Consumerism and Madness in Mary Harron’s American Psycho

Abstract

Situated in a different watershed era, in the booming 1980s, the film American Psycho focuses on the negative effects of consumerism in the milieu of the so-called "yuppies". This article traces the debilitating pressure to conform, and the resulting superficiality that drive the protagonist of the movie to murder. Here, the focus lies on the male psyche, as "engaging in commodified recreational activities started to lose its stigma as being a women’s domain", and men began to be specifically targeted as consumers in the second half of the 19th century.