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PORTSIDE CULTURE

FROM INCEL CULTURE TO THE WHITE HOUSE: AMERICAN PSYCHO’S DARK HOLD
ON MODERN MASCULINITY  
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Tim Jonez
January 29, 2026
The Guardian
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_ As the musical version of the notoriously gory book returns to the
stage, its tale of 80s yuppie nihilism feels more relevant than ever
in the era of Andrew Tate, Trump and tech bros _

Patrick Bateman’s business card. , Composite: getty/Guardian Design


 

I have just witnessed a murder. Spattered against the white walls of
the Almeida theatre
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streaks of blood. Underneath them a particularly gruesome-looking hand
axe rests on a table. And on the other side of the room, a clue to who
the perpetrator might be. Discarded next to someone’s laptop is a
business card – bone-coloured, raised black lettering – bearing a
familiar name: Patrick Bateman.

Him again.

It’s 35 years since Bret Easton Ellis’s third novel, American
Psycho, unleashed Bateman on his rampage of sadistic violence, and it
seems we’ve never stopped wanting more. In the decades since,
Bateman has stabbed and slashed his way through a Hollywood movie
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an unlikely hit musical
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and all kinds of internet memes (“I have to return some videotapes
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film, reportedly starring Austin Butler
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as Bateman, is in the works, but before that a reworked musical
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the place it first appeared, hence my visit to rehearsals at the
Almeida today. As I watch the cast perfect harmonies around the names
of typefaces (“Tiiiimes, New Roh-oh-man”), I wonder how a story
about 1980s Wall Street bankers – complete with oversized mobile
phones and references to Sony Walkmans – has remained so relevant?
Should we be worried that it has?

To answer this question we have to understand Bateman himself.
Obsessed with designer labels, male grooming and ludicrous fine dining
(swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade, anyone?), Bateman’s money
and status-obsessed existence was a pitch-perfect send up of US
capitalism during the Reagan era. Yet the satirical element seemed to
be lost on critics at the time. The Guardian’s Joan Smith, using a
line as brutal as any Bateman murder, dismissed the novel as “nasty,
brutish and long”, whereas a moral panic about the book’s graphic
acts of violence against women prompted Simon & Schuster to pull out
from publishing it at the last minute (Ellis kept his $300,000
advance, then found a new home with Vintage). The controversy has
never entirely gone away – even now, the novel can only be sold in
Australia
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if shrink-wrapped.

Perhaps unnerved by all the fuss, Ellis himself claimed the novel was
inspired largely by his property developer father and the bankers he
hung out with for research. He wasn’t being entirely honest. “I
didn’t want to own up to the responsibility of being Patrick
Bateman,” he said in 2010, “so I laid it on my father, I laid it
on Wall Street.” In reality, Ellis admitted he was writing about his
own
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“rage … boredom … my loneliness, my alienation”.

It wasn’t just Ellis who related to Bateman and the book’s themes
of alienation and despair; as time went by the novel transcended the
controversy to become a slow-burn success. “I don’t think it would
be as widely read if the point of the book was specifically an attack
on yuppie culture,” Ellis said. “I think there’s a larger
feeling that people respond to in the book.” So what, exactly, is
this dark energy that it holds?

Arty Froushan, who plays the lead in the new musical, says he was
slightly offended by how many of his friends said Bateman was the
“perfect role” for him. But you can see what they mean. Froushan
has the requisite preppy looks and, from watching him rehearse, he
really gets across Bateman’s constant sense of status-anxiety. Is
his business card stylish enough? Why doesn’t he own his own tanning
bed? The references might have changed, but Froushan believes these
issues have only got worse with the rise of the internet. “Instagram
is such a horrific amplifier of it, this constant neurotic comparison
that we carry out with our peers and the sort of disconnection that
fosters,” he says. “It offers the illusion of connection and
connectivity, but actually you end up feeling completely isolated and
it discourages empathy.”

It’s a horrible thought, that there might be some Bateman in all of
us – obsessing about our frown lines, or scheming how to make our
holiday look better than it really is on social media, all while the
world burns. But maybe we don’t need to be so hard on ourselves.
Because surely much of the reason why we still turn to American Psycho
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time is that – perhaps before anything else – it is unremittingly
hilarious. Over its 400-plus pages, there is little in the way of plot
or character progression, and a lot in the way of bitchy dialogue and
endless running jokes such as the increasingly deranged topics – eg
toddler murderers – discussed on Bateman’s beloved Patty Winters
Show. When he brings up the real-life serial killer Ed Gein during
drinks with his friends, one of them replies: “Is he the maitre’d
at Canal Bar?” At a U2 concert, a bored Bateman spends the show
trying to work out if The Edge is wearing Armani or Emporio, before it
emerges he doesn’t actually know which one The Edge even is. Perhaps
the most telling running joke is the way nobody seems to recognise
anyone else – Bateman is mistaken for one of his peers on virtually
every other page, the implication being that all these people blur
into one.

By keeping the dialogue virtually unchanged and condensing the story
into just over 100 minutes with something approaching a story arc,
Mary Harron’s film _should_ improve on the novel. It has certainly
become what defines American Psycho in the eyes of the public,
cleverly incorporating Bateman’s earnest reviews of Whitney Houston
and Huey Lewis and the News with his scenes of unhinged violence. And
yet there’s something about the novel’s seemingly unnecessary
length – the way Ellis, just 22 when he started writing it,
masterfully maintains the voice page after page – that really drags
you into the inanity of Bateman’s world.

_Bateman’s representative in 2026 is Andrew Tate, who shares his
fetishisation of status, working out and the dehumanisation of women_

Ellis was hugely influenced by style mags such as GQ (“A bold
striped shirt calls for solid coloured or discreetly patterned suits
and ties,” says Bateman) and today you hear that same detached tone
as TikTok’s auto-generated voice talks you through people’s
mundane daily routines. Ellis was intrigued by how gay tropes and
rituals, such as working out and waxing, were being adopted by
straight alpha males, and has claimed his book was “probably the
first novel about a metrosexual”. What the public didn’t know at
the time was that the man who conceived Bateman – a massive
homophobe – was gay himself.

In so many ways, American Psycho crashes headfirst into today’s
cautious debates around identity politics. It enraged feminists on
publication and you certainly couldn’t imagine a writer getting away
with some of the gratuitous sex and violence scenes today. Ellis
trawled through autopsy reports for his research, dragged himself into
a place that repulsed him: sex workers get maimed with coathangers;
heads are stored in freezers. Yet often it’s Bateman’s intrusive
thoughts that are more chilling to the reader than his gory actions:
while discussing gossip columnists and bistros, Bateman casually tells
the reader about a waitress he “raped with a can of hairspray last
Christmas when I was skiing … over the holidays” before returning
to his thoughts on the lousy acoustics of the venue he’s in.

Reading the book still carries with it the frisson of a guilty secret.
“You wouldn’t tell a first date you were reading it,” is how one
colleague puts it, and it’s true I didn’t feel entirely
comfortable reading it on the commute to work. But is it really
misogynistic? Harron believed her film was really an attack on male
fragility, asking a question that particularly resonates today: what
on earth is going on with men right now?

That means all men. One obvious comparison to Bateman are the members
of Oxford University’s Bullingdon Club, which produced two recent
British prime ministers in David Cameron and Boris Johnson. In 2013,
the Mirror reported that one initiation ceremony for joining the club
involved burning a £50 note in front of a beggar
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a taunt beloved by Bateman and his pals. But American Psycho’s
targets are broader than just society’s elite. Perhaps Bateman’s
true representative in 2026 is Andrew Tate and his followers, who
share his fetishisation of status, working out and the dehumanisation
of women. When you look at the rise of “incel” communities, pickup
artists, grindset culture, tech bros and wellness gurus slapping beef
tallow on their faces, American Psycho’s message seems depressingly
more pertinent than ever.

Rupert Goold, the director who first brought American Psycho to the
Almeida and who is restaging it as his swansong before heading off to
take charge at the Old Vic, says the book has an “almost Dostoevsky
quality” that evokes “a kind of loneliness”. This means it can
map on to all sorts of modern malaises, and Goold is attempting to use
this incarnation of the musical to examine the modern manosphere.
“People like [fitness influencer] Ashton Hall
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who has millions of followers and lives this totally Patrick Bateman
life where he wakes up at five in the morning, puts his face in ice
and then reads self-help books and works out.”

And yet there is a huge irony at play. Because in recent years Patrick
Bateman – specifically Christian Bale’s movie persona – has
become a kind of aspirational figure for the very same men he was
designed to mock. In some quarters he is held up as being the ultimate
“sigma male
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a masculine archetype who sits at the top of the food chain, yet also
slightly outside it, refusing to conform to society’s rules like the
typical alpha male. (It should be noted that Bateman isn’t really a
sigma male, given he is driven by a relentless need to fit in.) The
“sigma face” – a smug pout while simultaneously frowning,
modelled on one of Bale’s expressions in the film – has become a
huge meme.

How has this misunderstanding taken place? Kanye West’s Love
Lockdown [[link removed]] video was
inspired by Bateman’s sterile apartment, and the journey
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the musician has been on since then seems pertinent. Ellis was
interested in writing a book that was all about surface, yet it’s
now being read by some on this same surface level; Bateman as a good
looking, muscular, rich idol who gets the girls and does what he wants
to them. The fact Bateman’s descriptions of sex sound pretty teenage
and virginal probably helps them to appeal to a younger audience.
It’s hard to know what Ron DeSantis’s excuse is, though: the
Florida governor used Bateman footage in a 2023 video
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aimed at promoting his anti-LGBT credentials while running for the
Republican presidential nomination.

_Like Bateman, Trump is obsessed with surface: the TV ratings, the
prizes, the sycophancy_

Which brings us, of course, to DeSantis’s rival in that race. There
aren’t many things Bateman authentically loves, but – along with
Les Misérables and the 1980s output of Genesis – he is a huge
admirer of Donald Trump, even recommending the then businessman’s
The Art of the Deal
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to the detective investigating one of his murders. Ellis chose Trump
to be Bateman’s idol because back then he was a distilled
representation of the elite – a showman who loved money. But now
he’s president, the comparisons are even stronger. Like Bateman,
Trump is obsessed with surface: the TV ratings, the prizes, the
sycophancy. Also like Bateman, Trump has constructed his own reality.
In American Psycho, we’re never quite sure whether or not what
Bateman is telling us is happening is actually happening. Sound
familiar?

When I first read the book, it seemed fairly obvious to me the murders
were only happening in Bateman’s addled mind as he approached a
nervous breakdown. He made little effort to cover them up, after all,
leaving his apartment with body bags and with blood on his clothes.
But, of course, Bateman is rich and privileged. Even when he tells
people what he does in his spare time they don’t listen. Like Trump,
Bateman could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot
somebody” and get away with it. In other words, he’s hiding in
plain sight. Forget not all heroes wear capes; Bateman shows that not
all villains wear masks.

A common line about the politics we find ourselves saddled with these
days is that it’s “beyond satire”. How could you make, say, a
Veep
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comedy about a US administration far more ludicrous than anything the
writers could ever come up with? It’s a question I pondered while
writing this piece, the backdrop to which was Trump seizing
Venezuela’s president, threatening to invade Greenland and defending
the shooting of a mother by ICE agents. Ellis was warning us where
hyper-masculine capitalism was heading, but we got distracted by all
the blood and gore on the surface. Now that we have a real life
American Psycho in charge of the world, his darkly comic novel looks
like the most lethal satire of all.

_American Psycho_
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is at the Almeida theatre, London, to 14 March._

* american psycho
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* Donald Trump
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* incels
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* hyper-masculinity
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* capitalism
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