Ever since I was a teenager, I have been fascinated by stories about the criminally insane. Films such as the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece Psycho or the 1991 classic The Silence of the Lambs immediately captured my attention, opening up a window of perspectives that I had never even imagined. Rather than committing horrific acts out a desire for wealth and power, a psychopath can be written to do things for reasons that make sense only to themselves. The unpredictable nature of these characters make for a fascinating character study, and films based on this premise are able to enthrall the viewer almost instantaneously. But it was not until I viewed the controversial 2000 film American Psycho that I saw a deranged, violent mind portrayed in such a unique way – as an unapologetic black comedy.

From the opening scene, American Psycho establishes itself as a satirical view of 1980’s Yuppie culture – or a mockery of vanity-consumed cultures as a whole. Every character in the restaurant looks and talks exactly the same, as the lead character, Patrick Bateman, and his associates are unable to identify which person in the restaurant is another associate of theirs, Paul Allen. Every character is so consumed by their obsession to look as perfect as possible, that they lose their own identity entirely and become indistinguishable from one another. This theme is a constant force throughout the entire story, even becoming the penultimate plot point for the intentionally vague ending.

Nowhere is this mockery of indistinguishably vain personas more perfectly encapsulated than in perhaps the greatest and most well-known scene in the film – the business card scene.

Each character so desperately seeks further validation for their appearance that they even do so in something as trivial as how their business cards look. And for the ultimate punchline, the business cards themselves are also essentially indistinguishable from one another. However, the characters (especially Bateman) are able to notice even the most minute imperfections between each card, and treat them with tremendous importance. Even to the point that Bateman, so consumed by his insecurities of his card being seen as inferior to Paul Allen’s, decides to murder Allen for such a minor slight. The scene is so ridiculous in its absurdity that the original author of the American Psycho novel, Bret Easton Ellis, didn’t even realize how amusing it was until witnessing it in the film himself.

There are so many more ingeniously comedic scenes throughout the film, notably the infamous scene of Bateman murdering Paul Allen to an upbeat pop song (about the importance of conformity, no less), but the film also holds a significant importance even to this day. The notion of a culture consumed by greed and vanity is certainly not isolated to the 1980’s, as a similar Yuppie-level ruthlessness was witnessed during the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. We have also seen the introduction of social media become a shrine towards vanity, with people constantly seeking approval for their appearance from millions of complete strangers online. Some may view American Psycho as little else but a comedic bashing of the 1980’s, and perhaps it was originally intended to be that way. But so long as American culture continues to value vanity and greed above all else, as we quite clearly do today, American Psycho will be a harsh look in the mirror for us all.

And a damn funny one at that.