TikTok Discourse: Satire and Politics

 "You don't understand American Psycho!!!11! Or the Joker!!"

It's so funny to me that a certain flavor of frustration is always present when these two political extremes interact with each other. The claim is as follows -- Patrick Bateman is a caricature of the American Dream and hustle culture, and American Psycho is meant to be a criticism of capitalism and what vices flow from it: greed, consumption, and violence. Sure. Simple. I can agree that the film is well constructed to communicate this message, but what should I do when I disagree with the core themes? 

The first option is reactive discourse. To use logos to disagree with the film's fundamental tenets. To argue your side. Limited effectiveness, but probably most in line with academia and analytical philosophy. 

The second option is through reactive creativity -- media that praise the opposite of it. So, fighting culture war media with culture war media. Either critiques of other economic systems or support for capitalism. Yes, fine, limited by resources, and in line with literary and cultural strategies. 

The third option, which is what most internet manosphere denizens seemed to have taken, is that of a satire of a satire. They will "blindly" praise American Psycho and put Patrick Bateman on a pedestal as if he was their role model and a hero. The irony is twofold: the first is that there is always a danger in making a villain too charismatic -- if so, then readers will just begin to side with the antagonist. Don't think that these internet "sigmas" are stupid. Yes, they do sound stupid and cringe, but everyone is just as stupid. They know American Psycho is a criticism of capitalism. They know Patrick Bateman pursues money and status to the extreme. But what if they disagree with the main theme of the story? It seems, under this understanding of the film and the audience, these "sigmas" willfully ignore the main message in order to subvert the film's cultural meaning -- even if it means pissing off the film directors, producers, and actors. 

Second, this decision to willfully ignore the satirical elements, satirically, is an effort to sort of play into the emotions of left wingers, who have always claimed to be more educated, less ignorant, and morally superior to their hillbilly counterparts. So these right wingers, knowing this stereotype, start to embrace that identity in an effort to piss off more liberals -- "trolling". To see more liberals frustrated, thinking that conservatives do not understand these films at all, and subverting cultural media for their own purposes, has to be the funniest trends I have seen recently. 

So the irony is twofold: first, it is a satire on a satire, and second, it plays into the stereotypes about what groups of people are intelligent and which are uneducated. I think the conservative project has been more successful on this instance.