Character · American Psycho
Patrick Bateman's IQ — what the methodology actually says.
"Patrick Bateman's IQ" is a popular search. TV Intelligentsia doesn't invent IQ numbers for fictional characters. Here's the honest answer — the show's IQ Score, and what it tells you about how seriously the work treats his mind.
The honest answer
TVI scores shows and films, not characters. Assigning an IQ to a fictional character would be fabrication — we don't have a methodology for that. What we do have: a 0–200 rating of the work's structural intellectual quality, and that score tells you something real about how seriously American Psycho treats Patrick Bateman's mind.
Who Patrick Bateman is, and what kind of intelligence the show actually depicts
Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is Wall Street investment banker whose status-anxiety cognition is the actual subject of Mary Harron's adaptation — the rare American-film villain whose narcissism is rendered with documentary specificity rather than as caricature. The character's intellectual signature in the show is the intelligence of consumption rendered as substitute for identity, taxonomic-status cognition (business-card stock, Huey Lewis discography), the rare antagonist whose performance is sustained inquiry into how 1980s Wall Street made narcissism the load-bearing structure of selfhood.
This is the part of the question "what is Patrick Bateman's IQ" that the search engine flattens. The real question — the one viewers are circling — is whether the show treats his mind seriously. That's the question TVI can actually answer.
What the IQ Score reveals about the portrayal
American Psycho scores 158/200 (Stimulating tier — top end) and Bateman is the structural engine. The rubric reads what Bale and Harron committed to: that narcissism is cognitive material, not just moral failure. The business-card sequence works because the film treats status-fixation as a real form of attention — a kind of intelligence applied to entirely the wrong object. That's the satirical achievement most readings of the property miss.
For the full score breakdown — Cognitive Stimulation, Educational Value, Craft & Quality, and the rationale — see American Psycho on TV Intelligentsia. Or read what an IQ Score is and how it's calculated.
Read the full methodology
How TV Intelligentsia scores intellectual quality — the rubric, the dimensions, the published framework.
Methodology →