You Love to See It: American Psycho (Patreon)

When Patrick Bateman kills women, he uses tools to do it. A chainsaw for the sex workers he lures to his apartment; a nail gun when he considers murdering Jean, his secretary. When he murders men, he uses weapons. A knife for the homeless man he guts in an alleyway; an ax for Paul Allen, a coworker whose popularity and connections inspire jealous rage in Bateman. That a man like Bateman sees women as objects is hardly surprising; he can scarcely maintain even his own sense of interiority. The infamous business card scene in which he teeters on the edge of hysterics because his coworkers prefer another man’s cards to his own perfectly showcases just how much he lives at the mercy of forces neither he nor any of the men around him understands.

Men may disgust or threaten Bateman, but it’s women for whom he reserves his most extreme acts of violence. While killing the two sex workers he is paradoxically both revealed and masked, his true nature finally on display, his face concealed by a rough canvas bag with crude eyeholes cut out of it. His worst urges are reserved for them, these people he sees as disposable, but his face, the symbol of his essential nature, is hidden. As he exemplifies when directing his secretary how to dress and obsessing over who his lover prefers, he views women as extensions of himself, and on some subconscious level he may realize this makes them privy to an understanding which escapes even him. 

When he kills women, Bateman, like a certain former president, is “managing his anxieties.” He’s pruning away people who can see the self he claims not to possess, the maimed and squirming superego curled like a grub somewhere beneath his countless overlapping skins of conformist tastes and canned opinions. As Jean proves when she finds his notepad in his desk and realizes the import of his grisly doodles, he’s right to fear the women around him, women he ignores and underestimates not as a conscious choice but as part of his desire to fit in. He uses tools to kill them because in some obscure way he knows he's working when he does so, performing maintenance on the architecture of his life and the diffuse structure of his identity. A man is another Patrick, a potential enemy or underling. A woman is a ghost in the machine.