In a new, wide-ranging interview, American Psycho writer and director Mary Harron went off on "Wall Street bros" who love the movie.
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Ever since Christian Bale stepped into the designer suits of Patrick Bateman in 2000's American Psycho, men have been missing the point of the movie and admiring the main character.
Now, there's a whole trend of self-identified "sigma males" who identify with Bateman and try to model their lives off of him.
Like Bateman, sigma males are "self-sufficient loners; they attract extremely good-looking women but aren't interested in them, and, in keeping with society's growing fixation with productivity, they're capitalist hustlers," per GQ.
Harron, who co-wrote the film with Guinevere Turner, says she's "mystified" by "Wall Street bros" and similar types who embrace the film.
"I'm not sure why [it happened], because Christian's very clearly making fun of them…" Harron told Letterboxd. "But, people read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read The Catcher in the Rye and decide to shoot the president."
She continued, saying it was "very clear" to her and Turner, who is gay, "that we saw it as a gay man's satire on masculinity," and explained how the book's author, Bret Easton Ellis, being gay "allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males."
She continued, saying those same rituals exist in sports and Wall Street, "and all these things where men are prizing their extreme competition and their 'elevating their prowess' kind of thing. There's something very, very gay about the way they're fetishizing looks and the gym."
"They’re so obsessed with their looks, and Bret could see it and focus it and underline it," she continued. "It was the thing that Valerie Solanas, of I Shot Andy Warhol, (Harron's directorial debut was that film, which focused on the life of radical feminist Solanas who tried to assassinate the famous artist) always said: there was a reversal of alpha male culture, which was more like the culture of teenage girls. It was about insecurity and vanity and competition and the way they gossip. The way they talk about each other is like teenage girls in a locker room at school."
Harron said that while Bateman is ostensibly handsome and well dressed, "he's played as somebody dorky and ridiculous."
"When he's in a nightclub and he's trying to speak to somebody about hip hop—it’s so embarrassing when he's trying to be cool," she says.
Next, gay filmmaker Luca Guadagnino will be trying his hand at adapting the novel into a new film. Only time will tell if "sigma males" will see in his Bateman what they think they saw in Harron's version of the character.
