American Psycho - Congratulations. We're All Patrick Bateman Now

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]1,000 stomach crunches.

[00:00:02]Every morning Patrick Bateman counts them like stock prices.

[00:00:06]The way a junkie counts days clean.

[00:00:09]Like the number of ways you can slice open a human throat.

[00:00:13]The word corporation comes from the Latin corpus, meaning body.

[00:00:18]Bateman's incorporated himself. Patrick Bateman LLC.

[00:00:22]Limited liability. Unlimited sociopathy.

[00:00:27]Bodies aren't bodies anymore. They're billboards. Prime locations advertising your net worth.

[00:00:34]Bateman's body's a meat-based business card.

[00:00:37]Embossed with veins. Watermarked with sweat.

[00:00:40]That subtle off-white coloring of trenbolone.

[00:00:43]The [music] tasteful thickness of his delts.

[00:00:46]My god. It even has a six-pack. [music] Bateman files the paperwork. La Mer moisturizer. Isopure protein.

[00:00:56]Vitamins lined up like a pharmaceutical [music] firing squad. The Amazon Prime approach to existence. Next-day delivery on a soul that never ships.

[00:01:06]His morning routine runs like a Swiss train schedule.

[00:01:09]Reps timed. Sets logged. Workout stats recited like Nasdaq closing numbers.

[00:01:16]I can do a thousand now.

[00:01:18]Not I did.

[00:01:20]Can do.

[00:01:21]Present capability. Accumulate value.

[00:01:25]Sweat equity in the bank of nobody gives a [ __ ] The only thing compounding is cortisol and existential debt.

[00:01:33]The Spartans used to throw babies off cliffs. At least they got it over with quickly.

[00:01:38]Bateman throws himself every morning.

[00:01:41]Still hasn't hit bottom.

[00:01:44]Muscle's just scar tissue. Microscopic trauma rebuilt stronger.

[00:01:48]Corporate Kevlar.

[00:01:50]Not protecting the inside. Advertising nothing's there.

[00:01:55]His mirror flexing's less vanity, more quality control.

[00:01:59]Checking the merchandise before market open.

[00:02:02]The market never closes. The gym never sleeps.

[00:02:07]The first rule of retail, the product always eats the consumer.

[00:02:12]Bateman can't stop because products depreciate. They rot.

[00:02:16]Shelf life shorter than 7-Eleven sushi.

[00:02:19]Maintaining an asset that loses value faster than a Tesla Cybertruck.

[00:02:25]In Japan, they call it karoshi.

[00:02:27]Death from overwork.

[00:02:29]Bateman's got it backwards, working himself to death to look alive.

[00:02:34]>> [music] >> Capitalism's greatest trick.

[00:02:36]Making you both the sweatshop and the sneaker.

[00:02:40]The child laborers stitching your own Nikes.

[00:02:43]Every workout's unpaid overtime.

[00:02:46]Each mirror check's a performance review for a job that doesn't exist.

[00:02:51]Not because it makes you better.

[00:02:53]Because stopping makes you worthless.

[00:02:56]Bateman's workout and skin care routine [music] are the same thing.

[00:03:00]Maintenance on a machine that produces nothing but its own maintenance.

[00:03:04]A printer that only prints pictures of itself printing.

[00:03:08]Bateman discovering what women always knew.

[00:03:12]Your flesh is currency and the exchange rate is [ __ ] Sisyphus had a boulder and a mountain.

[00:03:20]Bateman has dumbbells and a mirror.

[00:03:22]Sisyphus was condemned by Zeus.

[00:03:25]We swipe right on our own damnation.

[00:03:28]Discipline isn't freedom. It's a subscription service you can't cancel.

[00:03:34]Some twisted [ __ ] named Bentham dreamed up the Panopticon back when [music] powdered wigs were still a thing.

[00:03:39]A circular prison where guards could see everything, but prisoners saw nothing.

[00:03:45]Genius level sadism.

[00:03:47]We don't need prison architects anymore.

[00:03:50]We built the cells ourselves.

[00:03:53]Your iPhone tracks everything. Steps, REM cycles, how long you stare at your ex's [music] Instagram.

[00:04:01]The guards aren't in towers, they're in Cupertino, in Meta headquarters, in your girlfriend's TikTok comments.

[00:04:10]Every morning, wake up, check your Aura ring, police your flesh, report to nobody.

[00:04:17]Punish yourself harder than any warden would ever dare.

[00:04:21]The tragedy, this prison looks like a penthouse. Blue checkmark, verified account, personal brand so strong it strangled the person.

[00:04:32]The dose only escalates. 10 push-ups become 500. One Xanax becomes three Klonopin.

[00:04:40]The hamster wheel is on fire. The pet store's condemned, but you keep running because the exit's been outsourced.

[00:04:50]Here's what they don't tell you about Narcissus. He didn't just love his reflection. He starved to death staring at it. Wasted away. Became the nothing he was looking at.

[00:05:01]The Greeks knew. Self-love's just another way to eat yourself alive.

[00:05:06]Bateman takes notes.

[00:05:08]Lives in a $4 million infinity mirror where humans are the least interesting furniture.

[00:05:14]The Sub-Zero fridge, the Gaggenau oven, floor-to-ceiling glass.

[00:05:20]Bateman only exists in reflections.

[00:05:23]Watching himself watch himself until there's nobody left to watch.

[00:05:28]The word person comes from the Latin persona, a theatrical mask.

[00:05:34]Bateman peels off his facial mask every morning like he's shedding yesterday's failed humanity.

[00:05:40]Face is fiction.

[00:05:42]Just another Bateman under the Bateman.

[00:05:45]Think about that raincoat.

[00:05:47]Clear plastic over Valentino while he kills.

[00:05:51]The coat doesn't hide his identity. It protects his suit, the actual identity from reality's mess.

[00:05:59]Transparent motor gear, everyone looks away.

[00:06:03]Here's what nobody understands about psychopaths.

[00:06:06]They're not trying to feel nothing.

[00:06:08]They're trying to feel anything.

[00:06:11]Murder as emotions last ditch [music] Hail Mary pass.

[00:06:14]Destroying others to feel alive.

[00:06:17]Taking life because he doesn't have one.

[00:06:21]For Bateman, murder's just another workout, another routine, another way to fill the time between nothing [music] and nothing.

[00:06:30]Tuesday's chest, Thursday dispose of Paul Allen.

[00:06:36]We evolved to see our reflection in puddles. Now it's every surface. Phone screens, elevator doors, the black mirror of a sleeping laptop.

[00:06:46]You spend more time with your own face than your mother's.

[00:06:49]You know your blackheads better than your kids laughter.

[00:06:53]Each reflection slightly different, none of them real.

[00:06:58]Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher who looked like Santa Claus if Santa dealt Quaaludes, called this the simulacrum.

[00:07:06]The copy with no original.

[00:07:09]The deep fake before the fake.

[00:07:11]The Instagram filter looking for a face to wear.

[00:07:14]But here's the mind [ __ ] You're watching this through your iPhone, watching a 4K restoration of a film shot in 1999 [music] about 1987.

[00:07:25]The VHS tape digitized, upscaled, compressed, streamed until Christian Bale becomes electromagnetic static pretending [music] to be human.

[00:07:36]That scene where he films himself [ __ ] while watching the playback while checking the mirror.

[00:07:41]a masturbation Möbius strip, OnlyFans with one subscriber.

[00:07:47]His partner may as well be gym equipment, just another surface to check his form against, a Peloton that moans.

[00:07:56]The word gymnasium comes from No, [ __ ] that.

[00:08:00]You know what Dorsia means?

[00:08:02]Nothing.

[00:08:04]It's a sound rich people [music] make when they're trying to describe somewhere you'll never go.

[00:08:09]Bateman's body is Dorsia, a location that doesn't exist, but everyone pretends they've been there.

[00:08:18]I want to fit in.

[00:08:21]Bateman tells Evelyn.

[00:08:23]Like a tumor that nobody notices is cancer.

[00:08:27]Wall Street doesn't produce individuals.

[00:08:29]It mass produces Bateman, serial numbers instead of serial killers.

[00:08:35]Psychopathy hides in plain sight because psychopathy is the uniform.

[00:08:40]There is no real me.

[00:08:43]InTech, they call this a feature, not a bug.

[00:08:47]Goldman Sachs pays seven figures for this kind of flexibility, the ability to fire a thousand people before lunch and donate to orphans at dinner.

[00:08:57]Souls create drag. Bateman flows like mercury.

[00:09:01]But mercury also causes hallucinations.

[00:09:05]19th century hat makers went insane breathing mercury fumes. Mad hatter syndrome.

[00:09:11]Their reality dissolved, perceptions warped. That's Bateman by the third act.

[00:09:17]Did he kill Paul Allen or imagine it?

[00:09:20]Display windows show him different versions of nobody.

[00:09:25]What if the perfect body is as imaginary as the murders?

[00:09:29]Abs from the Latin abdominalis means to hide away.

[00:09:33]Bateman's abs may be washboard, maybe flab wrapped in designer delusion.

[00:09:38]The thousand crunches exist in the same place as the chainsaw murders.

[00:09:43]Somewhere between synapse and psychosis.

[00:09:46]Both there and not there until observed.

[00:09:49]Schrodinger's abs.

[00:09:52]But confession requires a self to confess, a soul to save, a person to forgive.

[00:09:58]He's a corporation trying to feel guilty.

[00:10:01]A return on investment trying to find God.

[00:10:05]The film isn't showing us a psychopath with the perfect body.

[00:10:08]It's showing us that the perfect body and the psychopathy are the same symptom.

[00:10:13]The disease of believing you can purchase meaning.

[00:10:17]Mary Harron turns the camera into a liar.

[00:10:20]Makes a mirror that looks like a movie.

[00:10:22]The only reliable narrator is your own doubt.

[00:10:26]Your eyes receive light reflected off a screen. Your brain assembles shapes.

[00:10:31]Your mind decides what's real.

[00:10:34]Three separate processes.

[00:10:36]Three separate chances to [ __ ] up the truth.

[00:10:39]You think you're watching Bateman?

[00:10:41]You're watching yourself watch yourself.

[00:10:44]The body on screen is a Rorschach test of your own [ __ ] up expectations.

[00:10:48]If you see discipline, you've already bought the product.

[00:10:52]If you see aspiration, congratulations.

[00:10:56]You're Paul Allen waiting to get axed.

[00:10:58]Truth isn't just dead, it's being dismembered and stored in separate freezers.

[00:11:05]Somewhere along the way, the satire got stripped for parts and rebuilt as a lifestyle brand.

[00:11:11]Ed Gein made lampshades out of human skin.

[00:11:14]At least he had a goal.

[00:11:16]Now we turn our own skin into content.

[00:11:18][music] Chemical peels, morning routines, before and after posts, skinning ourselves alive for the algorithm.

[00:11:27]Put a serial killer on the internet. He becomes a lifestyle coach.

[00:11:32]The 4:30 a.m. ice bath, the lion's mane coffee, the mouth taping sleep hack.

[00:11:39]We turn Bateman's psychosis >> [music] >> into a Huberman Lab episode.

[00:11:44]Gorilla mode pre-workout, alpha brain, ashwagandha, magnesium glycinate, replacement parts for the human you used to be.

[00:11:54]The modern Bateman doesn't need a nail gun. He's got headspace and a Whoop strap.

[00:12:00]He doesn't kill people. He kills every part of himself that can't be quantified.

[00:12:05]The male grooming industry, $78 billion.

[00:12:09]Male suicide rates, highest ever recorded. [music] Men dying inside optimized bodies that have never looked better.

[00:12:19]Personal trainers adjust your form.

[00:12:22]Financial advisors adjust your portfolio. Therapists adjust your coping mechanisms.

[00:12:28]Nobody adjusts the hollow [ __ ] core where yourself used to live.

[00:12:33]In American [music] Psycho, Bateman looks in the mirror and sees nothing.

[00:12:38]In 2026, we call that goals.

[00:12:42]Sigma male. Have you heard this term?

[00:12:45]Sigma [ __ ] male.

[00:12:47]The man who doesn't need anyone because he's too busy optimizing his morning routine.

[00:12:53]These kids watch Bateman and see everything except the point.

[00:12:57]Like reading Moby Dick for fishing advice. Like watching Schindler's List for fashion tips.

[00:13:03]They're not joking. Or they are joking.

[00:13:06]Or they're joking about not joking.

[00:13:08]The internet makes everything true and false simultaneously.

[00:13:12]Schrödinger's [ __ ] post.

[00:13:15]Men building bodies like castles no one will ever storm.

[00:13:19]Fortifying nothing against nothing.

[00:13:22]The enemy never comes because the enemy is the absence of an enemy.

[00:13:28]Vanitas, Latin for emptiness, futility, where we get the word vanity.

[00:13:35]The old masters painted skulls next to mirrors reminding us that beauty is temporary and death is forever.

[00:13:43]All this preening's rehearsal for decomposition.

[00:13:46]Your six-pack's future worm food doing publicity shots.

[00:13:51]This is not an exit.

[00:13:54]These words hang at the end of American Psycho.

[00:13:57]No exit from the body, no exit from the violence, no exit from the system that creates both. No exit from the loop because the loop is the point.

[00:14:07]You're not maintaining your body so you can live. You're living so you can maintain your body.

[00:14:13]Sartre said hell is other people. Wrong.

[00:14:16]Hell is you. Alone with your Fitbit realizing you've walked 10,000 steps to nowhere.

[00:14:23]Hell is optimizing everything except your reason to exist.

[00:14:27]The future isn't robots replacing humans. It's humans replacing themselves with something that photographs better.

[00:14:34]Something that looks perfect and feels like absolutely [ __ ] nothing.

[00:14:38]The body remains. The perfect body. The gleaming empty and possibly maintained body. Still doing crunches. Still checking its watch.

[00:14:48]Because that's the real horror. You could be in perfect shape and perfect hell at the same time. But you already knew that. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to return some videotapes.