When We Were Young - an 80s and 90s pop culture podcast · When We Were Young podcast

"I Guess I'm A Pretty Sick Guy" - American Psycho

·1 hr 14 min·10 clips

The show opens by treating the calendar turn like a joke with teeth. That sets up a conversation about the film that is less interested in quoting it than in asking why Patrick Bateman's polished routine, dead-eyed vanity, and carefully arranged tastes still feel legible. Bateman keeps getting read as insecure. The panel leans into that idea by talking through his business-card fixation and the way the film makes him look weak in places where another movie might have made him look dominant. Tony Montana is the foil. Comparing Bateman to Scarface gives the episode a clean way to separate Bateman's brittle performance from Montana's more direct force, and it helps explain why one character feels like swagger while the other feels like a man collapsing under his own image. The morning routine matters a lot. What starts as a joke about grooming, clothes, and self-maintenance becomes a way to think about how ordinary habits can slide toward obsession and then toward something much darker. Huey Lewis shows up too. That discussion lets Chris and Becky pivot into the show's bigger habit of using pop songs and pop lore as evidence for loneliness, cynicism, and the strange logic people attach to their favorites. The violence never stays abstract. Even when the conversation gets playful, it keeps returning to the idea that Bateman is funny because he is so extreme and unsettling because he is built out of recognizable social reflexes. The panel rhythm stays loose. Asides about style sections, a dog, and how much research is still left to do keep trading places with the analysis, so the episode sounds researched without getting stiff and jokey without losing the thread. That balance is the point. The episode keeps circling back to masculinity, narcissism, and violence without turning solemn for too long, which lets the film stay funny even while the critique sharpens. The ending teases more chaos. Boy-band talk and the confession that a lot of the research still hasn't happened yet give the close the same slightly unruly feel as the rest of the conversation, and that unruliness is part of the charm.

As heard by us

A sharp look at Bateman's insecurity, grooming rituals, and the joke of trying to project control.

American Psycho is framed less as a greatest-hits horror watch than as a close look at Patrick Bateman's routines, insecurity, and the odd way ordinary habits can feel harmless right up until they do not.

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Why you'd press play

When Bateman's routine feels a little too recognizable.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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