Oughts From the Aughts: American Psycho (2000)
My favorite underrated gems from the 2000s, explained in under 2010 words
“It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.” -David Brooks
“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
Recently, fitness influencer Ashton Hall’s morning routine went viral.
He rises before 4:00 a.m. and spends the next five hours performing a dizzying, obsessive sequence of meditation, journaling, sprints, and dunking his head in bowls of artisanal spring water. He doesn’t sit down to eat or work until after 9:00 a.m.
It’s the kind of masochistic, unsustainable wellness-bro nonsense people like me love to mock.
And mock they did.
Realists noted that a marathon-length morning routine is neither advisable nor sustainable. Skeptics observed that the only “job-like” thing he does is mutter, “so looking at it bro, we gotta go ahead and get at least 10,000”—before being handed a meal and mineral water by an off-screen woman. Fitness experts argued that Hall, who is as jacked as an action figure, definitely didn’t get that way from the tepid pushups and treadmill sprints we see—heavy barbells and steroids were likely involved. Nitpickers gleefully pointed out discrepancies in the timestamps— Hall swan dives into a pool and hovers mid-air for four angelic minutes.
My favorite take was from a Youtube commenter on a reaction video who just completely— and poetically— lost it:
“His routine is the equivalent of someone force-feeding you glass while reading you LinkedIn quotes. His fake hustle porn lifestyle is a horror film where the monster is productivity. I imagine him tucking himself in at 7:36pm, reciting affirmations while his skin peels off to reveal another brand deal underneath. I imagine him brushing his teeth with battery acid just to feel something. I imagine him staring at a ring light for so long that it becomes God. Ashton Hall is not a man. He’s a symptom. A smiling virus wrapped in Lululemon and trauma. His daily routine isn’t a schedule— it’s a curse. And every time I see it, I get closer to stapling my phone shut and walking into the ocean, whispering ‘rise and grind’ as the tide takes me.”
All of these critiques touch on the same issue.
Hall’s routine is a polished performance of a false reality—a near-perfect metaphor for the influencer as a poignant and parasitic symbol of late-stage capitalism. Nowhere is performance more marketable—or more mistaken for reality—than in America’s twin temples: wealth and health. This, I suspect, is why one morning routine managed to trigger such strong reactions from so many people. The implication—that if my morning looked like his, I’d be equally jacked and wealthy—is as seductive as it is impossible.
No real human being—including Ashton Hall—lives this way.
This epitomizes the kind of shiny, muscular nothingness that’s taken over the fitness landscape in the past decade. Yet while Hall embodies everything I loathe about Andrew Huberman, the person he reminds me of most isn’t even real: Patrick Bateman.
Patrick Bateman also has an iconic morning routine.
Like Hall, he’s ripped, meticulously groomed, and lives in a sleek, minimalist apartment. By day he’s a Vice President at a Wall Street firm, gliding through a world of Valentino suits, Oliver Peoples glasses, and exclusive restaurant reservations. But by night, he’s a sadistic killer.
In American Psycho, Christian Bale plays Bateman with unsettling precision—a man whose polished yuppie exterior conceals something far more monstrous within. The film’s most intense scenes—of violence, misogyny, and exploitation—have always been polarizing, and for good reason: American Psycho is, at times, brutally hard to watch. This and Midsommar are the most disturbing films I’ve rewatched more than four times. Like Ari Aster, director Mary Harron uses horror deliberately, never gratuitously. Every image has a purpose.
At its core, this isn’t a horror movie about a serial killer; it’s a satire of American consumerism. Like Jennifer’s Body and Starship Troopers, it was a sharp critique that arrived before the culture was ready for it—polarizing at first, then canonized as a cult classic.
Beyond its remarkable second life via ubiquitous memes, American Psycho has stood the test of time as a devastating condemnation of the toxic confluence of capitalism and masculinity in America.
From its opening scene, which is second only to Lord of War as one of the most visually arresting intros in film, it grabs you and confidently leads you to places that are as necessary to see as they are disturbing to witness.
Anchoring all of this is Christian Bale’s performance, which I think is a career best. He famously based his take on Bateman on Tom Cruise—a man he found handsome and charming, until he shook his hand and realized no one was home. His icy line delivery and physicality in the role are captivating and unnerving.
Just listen to him talk about politics or music.
He wears culture like another designer suit. Like everything else in his life, it’s just another way to fit in, to show off the kind of man he is, regardless of if he believes any of it. It’s the kind of vapid virtue signaling that’s cluttering Instagram and TikTok like plastic waste in the ocean. It’s the same depravity you hear from people like Ted Cruz or JD Vance, men who, like Bateman, smoothly preach a return to “traditional moral values” while clearly having no discernible morals or values of their own besides power.
The genius of this film is how it cleverly conveys these dualities through sharp, stylized scenes.
I’ve rewatched Bateman’s morning routine, the famous business card scene, and the climactic confrontation with the lawyer dozens of times just to bask in the craft and vibes of it all. It’s amazing filmmaking—haunting yet surprisingly funny.
This is a movie about duplicitousness, shiny facades that conceal a dark terror within. The stock brokers in this film are basically ring wraiths, hollow men with no greater calling other than greed, status, and vanity. Bateman’s world is so meaningless that the only individuality he finds is in the most depraved corners of his mind. Like a walking corporation, he is incapable of empathy and can only relate to people by exploiting them. His life is so cold, calculated, and comfortable, that the only novelty or humanity he feels is through violence.
What makes this film even more disturbing is how its ambiguous ending resists clean conclusions—showing us how the wealthy live in their own reality, immune from consequences. After Patrick confesses to multiple murders and no one reacts, we cut to Reagan on TV, calmly justifying the Iran-Contra scandal. One of Bateman’s colleagues wonders what Reagan really believes inside. Bateman cuts in
“But what’s inside doesn’t matter…”
This scene and this sentence capture the real horror of the entire movie. It’s not an accident that Ronald Reagan was an actor before taking over American politics. Long before Trump, Reagan understood that politics had become performance. This explains his revealing choice of words on Iran Contra:
“A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”
Whether Bateman’s murders were real or imagined—whether he killed Paul Allen or just someone who looked like him—is beside the point. All that matters is the performance.
Tellingly, Paul Allen’s disappearance is the only one being investigated. Nobody seems to care about the unhoused people or sex workers being murdered— they’re all too preoccupied with getting dinner reservations at Dorsia.
American Psycho endures because it’s steeped in ’80s aesthetics yet speaks timelessly about consumerism. Its critique landed years before the zeitgeist caught up—which is precisely why it’s aged like a fine wine.
Bateman has no interiority—because in his world, appearance and polish are all that matter. This is increasingly how our world operates, too. In the quarter century since we first met Bale’s Patrick Bateman, our men have only become more duplicitous: saying one thing and doing another.
The gap between words and reality has only increased.
Meanwhile, influencers have shown us that the self is capitalism’s final frontier—branded, optimized, and colonized like a tumor.
The true and lasting terror of this movie isn’t its depiction of one fictionalized psycho, it’s his eerie resemblance to thousands of real men.
We see Patrick Batemans every day.
Andrew Huberman builds a brand around his stoic scientific expertise and jacked physique while also cheating on and lying to five separate women whose feelings an d truths clearly didn’t fit his protocol for romance.
Donald Trump, failed businessman, known rapist, and reality TV star campaigns on his business acumen and tough guy persona and gets elected president twice.
YouTubers become boxers and fight washed-up pros.
CEOs cry on LinkedIn while laying off thousands.
Ashton Hall wakes up at 3:30 a.m. again—presumably—and prepares for his day…for six hours.
Bo Burnham gets that funny feeling again, the quiet dread that seeps through modern life, cataloged in lines like:
Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul /
A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall
Full agoraphobic, losing focus, cover blown /
A book on getting better hand-delivered by a drone
American Psycho evokes all of this. Yet what it reminds me of most is the most unsettling thing I read as a sociology major: The One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse.
Marcuse was deeply concerned with how consumerism was making society miserable, distorting our identities by making us crave what he called “false needs.” False needs feel stimulating but never satisfying—junk food for the soul. By indulging in them we often neglect or undermine our true needs. This leads to a world full of people who know the right stuff to say, do, and buy, but feel no real satisfaction—a world of Patrick Batemans.
As Marcuse puts it “the result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate belong to this category of false needs.”
Mind you, Marcuse published this in 1964—long before Reagan’s electoral landslide, “Hip to Be Square” hit the charts, or Wall Street nihilism became a lifestyle.
The One-Dimensional Man, like Office Space and American Psycho, was a critique of American society that was way ahead of its time. Many parts of these texts that seemed alarmist or hyperbolic at the time have since become normalized, accepted, and even emulated parts of our culture.
Influencer wellness videos like Hall’s are a near-perfect embodiment of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man: reducing health to a sequence of individual, aestheticized self-optimizations, stripped of community, connection, or care.
The infuriated YouTube commenter had it right.
Ashton Hall is not the problem. He’s the product. He is not a psychopath—or even a bad person. He may not even be abnormal. He is just making a living in a world that rewards image over reality.
The arc from Marcuse to Bateman makes it clear that Hall embodies a trend much bigger, older, and sadder than he is, one where appearance eclipses substance, your private life becomes consumable content, and everything is for sale, except for what will actually make you happy.
So when I see a handsome, stoic, unknowable man perform a six-hour morning ritual purely for the likes, I don’t see discipline or entrepreneurship.
I see Patrick Bateman.
And it terrifies me.