In line with what both Harron and Turner feel about the question of whether or not the murders are real, Bret Easton Ellis has pointed out that if none of the murders actually happened, the entire point of the novel would be rendered moot. As with the practical theories regarding the Carnes conversation, the outbursts and the empty apartment, interpreting the murders as real is part of the film's social satire. Ellis has stated that the novel was intended to satirize the shallow, impersonal mindset of yuppie America in the late 1980s, and part of this critique is that even when a cold blooded serial killer confesses, no one cares, no one listens and no one believes. The fact that Bateman is never caught and that no one believes his confession just reinforces the shallowness, self-absorption, and lack of morality that they all have.

None of them care that he has just confessed to being a serial killer because it just doesn't matter; they have more important things to worry about. In Bateman's superficial high-class society, the fact that even his open confession to multiple murders is ignored serves to reinforce the idea of a vacuous, self-obsessed, materialistic world where empathy has been replaced by apathy. By extension then, this could be read as a condemnation of corporations in general; they too tend get away with murder (in a figurative sense) and most people just choose to ignore it, just as do Bateman's associates. In this sense then, Bateman serves as a metaphor, as do the very real murders. If the murders were purely in his head, the strong social commentary would be undermined and the film would become a psychological study of a deranged mind rather than a social satire. And whilst that is a perfectly valid interpretation, as Harron indicates above, it is not entirely what the filmmakers were attempting to achieve.