'American Psycho': a double portrait of serial yuppie Patrick Bateman

Kooijman and Laine analyze Mary Harron's "American Psycho," a 2000 film adaptation of the 1980s satirical novel by Bret Easton Ellis in which Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic Wall Street young urban professional ("yuppie"), assumes an alternate identity as a serial killer. The authors examine the double personas of the Bateman character and in particular focus on how the film's depiction of Bateman reveals that his identity as a serial killer is a hallucinatory construction, which therefore suggests that his identity as a yuppie is a construction as well. Several scenes from "hitAmerican hitPsycho" are dissected, and psychoanalytic theory is applied to scenes where the schizophrenic Bateman character responds to his mirror image as a unifying force.