Patrick Bateman spends an extraordinary amount of energy trying to be noticed. The right suit, haircut, restaurant and, obviously, business card are all supposed to prove that he is somebody.
The problem is that almost nobody in American Psycho looks closely enough at another human being to know who that somebody actually is.
Names are constantly confused. Men dress alike. Status symbols differ by microscopic details that somehow carry enormous importance. Even when Bateman says things that should be impossible to ignore, the world around him has an impressive ability to keep moving.
That's why the most interesting question in American Psycho isn't simply whether everything Patrick does actually happens.
The more disturbing question is whether this world could recognize Patrick Bateman at all.
Spoilers: detailed film discussionIncludes plot developments and the ending. Open deliberately.
Bateman constructs himself every morning
The famous morning routine establishes the problem immediately.
Patrick's body is trained, cleaned, moisturized and maintained with extreme precision. Every visible surface receives attention.
What lies underneath is considerably harder for him to define.
Bateman builds identity out of brands, restaurants, clothes, apartments and cultural opinions that often sound as if they were memorized for exactly the right social occasion. Even his enthusiastic discussions of music can feel less like personal taste and more like another piece of equipment required to perform Patrick Bateman correctly.
It's funny until the emptiness underneath becomes obvious.
He desperately wants to distinguish himself by owning exactly the same things as every man around him.
That isn't the strongest route toward individuality.
The business-card sequence takes this system to its logical extreme.
Several men place cards on the table that would look virtually identical to any normal person. The group reacts as if they're comparing priceless works of art.
A slightly different shade. Different lettering. A watermark.
Bateman nearly collapses internally.
The scene works because the competition is simultaneously ridiculous and completely sincere. Individuality has been reduced to tiny differences in status objects.
Nobody asks who these men are.
The question is whose nearly identical rectangle of paper looks marginally more expensive.
Bateman wants to rise above the crowd, but everything he does is designed to prove that he belongs perfectly inside it.
Nobody can keep the names straight
The repeated cases of mistaken identity push the joke much further.
Bateman gets called by other names. He confuses colleagues himself. Paul Allen mistakes him for someone else. Later, even supposedly personal encounters become unreliable because these people don't seem to pay enough attention to one another to remember who they were actually with.
That isn't just a running gag.
It destabilizes the entire social reality of the film.
If nobody can confidently identify the man they had dinner with, then even a disappearance becomes surprisingly difficult to verify.
The ambiguity surrounding Bateman's crimes therefore isn't only psychological. It's built into the society around him.
Reality becomes hard to confirm when everyone is too busy looking at surfaces.
Even confession doesn't guarantee recognition
Eventually Patrick attempts to break through the façade.
He says things that, in any functioning social environment, should produce immediate consequences.
Yet even this doesn't guarantee that anyone truly sees him.
People hear words without taking the person behind them seriously. That's one of the film's nastiest jokes.
Patrick has spent his life perfecting himself for an elite culture that registers other humans primarily as clothes, reservations, careers and useful contacts.
Then he suddenly wants that same culture to recognize his unique inner reality.
It has almost no mechanism left for doing that.
The perfect nightmare for a narcissist
That's why American Psycho isn't only about whether Patrick Bateman is a monster.
He needs to be a distinctive monster.
Even that may be denied to him.
His money doesn't make him unique. His apartment doesn't. His clothes certainly don't, and the business card turned out to be a disaster.
If even his worst actions fail to give him a stable identity, he's left with the thing his entire existence has been designed to avoid:
insignificance.
That's the elegant cruelty of the film.
Patrick Bateman lives in a world where everybody desperately wants to be seen.
Nobody is actually looking.