Titled as they are, these three works implicitly position their straight white male protagonists as consummately American. Within this subgenre, Psycho makes a particularly resonant match with two films released within the same nine-month period: American Beauty (dir. Meanwhile, the 1997 video game Grand Theft Auto allowed the player to enter into an avatar and rehearse violence on women and people of color.ĭozens of Hollywood productions channeled - and monetized - white men’s anxiety around their own forgettability during this period: think Falling Down (1993), Disclosure (1994), Fight Club (1999), and Office Space (1999). Men’s rights activists bitterly reframed this modest leveling of the cultural and economic playing fields as injustices, a rhetorical move that sociologist Michael Kimmel has termed “aggrieved entitlement.” And their message reached an unprecedented audience via new media channels sympathetic to the cause, from Fox News, launched in 1996, to conservative talk radio, which rose to prominence after the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, to best-selling books like Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990). It also reflected a more material plight: rising unemployment rates were steadily eroding the middle-class stability enjoyed by previous generations of white male breadwinners. The explosion of pro-male organizations and retreats during this decade - their members predominantly straight and white - was in part a reaction against multiculturalism and the political gains won by women and minorities in previous years. White men’s cognitive dissonance over this catch-22 came to a dangerous boil in the 1990s with the birth of the so-called men’s movement in America. But alongside the social, political, and material privileges that such everyman status entails, certain “anxieties plague an unmarked body,” as film scholar Nicola Rehling puts it - anxieties that one is “ontologically empty,” a member of a “fundamentally unstable category.” White men have historically positioned themselves as the presumed subject of Euro-American culture, even at times when this claim has defied statistical reality (e.g., when women have outnumbered the nation’s men, as they currently do, or when the number of indigenous people in North America dwarfed the white population). As the members of America’s supposedly default gender, race, and sexuality, heterosexual white men were simultaneously terrified of and obsessed with being average.
This scene distills the paradox of white manhood with which US media and culture were increasingly preoccupied in the decade leading up to American Psycho’s production. Much as the only trait that materially distinguishes Bateman’s card from the white stack is a whiff of thanatos (its “bone” hue), Bateman’s nocturnal violence will soon become all that sets him apart from the herd of paper-pale finance bro doppelgängers. Little wonder, then, that one of the VPs flies into an existential tailspin over losing the stationery-as-identity measuring contest: Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) soon murders his colleague for having presented a superior card. These white men are not simply symbolized by their business cards - they are business cards.
So, too, do their personalities lack color, consisting exclusively of the (largely interchangeable) brands they sport: Valentino or Armani suits the exquisitely vague title of vice president. The men bear a strong resemblance to the cards they flick forward like switchblades: white, white, white. PALE NIMBUS, eggshell, bone: the shades of the business cards that a group of investment bankers whips out in an early scene of American Psycho (dir.
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