An Investigation of American Psycho(sis)

February 24, 2026

“NO NEW KNOWLEDGE CAN BE EXTRACTED”-Patrick Bateman

Shocker to no one but once again Patrick Bateman was wrong. In regards to the cult classic American Psycho widely known as the movie your 19 year old brother is obsessed with maybe there is some new knowledge that can be extracted. I’m not here to call it the best movie ever, and I’m not going to rehash the same line about its ironic reception and moniker into “dudebro” movie hall of fame. Despite the dark comedy and empty suits it should be clear to all that this movie and its characters are not ones to be celebrated.  A dudebro movie is exactly what it sounds like: a film centering a male (white) protagonist who selfishly moves through the film’s narrative embodying toxic masculinity while having its audience ironically celebrate these traits. Think Marty from Marty Supreme, Jordan Beckford from The Wolf of Wall Street, Tyler Durden from Fight Club, and countless others.  

If American Psycho is the aestheticized endpoint of the “dudebro” canon, where satire collapses into style, its antithesis might be its very own, slighly less known, cinematic predecessor, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, which refuses that seduction altogether. Released 30 years prior to American Psycho in 1970, directed by Italian filmmaker Elio Petri its influence is strikingly clear when you watch both films. The film begins with a top-ranking police inspector killing his mistress, only to become a part of the ensuing homicide investigation. The film follows as he deliberately plants evidence pointing back to himself. He tampers with the crime scene in ways that are obvious, yet his fellow officers either overlook the signs or fail to pursue them seriously. As the film progresses, their incompetence subtly masks complicity.  Growing in confidence in the protection afforded by his position, he uses the investigation to test that competence and integrity of Italian law enforcement, exposing how authority shields itself from accountability.

DETACHING FROM THE AESTHETIC

Every film is political, and to ignore that is foolish. Elio Petri was working in the wake of Italy’s late-60s and 70s unrest, the workerist movements, student uprisings, and the Years of Lead. The movie isn’t a mere storytelling device; it was a critique of Italian Neofascism in a post Mussolini Italy torn between radical terrorist protest. Glimpses of which serve as the backdrop to the plot of the film.

Fast forward to American Psycho, dir. Mary Herron, power is less about the state and more about capital. Patrick Bateman’s authority flows from money, Wall Street status, exclusivity, and access. Reagan-era finance capitalism replaces the badge with the business card.  While both films are critiques, the gaudy displays of power in their American iteration are what force that critique to be lost in translation. To the media illiterate or impressionable young men who keep the film alive message rings hollow in the face of a pristine upper westside apartment, perfect skin and workout routine, and access to women.

And this is where the contrast lies. Investigation of a Citizen Above citizen isn’t sexy in the slightest, so the message is much harder to succumb to idolization and dudebro fandom. There’s no clean extraction, no minimalist office-core mood board to rip and repost. The power Elio Petri displays is bloated, bureaucratic, and structurally protected. It makes no stylized attempt to be admired, but instead wants to indict. Petri’s film embeds critique in institutional structure rather than charismatic individualism. There’s no easily extractable “aura” to commodify. Bateman, however, with his slick back hair stylized imagery, is perfect for memetic abstraction. While director Mary Herron has made it clear that it was never her intention, in a society that prioritizes the materialism and aesthetics of Bateman’s character, misinterpretation was the only logical end result.  And now more than ever, how does anything hold meaning if you can turn it into a meme.  There are days and stretches where every moment of the news cycle feels more outlandish than the last. 

Palestinian liberation and its need fall to the backdrop of virality and hollow outrage. The Epstein files seem so sinister and evil that they’ve been attributed to conspiracy theories. People aren’t posting about the Congo as much as they were last summer. There is so much more, and to even conflate these individual issues is a reflection of how insurmountable and devoid of weight they feel when constantly presented to you through the stream of your phone.

How can you interpret and overcome your very reality when platform capitalism spends every second of your existence stripping it of its complexity and depth. Interpretation is purposely being construed in an attempt to prevent any real action against the real-world horrors that we know and see are taking place and with the advent of AI imaging/video we are reaching a point of no return.

The idea that nothing feels real or substantiated is an increasingly popular one circulating in the current social climate. “Everything feels like a grift.” “Nothing feels real,” are common phrase I’ve seen online and have heard in conversation. Franco “Bifo” Berardi is an Italian philosopher, media theorist, and activist whose work explores the intersection of semiotics (the study of signs and meaning), capitalism, and mental health. He argues that contemporary society, under “semiocapitalism” (capitalism based on the exchange of signs rather than material goods), is undergoing a, “mass psychosis” caused by an overload of information, acceleration, and the destruction of human empathy. In chapter 4 of his book Futurability he writes

“The intensification of the info-flow provokes a disturbance in the cognitive ability to detect and interpret signs, but simultaneously pushes us towards a swarm-like-automation of the functioning of the mind. The self is both pressured from the outside world and replicated by the surrounding world of other minds. The faster the ac of interpretation of info-stimulus, the more the process of interpretation is shared and homologated.”

Futurability The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility

That shift in meaning and intepration of the symbols we are forced to see everyday is what matters. It reflects exactly what Berardi is describing. When we’re flooded with information at a constant speed, our ability to really process what we’re seeing weakens. Everything enters the same stream: corruption, war, celebrity scandal, conspiracy, injustice all flattened into content. Outrage online calling people out comes off as a performance instead of genuine empathy. Over time, this produces a strange numbness. It’s not that people don’t care. It’s that the constant churn makes it hard to feel anything in a sustained way. The feed moves on before meaning can form.

So when people say “nothing feels real” or “everything feels like a grift,” it isn’t just cynicism. It’s the feeling of living in a world where signs move faster than substance. The danger isn’t that everyone wants to be Patrick Bateman. It’s that we’re losing the ability to recognize what we’re looking at in the first place.