User Profile

Character Name: Patrick Bateman
Fandom: American Psycho

Background Information: Bateman works at the Wall Street firm of Pierce & Pierce (also Sherman McCoy's firm in The Bonfire of the Vanities) and lives on the Upper West Side in the American Gardens Building (where he is a neighbor of actor Tom Cruise). At first appearance, Bateman is a handsome, well-groomed, and intelligent young man, but he is eventually revealed to be a serial killer who murders a variety of people, from colleagues to several prostitutes. His actions, including torture murder and cannibalism, are described in graphic detail in the novel.

Bateman comes from a wealthy family. His parents have a home in Long Island, and he mentions a summer home in Newport. His mother now resides at a sanitorium. His father grew up on an estate in Connecticut, and now owns an apartment in a New York hotel. His younger brother Sean attends Camden College. Bateman graduated from Harvard University in 1984, and Harvard Business School two years later and moved to New York City.

When not nightclubbing or eating at trendy restaurants, Bateman watches The Patty Winters Show or listens to music, usually pop and pop-rock. His favorite musical group is Talking Heads, but Bateman discusses at length Genesis, Whitney Houston and Huey Lewis & the News. He also listens to jazz (Dizzy Gillespie and Bix Beiderbecke) but loathes rap, which he derides as "too niggerish" (he is not only shallow and psychopathic, but also virulently racist, misogynistic, and homophobic, although at one point he hypocritically reproaches his friends for using ethnic slurs.)

Bateman's personality

As written by Ellis, Bateman is the ultimate stereotype of yuppie greed: rich, shallow, and addicted to sex, recreational drugs and conspicuous consumption. All of his friends look alike to him (to the point that he often confuses one for another, and they often confuse him for other people) but he obsessively details every single feature of his clothes, stereo, car, workout routine, and business card. He is engaged to an equally rich, shallow woman named Evelyn. They can't stand each other, but stay together for the sake of their social lives. He has a mistress on the side (the fiancée of a colleague he hates) and has regular liaisons with prostitutes, many of whom end up being his victims. The one woman (and possibly the one person) in his life he has anything approaching feelings for is his secretary, Jean, whom he just can't bring himself to seduce, rape or kill, perhaps because she's the only person in his life who isn't completely shallow.

While on the surface Bateman seems to be the embodiment of the suave, attractive and successful businessman, he appears to loathe himself as much as he does everyone else; he kills many of his victims because they make him feel inadequate, usually by having better taste than he does. His friends mock him as the "boy next door," his own lawyer refers to him as a "bloody ass-kisser ... a brown-nose goody-goody," and he is often dismissed as "yuppie trash" by people outside of his social circle. In the middle of killing and dismembering a victim, he breaks down, sobbing that he "just wants to be loved."

He often (understandably) doubts his sanity; he has periodic attacks of psychosis, during which he hallucinates, as well as episodes of blind, unreasoning panic.

Bateman compensates for these inabilities and insecurities through obsessive vanity and personal grooming. He dresses in the most fashionable, expensive clothing possible as a means of affecting some "control" over his otherwise chaotic life. Likewise, he categorizes people by what they wear and how they look because they are more easily "understood" in terms of labels and stereotypes. People as three-dimensional beings are unpredictable and impossible to understand, but people in terms of attire and appearance are much more easy for Bateman to grasp.

Bateman does not fit the "typical" profile of a serial killer, as he kills more or less indiscriminately, with no preferred type of victim to prey on; throughout the novel, he kills men, women, and one child. He kills women mostly for sadistic sexual pleasure, often during or just after sex, and is also a prolific rapist. He kills men because they anger or annoy him, and the child just to see if he would enjoy it (which he didn't.)

Periodically, he matter-of-factly confesses his crimes to his friends, co-workers, and even complete strangers ("I like to dissect girls — do you know I'm utterly insane?") just to see if they're actually listening to him. They either aren't, or think he's joking.

Bateman talks about killing with the same emotionless, clinical detail he applies to his clothes, apartment, friends, and record collection; He in fact seems to be incapable of any real emotion save that of homicidal rage. In his own words: "I am simply not there." Toward the end of the novel, not even killing can arouse feeling in him.

Bateman was never arrested for the enormous number of murders he committed.

Bio taken from here.

[Not Patrick Bateman. Not Christian Bale. Do not dress to the nines, dissect girls, and eat/stare at strange food in fancy restaurants. I will axe you in the face if you believe otherwise, though. No, just kidding! This is for the RP Tenebrae Nostro.]

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