'American Psycho' Director 'Mystified' that Wall Street Bros Can't See the Movie is a 'Gay Man's Satire'

A luxury brand-obsessed serial killer seems like an odd choice of hero for "Wall Street bros," "American Psycho" director Mary Harron says, particularly when its main character is "a gay man's satire" on those same finance guys.

"The filmmaker recently chatted with Letterboxd Journal about the 'sigma male' social media phenomenon and how some men have grown to look at Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman as a role model," The Hollywood Reporter relayed.

In that article, Letterboxd Journal noted that while Bret Easton Ellis created the sociopathic Bateman, the first-person narrator of the 1991 novel, it's Harron's cinematic take from 2000, starring Christian Bale, that continues to resonate.

"At the time of this article, 'American Psycho' is the 23rd most popular film of all time on the platform, with almost four million watches (and it placed as number five in our recent Showdown rounding up the best dark comedies)," Letterboxd Journal revealed about the popularity of the film with the cinema-centric social media platform's users.

Indeed, Harron told the outlet, the film's humor, and Bale's "manic, comic, edge of craziness and scariness" performance, came as a surprise even as she was filming. "I didn't say, 'You're going to do very extreme physical comedy, but it's also going to be scary,'" Harron recalled. "We didn't plan it out that way; it was just an intuitive thing, which is one of the best things when you're filming."

Letterboxd Journal offered the additional surprise that "slightly more fans with she/her pronouns have selected it in their Four Faves" on the social media platform "than those with he/him pronouns," which the outlet attributes to the film being the work of "writer-director Harron and writer-actress Guinevere Turner..."

"I don't think that Guinevere and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention," Harron marveled. "So, did we fail?"

Perhaps not: The film is much more embraced now than at the time of its release, when it was roundly critiqued. The book, too, prompted a backlash, perhaps because its sadistic serial killer is the product of "respectable" society.

Still, THR reported, Harron remains puzzled. "I'm not sure why" Wall Street's male cadre seem to have taken so eagerly to the film "because Christian's very clearly making fun of them," Harron said.

What is also clear to Harron – though perhaps not to the film's finance bro fans – is that the book is "a gay man's satire on masculinity," with Bret Easton Elllis' "being gay [having] allowed him to see the homoerotic rituals among these alpha males," the director mused. "There's something very, very gay about the way they're fetishizing looks, and the gym."

And not just gay, but "mean girl" gay.

"They're so obsessed with their looks, and Brett could see it and focus it and underline it," Harron pointed out. "It was about insecurity and vanity and competition and the way they gossip. The way they talk about each other is like teenage girls in a locker room at school."

Harron talked about how, as the article put it, "the story has unfortunately aged quite well."

"It was about a predatory society, and now the society is actually, 25 years later, much worse," Harron pointed out. "The rich are much richer, the poor are poorer."

"I would never have imagined that there would be a celebration of racism and white supremacy, which is basically what we have in the White House," the film director went on to say. "I would never have imagined that we would live through that."

If Hollywood rumors are to be believed, we might be about to live through it again – this time with a gay director at the helm of a remake. "Call Me By Your Name" and "Queer" director Luca Guadagnino is said to be planning a new take, and "Dune" star Austin Butler – who played a murderous madman in that film, too – is said to be in contention for the role of Patrick Bateman.

But will anything ever live up to the original?