this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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I mean... your plot notes are on point... but 'yuppie' derives from 'YUP', which means 'Young Urban Professional'.
At the time, the 80s and 90s, yuppie was synonymous with ... the people making huge incomes in white collar jobs, in large corporations, by being cutthroat businessmen, usually earning their keep by orchestrating deals, layoffs, mergers, downsizing/rightsizing, etc... stuff that was good for the shareholders and execs, but bad for pretty much everyone else.
Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying?
I don't see how you think yuppie culture and sociopathy of the rich... are any different, I don't get why you are drawing a distinction there, or what the boundary is.
Yuppie culture is sociopathic, and the young rich people of the era ... were largely yuppies.
Bateman is a yuppie, he is a rich person, and he is a violent sociopath/psycopath... or at least, he seems to think he is... he may just be utterly delusional.
The way I see it is ... he is a hollow person, a husk, with no actual values, but is a brilliant actor, acting out the fake corporate/socialite norms... which are fundamentally built on a kind of sociopathy: Nothing matters other than the pursuit of profit and status, superiority in all aspects is the goal, any means to achieve this are justified.
Thus he is the uber yuppie, the ur yuppie, the 'perfect' yuppie... and he cannot maintain sanity as a 'perfect' yuppie.
When Bateman snaps, we're seeing the violence that is normally done indirectly, sanitized through the layers of corporate governance and influence upon government and society as a whole... all of the complications of politics and economics are removed, and we see a disintermediated, rich corporate mad man in a suit (or his birthday suit) just directly doing the violence that is normally obfuscated and done via societal systems and layers of bureacracy.
You show the truth with a lie, kind of idea.
Maybe a more succinct way of saying what I'm trying to say:
Yuppie culture was the culture of the rich, or at least a prominent subculture of a prominent subset of the rich, in the 80s and 90s. Bateman is basically a cariacature of this, thus the movie is a character study of a person who represents an entire class... of wealthy people. (We also get to just see the culture outright via Bateman's interactions with others in that culture)
2)Bateman might be a psychotic killer OR it is all a delusion. Multiple events in the book happen that make it pretty clear that Bateman might just be crazy and bored and isn't killing people. That bit about Paul Owen being seen alive in London could be real because just like people think Bateman is Halberstam people also mistake him for Paul Owen. This is because everyone is so shallow and replaceable that no one really knows anyone so it is heavily implied Bateman might just be crazy like his lawyer tells him.
Where we differ is I don't think anyone other than Bateman and maybe Owen show signs of sociopathy. The average yuppie was no different than the average bro of today. They just had better whiskey and worse haircuts.