@archdigestsyou: Patrick Bateman had a lot of issues, but a lack of taste in interior design wasn’t one of them. I’ve always been fascinated by villain lairs, which, for all intents and purposes, this apartment is. While I personally enjoy the audiobook far more than the film, Mary Harron’s adaptation, with production designer Gideon Ponte and set decorator Jeanne Develle, renders Patrick’s apartment in a way that is far more faithful to the core ideas the story explores. The clinical term both versions lean on is the "mask of sanity," Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 phrase for the psychopath who performs normalcy without possessing it. As Bateman himself says: "My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage." Modernist minimalism is the ideal material for that mask because it is the one style that can be perfect and empty at the same time. Spaces like these live through their negative space, the emptiness that frames the few carefully curated pieces of furniture and art, each selected to project an abundance of economic and cultural capital. A normal person struggles with that because a home naturally fills with personal belongings and clutter over time. To inhabit a room like this, you must constantly erase yourself from it. For most of us, that erasure is labor. Bateman, on the other hand, has no personality he has to erase. Instead, Patrick uses the space to perform: crunches and jump rope in the living room, recording sessions in the bedroom. Funny enough, in almost any other context, a home like this would be read as the residence of someone cultured, aesthetically refined, and deeply interested in design and art. But once you complete the picture with everything we know about Patrick and his circle of friends, my favorite quote from the book comes to mind: "Everyone looks familiar, everyone looks the same."

archdigestsyou

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Tuesday 21 July 2026 15:42:51 GMT