# The American Psycho ATM Cat Scene Explained
The ATM cat scene in American Psycho stands as one of cinema’s most memorable moments of surrealism and psychological breakdown. This pivotal scene marks a crucial turning point in the film where the narrative shifts from potentially realistic violence to undeniable hallucination and delusion.
In the scene, Patrick Bateman approaches an automated teller machine expecting to withdraw money like any normal day. Instead of displaying standard banking options, the ATM screen shows him a bizarre message: “Feed me a stray cat.” This impossible instruction immediately signals to viewers that something has fundamentally broken in reality. Bateman then spots a stray cat nearby and prepares to shoot it, but a woman intervenes and he shoots her instead. This triggers a chaotic chase sequence where the laws of physics seem to operate on cartoon logic rather than reality.
Director Mary Harron deliberately designed this moment to mark where the film stops being potentially real and becomes pure hallucination from Bateman’s fracturing mind. The talking ATM is not something that could ever happen in the real world, making it the clearest indicator that viewers have crossed into the protagonist’s delusional mental state.
Film scholars analyzing American Psycho generally agree that fantastic moments like the talking ATM are delusions rather than actual events. The film takes place during Wall Street’s massive growth period when fortunes were being made overnight, creating a culture where Bateman and his colleagues become carbon copies of each other with matching suits, identical haircuts, and shallow conversations. This extreme consumerism erases individuality to such a degree that people constantly call each other by the wrong names because nobody can tell these men apart.
The ATM scene becomes the dividing line in the narrative. Before this moment, Bateman commits murders that could theoretically be real, such as killing a homeless man and his dog in an alley, or murdering his colleague Paul Allen with an axe. After the ATM scene, everything becomes questionable. When Bateman later calls his lawyer Harold Carnes and confesses to murdering Allen and around 40 others, Carnes laughs at the confession and says someone as pathetic as Bateman couldn’t kill anybody.
One interpretation suggests that Bateman committed some murders but not all. Perhaps he only killed the homeless man and sex workers, while the Allen murder was an elaborate fantasy created by his jealous mind. The ATM scene represents the moment when Bateman shifts from being a psychopath committing actual crimes to becoming fully psychotic and unable to distinguish imagination from reality. Everything after the ATM scene might therefore be hallucinations.
Another possibility is that Carnes lied about seeing Allen in London, or he saw someone different but mistook them for Allen since everyone looks so similar. The apartment could have been professionally cleaned to remove evidence. The ambiguity is intentional, leaving viewers to decide what actually happened versus what existed only in Bateman’s deteriorating mind.
The cat itself becomes one of the few victims who escapes from the yuppie psychopath, making it a rare moment of mercy or perhaps further evidence that the entire sequence never occurred at all.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho_(film)
https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/movie-cats/100-most-iconic-cats-in-movies
