Patrick Bateman

Patrick "Pat" Bateman is a fictional character, the protagonist and narrator of the novel American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.

Biography and profile

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. She appears to be in-love with him, but he can't stand her but stays with her for the sake of his social life. He has a mistress on the side (the fiancée of a colleague he hates) and has regular liaisons with prostitutes and women he encounters at clubs, 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 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.

The question of Bateman's reality

Whether or not Bateman actually committed the atrocities depicted in American Psycho is subject to debate. Throughout the novel, and especially during its final chapters, Bateman describes various incidents and events that are either outrageously unbelievable or patently delusional. This is best exemplified in the chapter entitled "Chase, Manhattan," where Bateman engages in such wanton and public displays of violence — driving a stolen cab into a karaoke restaurant; engaging the police in a full scale shoot-out; killing the night watchman at the office building next to his own — that even he could not escape punishment. Finally, in one of the novel's most famous scenes, Bateman returns to the apartment of one of his victims, where he had stored numerous butchered corpses, only to discover the place cleaned, painted and for sale. The realtor, present upon his arrival, questions him as to whether he "saw the ad in the Times," which Bateman claims he did, only to have to the realtor reply that "there was no ad in the Times." She then requests that he leave and not return, which he does.Yet the novel does contain incidents which objectively may have occurred. In the novel's initial chapters, Bateman's friends reference a murder which took place at a yacht party attended by Bateman. Similarly, after Bateman kills his colleague Paul Owen (Paul Allen in the film), Owen's family hires a private detective to investigate his "disappearance." That a character later claims to have met Owen in London for dinner is immaterial, since characters frequently mistake one anothers identities throughout the novel. Paul Owen was actually decomposing in a bathtub in Hell's Kitchen. Bateman is also identified by a cab driver near the end of the novel as being the man who killed his friend, but instead of turning him into the police, he merely robs Bateman of his cash, Rolex and sunglasses.

While there are strong arguments for and against the "reality" of Bateman's crimes, it seems plausible that the truth lies somewhere in between. Bateman may have committed some of the acts he alleges, and may simply have fantasized about others. Perhaps the realtor had the apartment "fixed," and reports of her findings there buried, so as to make selling the place as easy as possible; perhaps she realized that Bateman was the man responsible, and let him escape simply to avoid a scandal and more work on her part. His "confessions" may operate in the same manner: perhaps he simply thinks he speaks when in reality he is not, and perhaps in other circumstances he actually does say something only to be ignored by his vapid, inattentive friends.

Bateman outside of American Psycho

Bateman made his first appearance in Ellis' episodic 1987 novel The Rules of Attraction (in which Sean, his brother, is the main character); no indication is given that he is a serial killer. Bateman also appears in Ellis' 1998 novel Glamorama. He does, however, appear in Glamorama with "strange stains" on the lapel of his Armani suit.

Bateman also appeared in the American Psycho 2000 e-mails, which were written as an attempt to hype up the movie. Although they are often mistakenly credited to Ellis, they were actually written by one or more unnamed author and approved by Ellis before being sent out. American Psycho 2000 served as a sort of "e-quel" to the original novel. The e-mails take place in 2000, a little over a decade since the novel. Bateman is in therapy with a Dr. M. He is also married to Jean, his former secretary. They have a son, Patrick Bateman Jr. (P.B.), who is 5 years old. In the story, Bateman talks about therapy, trying to get a divorce from Jean, his renewed feelings about murder, and falling in love with his son.

Most recently, Bateman appeared in Ellis' 2005 novel Lunar Park, in which a fictionalized Ellis confesses that writing American Psycho felt like channeling the words of a violent spirit rather than writing anything himself. This ghost — Bateman — haunts fictional Ellis' McMansion. A character also comes to Ellis' Halloween party dressed as Bateman.

Bateman in film

The best-known portrayal of Patrick Bateman is Christian Bale's in Mary Harron's 2000 American Psycho film adaptation. Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play the infamous character, but dropped out of the film. Bateman was also portrayed by Dechen Thurman (brother of Uma) in the 2000 documentary This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. Michael Kremko played Bateman in the opening scene of American Psycho 2: All American Girl, the 2002 direct-to-video sequel to American Psycho. In AP2, Bateman was killed by the young girl who saw him kill her babysitter, who took her along to his apartment in an attempt to apprehend him. Many fans don't consider the sequel to be canon.

Scenes with the character were shot for the 2002 film adaptation of The Rules of Attraction. Ellis revealed in an interview that director Roger Avary asked Bale to reprise the role, but Bale turned down the offer, and Avary asked Ellis himself to portray Bateman. Ellis refused, stating that he "thought it was such a terrible and gimmicky idea," and Avary eventually shot the scenes with Casper Van Dien. The scenes, however, were ultimately cut from the final version of the film.

Similarities with his brother

Despite generally hating each other, Patrick Bateman and his sibling Sean Bateman have various things in common, despite being on very different ends of the social scale. For one, they both take copious amounts of drugs, yet are not addicts.

Also, both characters bring doubt in whether they are reliable narrators or not. Many question how much of Patrick Bateman's story in American Psycho is true; and Sean Bateman's narration in The Rules Of Attraction sometimes clashes with other character's versions of a given story.

Chronology of Bateman's Life

ca. 1962: Patrick Bateman born (deduced from a passage in American Psycho where Patrick tells the detective Donald Kimball that he and Paul Owen were both seven in 1969).
1980: Bateman graduates from Exeter Preparatory school.
1984: Bateman graduates from Harvard University.
1986: Bateman graduated from Harvard Business School.
- From the time of his graduation, through the end of American Psycho, Bateman works at Pierce & Pierce.
ca. 1996: Bateman shows up at Victor's club in Glamorama.
2000: Bateman enters therapy with a Dr. M. This appears in the American Psycho 2000 e-mails.

Patrick Bateman | Патрик Бэйтмен