Ms Mary Harron’s film adaptation of Mr Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho opened 20 years ago this week. Until early this February, it remained one of the best movies about our present time – not just the 1980s, in which it is set, nor even the early 2000s when it came out, but, two months ago “now”; the self-merchandising, HD selfie, perfect vignette vacuousness of the Instagram generation.

When the movie came out, I remember thinking it was both too stiff and too camp. The supporting cast (from Mr Jared Leto to the great Mr Matt Ross of Silicon Valley) seemed to perform with all of the subtlety and grace of SNL actors, while Mr Christian Bale as Bateman was very near to Ace Ventura territory. (Also, all sorts of little things seemed out of place: was the film too cool for its subject matter, too knowing to be satirical? Did the appearance of downtowners Ms Chloë Sevigny and Mr Justin Theroux make a movie about bankers too hip to be square?) Over time, though, the frequencies of the cast, those splendid sets, costumes and cinematography, settled into harmony – or, perhaps,  in the past 20 years, our reality became so monstrous as to resemble the world satirised in the film, which is more like it.

The opening credits sequence, over an outlandish dish at some mythical Manhattan restaurant at the height of the nouveau and fusion fads, could serve as a direct mockery of so many foodie grams. (I recently rewound this sequence several times to think, “Ooh, how pretty”, and then, “Ooh, how gauche” – as I was meant to). Now, the fantasy stuff – the bit about banker Bateman murdering homeless people and women for sport, his revenge against the society that deprived him of meaning – feels painfully inevitable. When viewed from the New York of today, post-#MeToo, post-various financial crises, Bateman – the symbol of hyper-capitalist entitlement and its discontents is, if anything, understated.

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman,” he says, early on in the film, sounding like an influencer gone confessional or a reality show star trialing a new tack, “some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable... I simply am not there.”

Where are any of us these days, though, beyond our lifestyles? How there-there is our reality when primarily witnessed via our social media channels and laptop screens? Actually, with his endless monologuing about and namechecking of grooming products, his aspirational workout regimen and his interior decor straight out of Mr Kanye West’s mood boards, Bateman would have been the ultimate influencer. Even his half-baked pop music sounds like a preface for a sponcon sales pitch for a hi-fi set-up. If he were running around today – and not, you know, sitting in the Cabinet – Bateman would be every basic-bro online, professing his “expertise” in everything from arabica beans to Zalto stemware; mansplaining Mr Glenn Beck to people at Carbone and considering every album track save the singles to be deep cuts. “The reason Patrick Bateman loves this music,” Mr Ellis told The Paris Review in 2012, “and wants to tell us all about it in excruciating detail, is because he wants to fit in.”

But where does Bateman fit in now – or, where will he fit in, in the reality that this time will midwife? If Bateman, the hollow-man, sates himself with pop culture, and pop culture is inert in our collective isolation, what will he feed on? (And, what will sustain us?)

As Mr Ellis goes on to say in the same interview, “American Psycho came out of a place of severe alienation and loneliness and self-loathing. I was pursuing a life – you could call it the Gentlemen’s Quarterly way of living – that I knew was bullshit, and yet I couldn’t seem to help it. American Psycho is a book about becoming the man you feel you have to be, the man who is cool, slick, handsome, effortlessly moving through the world, modelling suits in Esquire, having babes on his arm. It’s about lifestyle being sold as life… Everything meaningful wiped away in favour of surfaces, in favour of looking good, having money, having six-pack abs… Patrick Bateman is the extreme embodiment of that dissatisfaction. Nothing fulfills him. The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. On a certain level, I was that man, too.” 

In the 20 years since Ms Harron released her film, I think we’ve come to embody that man to such an extent that we’ve altered its genre – from pitch-black comedy to something far more relatable. What Mr Ellis calls the GQ lifestyle may have reached its apogee before the lockdown, and may soon be in decline. Maybe, in our new reality, we will be better at seeing through surfaces (though their surfaces and the superficial portals that they contain, are all we have at the moment). It could be, that with everything lying fallow, the insecurity that Bateman represents, the aspiration ad absurdum, the covetousness unto the breach, too, will die out. Maybe, when our doors and businesses reopen, when we go back out into the world, the monster will be gone. Or, maybe, he’ll be lying in wait.