racial slurs and sexual remarks (especially when angered), or him ecstatically running up and down Broadway while stuffing his mouth with cereal and "screeching like a banshee" immediately after brutally murdering an innocent elderly man and his dog. His psychotic delusions are also ridiculous but are out of his control, only serving to emphasize his disturbed nature.
- Although American Psycho is undoubtedly exploitative, Patrick's actions are not used for shock value, as the author created him as a critique of Yuppie culture and to represent how he regretted ever having been one.
- He picks up a model, and when she tells him that he thinks all models are dumb, he lies to her by saying he doesn't. He then kills her offscreen, but it is shown that he plays with a piece of her hair while at work and also decapitates her and puts her head in a fridge.
Trivia[]
- While both versions of character are approved Pure Evils, the novel version is considerably much worse than the movie successor, as the movie version is never confirmed to have committed a child murder and lacks the exceedingly torturous brutality inflicted upon many more victims with it being depicted in graphic detail, and lacks some of the other crimes of his novel iteration. This was certainly done to evade controversy, as well as due to the difficulty of adapting such a novel onto the screen, as well as to not distract the audience from the main themes of the movie with needless violence.
- That said, the movie counterpart remains a malicious, cannibalistic, mass murdering rapist and his mindset mostly stays to be same whilst also lacking registered redeeming qualities and other villains to compete in terms of the heinousness standards, allowing the movie iteration to qualify.
- Whilst the movie iteration of Patrick is admittedly less deplorable than the novel's - simultaneously still remaining a heinous character enough to qualify as Pure Evil - he was initially considered to be Near Pure Evil, as it was thought he had a redeeming quality of sincerely caring for Jean, in deciding not to kill her. However, when this prevention was seen to not hold up or be true; in effect, being an impulsive murderer who simply lost his bloodlust due to the moment being ruined, he was approved as Pure Evil.
- Despite being a Hate Sink, and not intended to be liked, he has the unfortunate consequence of being highly revered by the "MGTOW/manosphere" community, whose members are impressed with his misogynistic/sexist attitudes towards women and homophobic behavior towards queer men. However, this is simply them projecting and assuming reverent qualities onto him as this is contrary to the fact that Bateman is shown to have awkward social skills, with many of his peers laughingly calling him a dork and a spineless loser and usually soliciting the sexual services of prostitutes as opposed to attracting them. This misaimed fandom was prevalent to such a degree that even Christian Bale denounced him as a joke in an interview and stated that he would likely find Patrick Bateman to be a very silly and laughable person in real life, his violence notwithstanding.
External Links[]
- Patrick Bateman on the Villains Wiki
- Patrick Bateman on the Hate Sink Wiki
- Patrick Bateman on the Ultimate Evil Wiki
- His novel version on the Reception Scaling Purgatory Wiki
- His film version on the Main Light Horse Wiki
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