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.

“Bob always took care of people who cooperated with him,” Screvane told Moses’s legendary biographer, Robert A. Caro. But only the people who cooperated, as Caro notes in his biography of Moses. “If you didn’t there would be no consulting jobs, no authority make-work, and you would find your pension was less than you had believed you were entitled to.” 

Not long ago, Caro turned 90. In a short recent book on his writing career, he reflected how he came to write his biography of Moses after realizing what he was doing as a journalist was “bullshit”. In contrast, people like Moses wielded powers of patronage that startled politicians like Screvane who stood to benefit from them. Caro recalled: “Here was a man, Robert Moses, who had never been elected to anything, and he had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day. And he’s had this power for more than forty years, and you, Bob Caro, who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it, you have no idea where he got this power.” 

The book that he eventually completed, The Power Broker, has passed into legend along with its author, becoming widely recognized as one of the greatest biographies ever written. It offers many lessons, from how a new road or housing development can generate blight in a neighborhood to how the Tammany Hall system of political corruption worked in New York. However, its main subject matter is how Moses effectively deployed a new, technocratic, form of corruption.

Most importantly for us perhaps, The Power Broker sheds light on how democracies are fragile and open to erosion and exploitation, casually handing away their crown jewels without realizing it — and with hardly anyone noticing. For the Britain of 2026, it helps clarify how a trusted and even loved institution like the BBC has lost its way, getting carried away on its own hubris and — crucially — remaining detached from public accountability thanks to the license fee. 

Moses’s hubris arose not just from natural arrogance but a deep well of achievement. He studied at Yales, Oxford and Columbia, where he wrote an admiring PhD on the British Civil Service, before he sought to apply his learnings to the state government of New York. His goal in this work, he explained in a later report, was “[to] press for progress toward responsive, responsible, efficient and democratic government in the state.”

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But he got to advance in his career only by accepting the compromises and accommodations of politics. As assistant to New York State Democratic governor Al Smith, Moses became an expert in drafting bills to conceal their real content. He got himself appointed to various independent Commissions and built parks, playgrounds, parkways (i.e. roads) and even beaches for families to flee to in the hot summer months. He built up a reputation as someone who Got Things Done — things which helped people. 

As Caro writes, the prevailing image of Moses in the pre-Second World War years “was of the totally unselfish and altruistic public servant who wanted nothing for himself but the chance to serve… The image was of the fearless independent above politics. The public believed authorities — entities outside the normal government setup, entities whose members were unsalaried and appointed to terms long enough in theory to ensure their independence from politicians — to be ‘nonpolitical.’”

This image helped Moses to get away with his greatest power grab. This was to turn the Triborough Bridge Authority, which built what is now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge linking the boroughs of Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, from an instrument of the city into an independent, permanent entity insulated from interference by city and state officials.

Using the drafting prowess he had obtained while working for Al Smith, Moses had concealed the power-grab in the financing documents of the bill that established the Authority. Once the bridge itself was complete (1936) and had paid off its bonds, its toll revenue flowed into the Authority’s coffers, rather than going to the city that had commissioned it.

With the end of the Second World War, the volume of car traffic soared. The Triborough Bridge went from carrying 11 million vehicles in 1941 to 23 million in 1949 and 46 million in 1960. Meanwhile, the Authority’s income from this and other infrastructure swelled from $8 million in 1941 to $26 million in 1951, $37million in 1960 and $75 million in 1967. The money allowed Moses to attract extra financing through bond issues, giving him an extra  $750 million to spend on public works in New York City in the 15 years after the Second World War. All this money also allowed him to grease the wheels of New York politics whenever resistance arose to his projects from citizens and their representatives. 

The Triborough Bridge Authority acquired some of the powers of a sovereign state, including the power of eminent domain, permitting the seizure of private property. The bill Moses drafted gave it power not just over bridges and their approaches but roads, streets, and parkways connecting with those approaches. And so Moses started hacking through highly populated areas of the city to build expressways to connect to his bridges. One of the most stunning chapters in The Power Broker, “One Mile”, details the consequences of this in a one-mile stretch of the Bronx where a community was torn apart and destroyed.

Altogether, around half a million city residents were forced to leave their homes to make way for Moses’s projects. He built 627 miles of major road infrastructure and much more besides. The justification he used for his road-building was that it would reduce traffic congestion on existing thoroughfares. But his projects only ended up creating more traffic. Within a few years of them being built, the new roads were as congested as those they were meant to relieve. Meanwhile, the New York City Subway’s infrastructure was decaying. Moses successfully blocked any new track being laid.

“In road-building in and around New York, he had a dictator’s powers,” Caro writes. “And he used them. He enjoyed using them — for using them gave him what was his greatest pleasure: the imposition of his will on other people.” But all along, Moses maintained that he was not political, that he was the antithesis of the politician and never let political considerations influence his projects. Compromise was what politicians did, he said. He saw himself as above politics: concerned with right and wrong, where he was right and anyone who objected was wrong. 

Of course, these ideas of “independence”, of “independent expertise” and being “above politics” retain a powerful currency today. Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestine Territories, describes herself as a “UN Independent Expert”, despite her evident sympathy towards Palestine. In Britain, whole swathes of government functions are farmed out to supposedly independent bodies. One of the most high-profile is The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which provides authoritative and easily-available predictions which, in practice, work to heap pressure on the government of the day. Never mind that those predictions have proved consistently wrong.

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But perhaps the most egregious examples appear in the non-economic sphere; see the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which sometimes appears vulnerable to activist exploitation. There is a distinct tendency for “quangos” to start acting like mini, alternative governments. This tendency is exacerbated when the quango is expected to have an impact, not just in its own particular areas of concern but on society as a whole. Arts Council England (ACE), for example, has broadened its remit from funding artistic work to supporting “creative practitioners” which it describes as “an umbrella term for all those who work to create new, or reshape existing, cultural content.” This has pulled in all sorts of groups and people who would not previously benefit from arts funding, including a BAME-only organization called Rising Arts Agency, which plastered the billboards of Bristol in 2020 with messaging including “The blood is on your hands” repeated three times accompanied with the message: “So, Mr White Man… What are your plans?” As the ACE chief executive Darren Henley has said, “Together, let’s create better lives.”

However, perhaps the best match to Moses in Britain, in terms of scope, style and impact, is the BBC. It is a carved-out part of the British state, but with independent income. In this respect, the license fee mirrors the tolls Moses collected from users of his bridges and tunnels — tolls that were almost compulsory for those living in the suburbs. Like Moses, with his manic road- and bridge-building, the BBC has magnified itself over time, intruding into ever more areas of life with a proliferation of channels, platforms and activities, while giving us news high on interpretation and promotion — from Israel-Gaza to Trump, the latest celebrity clickbait and puff pieces on drag queens. Moreover, the corporation’s ability to do this without advertising or charging extra has deterred any competitors, similar to how Moses deterred competition from railroad and subway.

Like Moses, the BBC has exploited its previous reputation as a trustworthy, broadly impartial and high-quality broadcaster to push in the opposite direction. Its commitment to “due impartiality” has become heavy on what it has thought is “due” and lighter on “impartiality”. If Donald Trump is a bad man, so the logic runs, then it is appropriate to emphasize that rather than report accurately on his ongoing activities. The approach could cost the BBC dearly, with a vengeful Trump suing it for $10 billion in a Florida court over Panorama doctoring his January 6 speech — a case that has already led to the resignations of both the Director-General and Head of News.

In truth, the very idea of being independent of politics, or “anti-” or “above” politics, is another kind of politics. The activists who heap pressure institutions like the Beeb, from inside and outside, have a point. All are sites of power; and the BBC is no exception. Politicians from Ed Davey to Harriet Harman want the BBC to be a bulwark against right-wing populism, but in doing so they point to how this idea goes wrong. They treat the BBC as an arbiter, promoting what is right — basically liberal-left progressivism — rather than serving in a more modest fashion as a reporter, mediator and facilitator for discussion. Theirs is the logic of the dictatorship rather than democracy, of Pravda against the old BBC. If a national broadcaster becomes a voice for some, in opposition to others, it does not deserve to survive while taking the money of both groups.

William Exton, a reformer and critic of Moses’ West Side Improvement project, told Caro: “His only reply to everything we had proposed was an ad hominem attack on us, and it was all a lie, a goddamed lie.” Cut to the reactions of BBC supporters to its present crisis and you hear talk of “right-wing” conspiracies and even “coups”, of nefarious “political” forces that are trying to destroy the noble Corporation. These could come straight out of a Moses playbook; except that Moses used accusations of Communism.

Moses ultimately fell victim to a ruse of the kind that got him his power in the first place. He was eased out of Triborough by New York Mayor John D. Rockefeller while he wasn’t paying attention. It may be that this sort of ruse, of an intensely political kind, is the only way the BBC can be reformed and restored to anything like the entity that built its reputation. Maybe the insiders and outriders are right. Maybe the leaking of the Prescott memo was a political act. And maybe it will prove to be the beginning of the end of an activist BBC, provoking a return to the rigor, trustworthiness and restraint that made the BBC worth exploiting in the first place.

But, like the formidable Robert Moses, the Corporation shows few signs of turning and few signs of regret.