ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)
By:
September 28, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

PATRICK BATEMAN
Now for a header into the cesspool. I’m referring to Patrick Bateman, star and object of the 2000 horror/comedy American Psycho. Christian Bale plays Bateman, an obscenely handsome man who murders homeless people, tortures prostitutes with coat hangers and chainsaws, eats the body parts of his victims, and thinks Huey Lewis and the News’ Sports is the peak of popular music.
These are not misdeeds to be forgiven. Bateman is a villain without any redeeming qualities. I have no sympathy for the serial-killing yuppie who feels more self-loathing from his inability to get a Friday dinner reservation than from the severed head stored in his freezer, but I also don’t hate him. Curious, I know. Especially since there isn’t any real attempt to make us admire Bateman in the way we were made to admire someone like Hanibal Lecter, who, though also a serial killer who eats the body parts of his victims, is at least elevated by virtue of his Holmesian panache and gourmet preparation of said body parts — a ridiculous audience manipulation that demonstrates how easy it is to flatter our appetite for elegant evil. Let Evelyn Waugh explain better than I: I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm.
But I like Patrick Bateman’s character, which has nothing to do with him being sympathetic or charming or — ugh — damaged. I like Bateman because he’s legible. His morality is irrelevant; he feels authentic in a milieu of inauthenticity. He’s surrounded by men who mistake each other for one another. Bateman is erased and misheard. His identity is unstable because identity is decoration. In his world, nothing has weight unless it wounds. Love is a pose, art is content. Only violence resists being turned into spectacle. Bateman’s violence isn’t a break from the culture, it’s the natural end point.
It is this — Bateman’s clarity about his own hollowness — that provokes something close to sympathy. He doesn’t pretend to care. He doesn’t feign human connection. He confesses his crimes to his lawyer, but his lawyer confuses him for someone else and doesn’t believe his confession. In a film where no one listens, Bateman is the only one shouting the truth: “I simply do not exist.”
Bateman isn’t destroyed by his vice, but by realization of its futility. His final breakdown isn’t an act of remorse, but of despair: not even his monstrosity makes him real. He’s not a villain, because villains don’t exist. Certainly not in American Psycho, and maybe nowhere else.
ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Kathy Biehl on DR. FRANK-N-FURTER | Catherine Christman on ALEXIS CARRINGTON | Crockett Doob on M3GAN | Nick Rumaczyk on AURIC GOLDFINGER | Mariane Cara on MIRANDA PRIESTLY | Trav SD on PROFESSOR HINKLE | Alex Brook Lynn on TOM POWERS | Lynn Peril on ENDORA | Adam McGovern on EDDIE HASKELL | Mimi Lipson on SUE ANN NIVENS | Heather Quinlan on HAROLD SHAND | Tom Nealon on SKELETOR | Matthew Hodge on BARRY LYNDON | Josh Glenn on JOEL CAIRO | Dan Reines on WALTER PECK | Mark Kingwell on HARRY LIME | James Scott Maloy on CLARENCE BODDICKER | Nikhil Singh on LOCUTUS | Carolyn Campbell on CARSON DYLE | Tony Pacitti on DENNIS NEDRY | Gordon Dahlquist on WALKER | Colin Campbell on RUTH LYTTON | Marc Weidenbaum on THE XENOMORPHS | Susannah Breslin on ANTON CHIGURH | Micah Nathan on PATRICK BATEMAN.
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