Since the exponential rise in popularity of social media we, the unglamorous masses, have gained access to the “personal” lives and thoughts of influencers: those who generate interest in a product or lifestyle through their posts on social media. The rich and famous no longer remain a mystery but are transformed into a ready-made product easily consumed by anyone with a stable Wi-Fi connection. Within each picture, post, or tweet lies a subliminal message pointing to a lifestyle of ease where the only conflict is which vacation property hosts these influencers’ next branded bash. Despite their obviously more lavish lifestyles compared to a solid proportion of their followers, influencers put a facade of relatability by joking about their lives and problems and hopping on memes. However, these attempts to blend with the masses simply display how removed and obtuse the upper crust is from the working class.
Twenty years prior to today, and shortly before the boom in proto-influencer reality TV like The Simple Life and Keeping Up with the Kardashians, came Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho: a satire of the lifestyle upheld by Wall Street yuppies of the 1980s. In the film, Patrick Bateman, our Charon in the Underworld of upper-crust New York City business executives, parades us through endless restaurants providing extravagantly disgusting entrees (the peanut butter soup comes to mind first), several monochromatic high-rise apartments, and the offices of Price and Price which operate more or less as a vehicle for brunch and whiskey on the rocks. There are hundreds of think-pieces on why American Psycho in any of its adaptations, be it the book, film, or musical, is a timely satire of society under capitalism, but there’s a near comical parallel between the stereotypical “influencer” lifestyle and the facade Patrick Bateman tries to uphold.
Patrick Bateman’s fixation on fitting in and preserving his self-proclaimed “idea of Patrick Bateman” is first seen manifesting itself into his obsession with brands and consumerism. One of the most well-known and parodied scenes of the film has Patrick narrating his morning routine as the camera voyeuristically pans across both him and the meticulously displayed serums, suits, and singular tub of frozen yogurt. Here Bateman not only introduces himself and how shallow he is, but begins selling his lifestyle to the audience. The pairing of Christian Bale’s meticulously toned torso and close-zooms on his face in a mirror are comparable to KylieSkin or SKIMS ads embedded in a mirror selfie, while the narrated shower and skincare routine could easily blend with the “get ready with me” videos sprinkled all over YouTube.
Obsessing over his looks is simply one of Patrick Bateman’s methods of fitting in. His preoccupation with status and appearances carries over into where he eats, what he drinks, and even his business card he carries. A running gag throughout the film has Patrick getting mistaken for his peers, with body doubles appearing in background shots of restaurants and on the street. Patrick even comments on how many physical similarities he shares with one of his coworkers while panning across a conference room full of near clones of Bateman. Influencers also share this obsession over appearances because their looks accentuate or are the base of their brand. The most prominent example of this is the phenomenon of Kylie Jenner clones – white girls with unfathomably dark tans and exaggerated lips and hips in the same skin-tight nude dress in the same white bedroom – which mirrors the boardroom of indistinguishable Price and Price CEOs. A large portion of the “influencer look” is derived from Black women and Black culture: large, defined lips, slicked-back hair with curled baby hairs, clothing covered in logos, big pants, small shirt, etc. White women have simply commodified something that Black women were mercilessly mocked for merely a decade ago. Patrick feeds off a brand and a lifestyle he finds both palatable and an easy coverup for his dastardly deeds in a comparable manner to the influencers who create a look built on a stolen and commodified culture and pass it off as their own.
In lieu of performing whatever financial business Bateman and his co-CEOs are all supposed to head, they lounge around bars or brunch places, each name similar to a pile of letters left over after a round of Scrabble. What time the executives do spend around the office center around nothing more than choosing what bar to wax philosophic about the perfect sex partner or whose white index card has a slightly more detailed gold font. These businessmen and their significant others obsess over names and prestige – ignoring whether or not the places they frequent actually serve something edible. It’s simply the flex of saying “I have a reservation for Dorsia at 8:30 tonight” that keeps them going. Influencers share this fixation on brands and foods based on looks and names instead of practicality. When the Emma Chamberlain hype was on the rise, Pressed Juicery was the talk of high school teen girls despite the ten-dollar juices tasting like melted grass, all the while LA restaurants like Nobu are referenced in songs as a symbol of wealth and clout. The most egregious comparison to American Psycho’s food status obsession is the food trends spearheaded by lifestyle blogs and YouTube channels like Goop, Bon Appetit, and Buzzfeed’s subsidiary Tasty. Plenty of food trends stem from these blogs for the sole purpose of beating the Instagram algorithm and going viral: the whipped coffee trend of 2020, elaborate charcuterie boards, insanely layered beverages, and overly detailed versions of basic recipes like toast and macaroni and cheese simply exist for gaining followers and accumulating likes. “Instagram foods” are simply the modern equivalent of the Price and Price way of fixating on restaurant names and flexing reservations.
Patrick needs to not only flaunt his status and looks but his moral superiority and tastes as well. The irony is that – much like the performative activism seen as of late on influencer platforms – Patrick practices the polar opposite of what he preaches to his peers. Ellis and Harron take the self-serving, throwaway activism of the bourgeois to a new level with Patrick’s homicidal tendencies; by having Patrick quite literally dispose of those he claims to support, he’s displaying an extreme version of how the lives of the disenfranchised hold no consequence to the upper class. The best example of this contradiction is a dinner scene with his fiancee and their friends in which Patrick includes ending homelessness on a list of priorities more important than Sri Lanka’s political uprising, all before killing a homeless man and his dog merely five minutes later. This mirrors the cycle of celebrities admonishing the behavior of another – sexual assault for example – while working with someone accused or proven of doing a similar or worse action. Actors like Kate Winslett and Scarlett Johansson, for example, have both vocally supported the Me Too movement and then defended working with proven pedophile and misogynist Woody Allen. More recently, Bella Thorne, who claims to support (and steals the aesthetics of) sex workers, scammed people on OnlyFans so severely that the company changed tipping and withdrawal policies for all other users, thus screwing over workers of an industry Thorne claimed to back wholeheartedly. Influencers like Thorne display major dissonance between their actions and their spoken ethics; the lip service they provide simply exists to quell any anger or suspicions of their true individualist values.
Patrick Bateman’s attempts to keep a facade of normalcy are undercut by his superiority complex and emphasis on conformity. His misreading of “Hip to be Square” or his usage of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and porn as background noise show how little he actually understands how he’s supposed to process life. Influencers living in their (sometimes literal) ivory towers share a similar detachment to how they’re perceived. Most recently, celebrities like Chrissy Teigen sang their praises for Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite and deemed it a masterpiece and, while they’re not incorrect, Parasite is a direct commentary on how exploitative the ultra-rich are and how they flaunt their wealth in front of their staff. If Teigen actually paid attention to what Joon-Ho was actually portraying, there’s no way she’d be defending its Oscar wins. American Psycho’s mockery of greed and wealth hoarding in the hypercapitalism of the Reaganite Era is a painfully similar prelude to the brand-heavy and profit-centered business of influencer culture.
