How Patrick Bateman remade our cities Welcome to ‘American psycho’ urbanism

In late February, Bret Easton Ellis confirmed on his podcast what Hollywood had been trying to bury for months. A string of A-list actors had read Scott Z. Burns’s new script for director Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Ellis’s iconic 1991 novel, American Psycho — and declined to play Patrick Bateman. Austin Butler and Jacob Elordi were the names that leaked; according to Deadline, neither has said yes. Ellis offered a polite explanation — nobody wants to stand in Christian Bale’s shoes — that did not quite convince even him. The producer, Lionsgate, is ready to move. Guadagnino is attached. Burns has rewritten the book from the ground up. There is still no Bateman. 

In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.

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