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.

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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.

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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.

Easy — but inaccurate. 

Cultural life in the 21st century doesn’t feel tortured or ecstatic so much as muted. We aren’t truly bored anymore; boredom has been technologically abolished. Every stray second can be plastered over with a feed, a notification, a video “For You,” an algorithmic recommendation tuned precisely to prevent mental calm. But neither are we animated. There are widespread predictions of a coming civil war and calls for a political uprising, yet neither is remotely on the horizon — because we aren’t passionate enough. Instead, we drift in a gray zone between stimulation and stupor, provoked but under-engaged, surrounded by infinite novelty that no longer feels all that novel.

Our clothes arrive in two days and fall apart in three. Travel is cheaper, but cities blur into one another, interchangeable landscapes of chain restaurants, and “authentically curated” coffee shops identical from Denver to Dublin. The internet, once a wild frontier, now feels like a series of endlessly recycled aesthetics: girl dinner, cottagecore, blokecore, everything a core, everything a remix. 

It’s precisely this sense of living in a stagnant wasteland that Blank Space, W. David Marx’s wide-ranging survey of 21st century-culture, tries to map. In his previous polemic, 2022’s Status and Culture, the Tokyo-based culture-vulture took a sanguine approach to contemporary life, arguing that the omnivorous approach to cultural consumption in the West — where there is no more snobbery, and where elites enjoy “not just high culture, but pop and indie, niche and mass, new and old, domestic and foreign, primitive and sophisticated” — is by and large a good thing for the sake of flattening the class distinctions of old. We were slouching toward equality. 

Now, Marx worries that the lack of pretense in contemporary culture is no utopia, that it might mean we’re all eating from the same trough of slop. Across nearly 400 increasingly exasperated pages, Marx convincingly argues that art, entertainment, and fashion since the year 2000 have been some combination of uninspired, recycled, soulless, corporatized, or plainly dumb — so much so that there is a blank space where a distinct cultural imprint should be. 

The book draws its title from the Taylor Swift song, but it should have been called Bad Space, because what Marx charts isn’t a lack of distinct cultural production, but a disposable, amoral culture led by “charlatans and reprobates,” as he puts it. “With creators no longer required to pursue artistic excellence, culture became a lowest-common-denominator battle for attention.” I’d go further, and argue that 21st-century culture is a product of the rise of a post-moral society, a civilization that lost its backbone, where shame, seriousness, and shared judgment have been replaced by nihilism, vanity, and greed. 

Marx would rather tell you that the hellscape of the present is due to the abandonment by the creative class of the 1960s counterculture that spurred cultural innovation to new heights. “Artists reshaped the established symbolic core, tweaking human consciousness to reveal new ways to perceive the world,” he wrote, which led to “new styles, new goods, and new behaviors.” But in his telling, the pure artistic invention of the late 20th century was suffocated to death by — yes — neoliberalism, that inscrutable yet omnipotent bogey of Left liberals.

To make his point, Marx praises Pearl Jam’s modest refusal to sell out in the 1990s and compares it favorably to the Mount Rushmore of 21st-century cultural derailment: Kanye West, whose career has the dramatic arc of a Greek tragedy rewritten by TMZ; who first made his mark with the gospel-inflected single “Jesus Walks” and barely 20 years later wrote a rap ode in honor of Adolf Hitler. The book also traces the inglorious rise of proto-influencers Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton and a trio of sleazeballs: pervy fashion photographer Terry Richardson, Vice editor-turned-Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild, whose contribution to American culture is … well, exactly what you think it is. What ties these figures together, in Marx’s telling, is that they exemplify a society with no values left but market values.

Blank Space performs rhetorical parkour to avoid blaming liberals or progressives for any of it, instead dutifully blaming 21st-century cultural decay on conservatives. He’s half right when he gestures toward economics and wields phrases like “neoliberalism,” “late capitalism,” and “market incentives.” And he isn’t wrong to invoke the late Fredric Jameson, whose famous line from Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism could serve as Blank Space’s thesis statement: “Aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally,” creating a frantic churn of “ever more novel-seeming goods” and obliterating the distinction between art and packaging. But the process described by Jameson is not simply the result of capitalism’s strength, but society’s weakening. Once the belief in non-market values collapses, culture becomes indistinguishable from advertising.

Marx argues for the revival of old norms, but he overlooks who was largely responsible for their demise in the first place. For most of the 20th century, flouting norms was a New Left pastime — from the counterculture to punk, queer avant-gardes, and the art world. The point was to Question Authority, mock propriety, scandalize the bourgeoisie, and liberate the individual. And they won. So decisively, in fact, that by the aughts, the bourgeois values were simply … gone. Outside of new social taboos created by the race-and-gender-obsessed professional-managerial classes, there was nothing left to rebel against. By rejecting moral language in the name of liberation, the Left ceded moral authority to the market, argues Ana María Cisneros in Damage Magazine. “We surrendered to the only morality the market recognizes: preference and purchase.”

The rot of the post-moral society goes beyond soulless or mediocre entertainment products. We may be in the midst of a mass amnesia event. In her 2004 book, Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs — a patron saint of liberals — treated cultural collapse as a social and institutional problem. The existence of big cultural industries — newspapers, TV, and the internet — obscured the fact that we were on the brink of a neo-Dark Age, a term that, whatever its historical accuracy, aptly describes periods of cultural stagnation and mass-forgetting. Jacobs recognized that, in the West, we were losing family stability, real education, civic responsibility, and cultural memory, and that it was leading to the erosion of the institutions that reproduce the collective customs, practices, and rituals of the past. 

The cultural byproduct of Dark Ages, Jacobs wrote, wasn’t empty. “It is not a blank; much is added to fill the vacuum. But the additions break from the past, and themselves reinforce a loss of the past.” Yet Marx makes the case that if we’re in a Dark Age, it’s because our artists are now conservative and lack a “genuine countercultural ethos.” Indeed, Blank Space makes the absurd claim that the early-aughts hipster era — the American Apparel, Vice, Williamsburg, Terry Richardson, “indie-sleaze” years — was Patient Zero of the new conservative culture. 

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His evidence is that the early-aughts hipster scene was snarky, cynical, and displayed a kind of libertine hedonism lacking utopian imagination, prefiguring the amoral MAGA-friendly art scene of post-Covid lower Manhattan (explored by UnHerd columnist Matt Gasda in his era-capturing play Dimes Square). Sure. But that makes the early aughts post-political, not conservative. Contra Marx, the hipster moment didn’t pave the way for Dimes Square conservatism, with its ironic trolling. Rather, hipsterism was a product of the vacuum of discernment and tradition created by anti-social libertarianism of both Left- and Right-wing varieties. And into that vacuum waddled the MAGA Right.

One has to read between the lines to realize that Blank Space is not just a cultural history, but an accidental sociology of a profoundly atomized society. 

Marx’s argument that the market colonized culture overlooks the fact that culture collapsed alongside society, and that this collapse was accelerated by technology. We now live in “the anti-social century,” as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has argued: the moment when digital technology accelerated our retreat into hyper-individualized isolation. Concerts, clubs, civic centers, hangouts, bars, and churches withered, and Americans now spend less time with friends, neighbors, and communities than at any point in modern history. Bowling Alone led to scrolling alone. The result is the erasure of the social fabric that once made innovative culture possible.

Culture requires communities with shared expectations, peer pressure, reputational consequences, scenes, mentors, and traditions. Remove those, and all that’s left is audience metrics and the conditions of a new Dark Age. Blank Space recognizes this reality in some sense and calls for a renaissance. Marx wants artists to RETVRN to the 20th century and bring back creative ambition, and, likewise, for critics to rediscover discriminating taste, audiences to rediscover seriousness, and creative enclaves to redefine norms — something like Make America Creative Again. It’s accidentally the best conservative book of the year.