The Yuppie Themes

More Money, More Problems, More Insanity: The Progression of The Yuppie In 1984 Newsweek magazine claimed that it was “The Year of The Yuppie”, a term used to describe young, well paid working professionals living luxurious lifestyles in the city. Yuppies came to infiltrate the late 1980’s culture, and two movie characters later written to epitomize this stereotype include Patrick Bateman and Jordan Belfort. Both American Psycho and The Wolf of Wall Street are centered around the lives of two men successfully navigating their way through Wall Street during the late 1980’s. Both characters strive for more: more clothes, more cars, more money, more social domination. While this is typical to the ‘yuppies’ of the 1980‘s, their particular methods

These changing themes can show the progression of consumer culture concerns as time goes on, however, for each the main message is the same: America has become infiltrated by yuppies, and they don’t appear to be leaving anytime soon. Before the movie was released, American Psycho was a novel written by Bret Easton Ellis and published in 1991. The book, much like the movie, struck a cord within the American society. With attacks against the book for being too violent and others dismissing the satirical message, Ellis defended his novel in an interview by saying “‘I was writing about a society in which the surface became the only thing. Everything was surface -- food, clothes -- that is what defined people. So I wrote a book that is all surface action: no narrative, no characters to latch onto, flat, endlessly repetitive. I used comedy to get at the absolute banality of the violence of a perverse decade’”(qtd. in Cohen). This message was clearly translated into the film adaptation that came 10 years later in 2000. Director Mary Harron mimics Ellis by using an overwhelming excess of graphic violence in order to represent and criticize the