I mean, this is exactly what that scene is trying to convey.

That… this dude is weirdly interested in ‘co-worker music’, he’s like, aggressively bland… and then he fucking snaps.

Hell, Bateman even literally says that one of their albums was too mainstream, too generic.

Bateman is totally vapid and hollow inside, and is desperately trying to find meaning, evoke an actually interesting response, but all he knows how to do is pantomime a cariacature of the perfect wall street socialite type.

So, you carry that forward, and the analogy works out to roughly: everyone whose entire life is wholly about fitting in to corpo culture, keeping up with the jones’s, everyone who is a ‘coworker music’ type of NPC automaton, ‘my personality is a couple Tiktok trends’ type person…

… they all have the potential to have this same Bateman style psychotic break, if they ever become… self-aware enough of their own lack of actual, genuine identity.

Maybe I didn’t understand the scene, when I watched it I assumed he had planned to kill the guy all along and that was just stuff Bateman was saying to make him think everything was normal

I don’t disagree, that is the more direct way to understand the scene from uh… like a perspective of ‘what is happening, why is it happening’, in relation to how the plot functions and progresses.

But if you go a bit deeper, into ‘why is the author having the plot work like this, why has the author used/created this kind of a character, what, if anything, is the message or lesson or moral they are trying to convey’… I guess my first comment is how I answer those kinds of questions.

Writing a plot that makes sense and is at least logically consistent, possible/plausible, that’s one thing.

Another thing is to do that, but in such a way that the specific plot beats, character decisions, they’re all designed to ultimately convey a more complex idea by illustrating an engaging scenario that demonstrates it, as opposed to just directly stating that moral or lesson.

Of course, media analysis/critique is always subjective.

I just didn’t preface my entire first comment with ‘Well, I think that…’ or ‘In my opinion…’, partially because I am autistic and tend to be blunt, but also partially because it comes across as more certain and confident, and is thus slightly more convincing, rhetorically.

So that right there is me trying to demonstrate my kind of analysis of author intent… on myself.

Makes sense, I overall agree, I’m mostly just unsure about the idea of a “snap”, “break” or gaining self awareness, as opposed to something more passive. It’s been a while since I saw the movie though and I didn’t read the book so I can’t make much of an argument about it.