Being a young, white man involved with social media, it isn’t hard to stumble upon content about American Psycho. Whether it is manifested as “fan cams” on TikTok of main character Patrick Bateman walking around the office listening to music or workout routines crafted to help someone sculpt Bateman’s chiseled physique, the 2000 cult classic has achieved a status of “memedom” and adoration that few films can claim to have more than twenty years after their release. Not only has American Psycho surged back into the popular culture of 2020s America, but its main character has pioneered a term that defines a unique set of media characters that many young, caucasian, cis-hetero men gravitate towards, identifying with many of these personas so much as to even say, “he is literally me.” Through a visual analysis, and drawing upon Stuart Hall’s writings on decoding, encoding, hegemonic codes, and negotiated codes, I’d like to break down visual structures in a still frame from American Psycho that might provide insight into why young men identify with and adore Patrick Bateman so much, and why there is a disconnect between what the creators may have originally intended the message to be.
The image which I have selected to analyze (Image A) is a still frame from a scene in which Patrick, in the immediate aftermath of murdering a coworker in cold blood, sits on the couch to admire the work he has just done. The body, in a pool of blood, lays before him on the ground. By isolating specific aspects of the image, I plan to show how the visual choices of the creators caused multiple readings of its message. It is important to remember that director Mary Harron intentionally chose to encode the image with a certain type of visual message. However, whereas the meaning of some aspects of the image were agreed upon by both the encoder (Harron) and certain cells of decoders (particularly young white men of the 2020s), we can also see that other aspects were not, leading to the conclusion that the reading of the image was a “negotiated version” (Hall 1993, 516).
To start, I highlighted the character of Patrick Bateman sitting in his tailored designer suit, trendy but not too disheveled haircut, and with a large cigar in his mouth. In Image B, around the image of Patrick, I have included many inserts of complimentary images that, I believe, represent an established dominant code of what it means to be “manly.” The images include depictions of famous celebrity athletes, movie stars, and models looking the same or partaking in the same activities as Patrick in the original image. Whether it’s Michael Jordan smoking a victory cigar after winning the NBA Finals, or Daniel Craig’s James Bond wearing a similar clean cut, traditional Victorian-style suit, each complimentary image is deployed to invoke a sense of intense traditional masculinity. Because these images are so widely acknowledged to invoke a feeling of traditional masculinity, they can be seen as almost hegemonic, or as Hall says, “certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed…but to be ‘naturally’ given” (511). And this “natural” understanding of what it looks like to be a man is exactly what Harron intended to show. Harron and others have stated that the work is satirical (Shapiro 2020). It is a critique of corporate greed and the hollowness and insanity of “putting on a show” in corporate life. And by displaying firmly established visual cues of masculinity into the image, Harron affirms that from the outside, Bateman is a very masculine, admirable, and successful man. This message is accepted by the young, white, male audience of 2020, because the codes are hegemonic. This is seen as an almost “natural” reading.
The disconnect comes later on, as exhibited by Image C. I have isolated the position of the body of Bateman’s victim, Paul Allen. Lying in a pool of blood, the audience only sees the lower half of Allen, his legs placed in an almost provocative manner, accentuating the curvature of his hips, buttocks, and lower legs. It is as if the dead body was posing for a seductive portrait, almost as if he would be propping his head up with his arm and gazing at a portrait painter if we could see the upper half of him. In my second manipulation of the original image, I included multiple images that explore how the positioning of Allen’s legs invoke messages about women.
Immediately, the placement of the body is reminiscent of famous nude paintings such as the Grande Odalisque, a famous 19th century portrait said to convey exotic eroticism and sexuality. Additionally, the inclusion of only half of the body is reminiscent of the popular Hollywood marketing practice known as the “Headless Women of Hollywood,” or the tendency to only depict women as objects to serve the male protagonists. Similarly, the more feminine and sensual position of the Allen’s body may lead the viewer to invoke thoughts about Bateman’s own interactions with women in the movie: hiring them as prostitutes, flirting with them, seducing them, yelling at them, fantasizing about perversions with them, using them as social capital, and of course, killing them. There is also nothing about the blood around the body or the blood on Patrick’s face that doesn’t scream “I just committed murder.” In all of these insinuations about women, Patrick is seen as dominant and sexually exploitative.
However, it is within this message that there seems to be a disconnect between encoder and decoder. Whereas Harron intends the feminine imagery and the dead body to remind viewers of Bateman’s terrifying mistreatment of women and his numbness to dominance over them, many white men of 2020 seem to see no problem with his actions or attitude. Hall states that within a negotiated position an audience “acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule” (516). So while Harron uses traditional masculine images to show the admirable “mask” of Bateman (Image B) and sensual feminine images to show his concerning sexist and dangerous dominance over women (Image C), the stated audience only seems to accept the hegemonic claim of the first aspect, electing to make a reading based on “local conditions” for the second (Hall 1993, 516).
But why is that? How is it that many young, white, cis-hetero men miss (or choose not to accept) the intended coding of the creator Harron. Why is it that some men seem to be okay with and even praise Bateman’s entire way of life, misogyny and murder included? The answer, in my opinion, lies in a much bigger topic, one that this visual analysis has only opened the door to.
Regarding why there may be such a disconnect between creator and audience, Hall states: “this in turn depends on the degrees of identity or non-identity between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted. The lack of fit between the codes has a great deal to do with the structural differences of relation and position between broadcasters and audience…” (510). Clearly there is an identity code that is not transmitting well between the two subjects. I believe it has something to do with the time in which the movie was released and the new target audience that it has reached two decades later.
In his YouTube video titled “Dissecting the Manosphere,” F.D. Signifier explains that in modern “cancel culture” and “Me Too” America, “for the first time in history, some white men have something they’ve never really had before: fear of social repercussions, a.k.a. responsibility.” In response to this fear of being held accountable for and judged for all of the things their race has been responsible for, there has been a new social trend that many white men have gravitated towards: Sigma Culture. Whereas “Alpha Males” are seen to be strong, successful, “leaders of the pack” members of society, “Sigma Males” often represent men that are just as successful and strong as alphas, yet they have removed themselves from the social hierarchy by their own choice and have rejected certain societal norms of manliness. They are “lone wolves.” This social movement can be seen in the rise of conservative and misogynistic internet personalities that prey on impressionable young men who are struggling to find an ideology. Certainly a thorough discussion of the manosphere could warrant many more pages, but I believe the systematic misinterpretation of American Psycho comes from this modern “identity” and way of thinking that was far different from Marron Harron’s and Bret Easton Ellis’. Patrick Bateman’s character, as represented by the still frame image, is the ultimate Sigma Male of 2020, successful as a traditional man in some ways (appearance, grooming, wealth, attraction of women without trying), while rejecting society’s norms and doing his own thing (killing and mistreating women). After all, for a generation of young, white, straight men who have been told their whole lives that the system is rigged in their favor and still can’t find success, wouldn’t they love to look for a lonely role model that enjoys all kinds of worldly success yet also rejects “the game” altogether?
The misinterpretation of the satirical codes of the image seem to be lost because perhaps the audience doesn’t see them as anything to be made fun of. This may also account as to why the film was somewhat misinterpreted even when it came out in 2000 (Shapiro 2020).
The “systematic distortion” of Patrick Bateman’s character as exemplified by the manipulated images comes from young white men’s response to woke culture and the realization that they are struggling to win a game designed for them. They have accepted parts of the dominant code while rejecting others, making their position a negotiated one.
Image A
Image B
Image C
References
Hall , Stuart. 1993. “Chapter 36 – Encoding, Decoding.” Essay. In The Cultural Studies
Reader, 507–17. London: Routledge.
Salamone, Lorenzo. 2022. “Who Are the ‘Literally Me’ Characters?” Nss Magazine. nss
magazine. November 18. https://www.nssmag.com/en/lifestyle/31458/literally-me-characters.
Shapiro, Lila. 2020. “Mary Harron on the Bizarre Legacy of American Psycho.” Vulture.
April 22. https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/mary-harron-american-psycho-in-conversation.html.
Signifier, Kayfabe, dir. 2022. Dissecting the Manosphere. YouTube. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1FkO7Tr70A.
Zucker , Steven, and Beth Harris. 2023. “Painting Colonial Culture: Ingres’s La Grande
Odalisque (Artykuł).” Khan Academy. Khan Academy. Accessed February 24. https://pl.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/later-europe-and-americas/enlightenment-revolution/a/ingres-la-grand-odalisque.