Naomi Girson | opinions editor

This summer I read “American Psycho” by Brett Easton Ellis, made exponentially more popular thanks to Mary Hammond’s stellar directing and Christian Bale’s masterpiece portrayal of Patrick Bateman in the 2000 film.

The book I especially appreciated for its graphically horrific imagery and inability to escape from Bateman’s mind.

But what I found especially sinister was how similar the apparent compulsions to fit in — socially, politically and aesthetically — were to my social media mutuals.

However, it was exaggerated reality for Ellis. It’s a satire, a horror story, it’s a scathing review of the yuppies plaguing Wall Street, chopping up body parts along the way.

As Britannica put it, “The novel’s protagonist, Patrick Bateman, is a psychopath who works on Wall Street. He conducts business meetings, goes to upmarket restaurants and commits [redacted], cannibalism and murder. The novel registers no difference between these activities.”

As haunting a description as it is, it’s a pretty concise summary of what Ellis did with Bateman’s character.

He spends a lot of time in the novel describing his and everyone else’s outfits everyday, from their socks to their neckties.

He did the exact same thing with his murders and executions.

Minus the graphic violence, his lifestyle, his focuses, his talking points are not unlike an influencer’s content now.

So many pieces of his obsessive daily routine that may have seemed so unsettling 25 years ago, are normal now.

CNN classifies Bateman as not only a serial killer, but a serial consumer. He knows what brand of pants everyone in the room has on, and he is silently ranking their importance based on price range.

When people post a fit check on Tiktok, or Instagram, everyone rattles off the brands of everything they have on, from their Golden Goose shoes to their Kendra Scott earrings.

In one of the most popular scenes from the movie, where Bateman details his morning, with his nine-step skin care routine, extensively hygienic shower and superfluous number of sit-ups is almost exactly like what influencers post on Instagram, while they get ready for their “busy” day. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

That’s how Ellis felt about Wall Street yuppies at the time. But now, thanks to social media, the shared life has been spread to everyone, and we are losing individuality every time someone asks for a link to a pair of jeans someone is wearing in their latest Instagram post.

Bateman never gets caught for anything he does throughout the novel because no one can identify him.

No one even knows who he is. He is called Paul Allen, Paul Owen and Marcus Halberstam throughout the novel and no one can even mark the difference between any of them.

Take the business card scene, where Bateman starts to panic, as all his co-workers compare their cards — all identical by the way.

They all care about the same stupid idiosyncrasies, comparing fonts, and background colors of their business cards, and they can’t even tell the difference between each other.

And comparison like this is worse than ever, thanks to social media, you don’t just see a few other people’s lives, you can see people’s full closets posted in YouTube videos, their hauls from big mall shopping trips.

According to the National Library of Medicine, “exposure to social media content can increase the risk of poor mental health outcomes, particularly among those with higher tendencies to engage in social comparisons.”

Now, Bateman was surely suffering from something a bit more severe than depression and anxiety, but much of his social interaction and comparison feeds into his more nefarious side.

Ellis works constant cracks into Bateman’s facade of sanity, occasionally making him confess, although no one seems to hear or care.

Patrick Bateman tells a girl he’s involved in murders and executions, and she says

“Well, most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions don’t really like it. He tries to clarify, “that’s not what I said,” but instead he just tells her to forget it.

This has happened to me, a lot of us probably, telling someone something, possibly important or even culpable, just for them to disregard it.

If we spent more time focusing on substance as opposed to style and the superficial, shallow snobbery Bateman and we all hide behind, we could see something real.

Instead of being honest these days, everyone is worried about fitting the ever-changing status quo our social media brings us.

I’m not saying every influencer is exactly the same, content creators talk all the time about “finding your niche,” it’s just that they all happen to succumb to the same algorithm, thus their content all starts to blend together.

What’s more interesting is the “sigma film `bro” that looks up to Bateman (seriously), isn’t really that much like him. It’s the “waking up at 6 a.m. to do Pilates in a matching Lululemon set, getting brunch at the most expensive spot in town, freshly manicured” women that are getting trapped in the beginning of the Bateman mindset.

Everyone is so worried about themselves, it’s becoming an illness, we just all need to reflect before we start picking up any more habits from Bateman.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu