Patrick Bateman Nodding

Submission 15,061

Part of a series on American Psycho / Patrick Bateman. [View Related Entries]

About

Patrick Bateman Nodding refers to a deleted scene from the 2000 film American Psycho in which protagonist Patrick Bateman (portrayed by Christian Bale) is listening to character Donald Kimball (portrayed by Willem Dafoe) at the bar, nodding as he speaks. In early 2022, a clip of Patrick Bareman nodding in apparent disinterest gained virality as the source material for memes, primarily video captions and GIF captions.

Origin

On April 14th, 2000, the American satire thriller film American Psycho premiered.^[1] In a deleted scene from the film, the protagonist Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is approached by a detective named Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe) at a bar, where the two are conversing as Bateman nods his head in agreement. The film's script^[2] describes Bateman's behavior in the scene as "nodding nervously, idiotically."

[Kimball:] So… You hang out here a lot?
[Bateman:] Yeah. I mean, whenever necessary, you know? How is the investigation going? Taken anyone in for "formal questioning?"
- Informal conversations, mostly. What's that, Finlandia?
- No, they're out as usual. Fucking dump.
- Too true. You see, Bateman, formal questioning is okay, but people tend to reveal so much
more about themselves in relaxed settings, don't you think? Just can't help themselves. They wanna confess. I mean, they wanna get caught!

The exact first meme to use the clip is currently unknown. On December 21st and December 23rd, 2021, TikToker^[3]^[4] @halal_kanye posted two video caption memes based on the clip of Bateman nodding as Kimball speaks, captioning them, "Me pretending I know what my teacher is saying so she can get her coffee breath out my face" and "Me at a family gathering listening to my uncle tell me how he used wipe my ass when I was a baby." The post gained over 3,900 views and 560 likes and 780,000 views and 45,200 likes in three months, respectively (shown below, left and right).

Spread

Following @halal_kanye's posts, the meme format received further spread on TikTok. For example, on December 25th, 2022, TikToker^[5] @evilnarancha posted a meme captioned in Russian, "when you passed the exam but the teacher started telling some story from the old days," which gained over 319,700 views and 45,200 likes in three months (shown below, left). A similar meme posted by TikToker^[6] @fiveheadmatt on the same day gained over 11,200 views and 1,800 likes in three months (shown below, center). On January 1st, 2022, Instagram^[7] account repostrandy reposted a video caption meme originally created by an unknown user, which gained over 204,300 views and 47,900 likes in three months (shown below, right).

On January 10th, 2022, the Russian entertainment website Medialeaks^[8] reported on the spread of the meme among Russian users.

On January 11th, 2022, Redditor^[9] InTheKurry posted a GIF caption meme based on the clip to the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit, where it gained over 2,600 upvotes in three months.

In February 2022, the video and GIF caption format acheived significant virality online, primarily on Reddit and Twitter.