Contrary to what you might have read elsewhere (in a lot of places) the film itself does not suggest Lou Bloom is a psychopath or sociopath or, indeed, exhibits any other mental condition or personality disorder. (Though, of course, he does exhibit certain narcissistic tendencies.) Lou comes with too much willingness to pursue violence to be termed a victim of society, but nevertheless he is what he is less because he was born that way and more because he was molded that way.
The very first words out of Lou’s mouth are quite telling:
“I’m lost.”
In fact, at that particular moment in that particular place Lou is not lost at all. He knows exactly where he is. On a much grander scale, however, Lou is very much lost. This is obvious by the way he speaks. He doesn’t speak like a regular human. Any time Lou has more than one sentence to say to something he slips into a cadence, rhythm and tone that sounds more like a motivational speaker or, even more so, like a guy in front of an audience force to sell himself because he knows the product he’s trying to peddle is crap. But, they, America is all about the packaging, right? Because if you don’t like what’s beneath the wrapper, you can just throw it away and buy something else.
Lou is lost because he has bought fully into the new America dream. Not the old one about finding a good job, buying a house, raising a family and not having to worry about class dictating the terms. The American dream Lou is pursuing is the bumper sticker dream. Lou is all about packaging. There is no core in there and everything he thinks is deep thinking sounds like something you’d see on a motivational poster or bumper sticker:
"Do you know what fear stands for? False Evidence Appearing Real.
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Why you pursue something is equally as important as what you pursue.
Good things come to those who work their asses off.
My motto is if you want to win the lottery you've got to make money to buy a ticket."
That last one there is particularly insightful because Lou doesn’t have a motto. If that’s his motto, then you can bet he heard or read it somewhere else. (The one about friends being a gift, by the way, comes from Robert Louis Stevenson, but he meant it in a way completely opposite from how Lou exploits it.) What human being actually speaks like that on a daily basis in normal discourse with others? The answer is those who have taken the lessons the titans of American capitalism have been teaching them literally.
Most of us know that kind of stuff is so vapid as to be meaningless and just laugh it off and go about living in the real world. But Lou caught on to something that rest of us haven’t. The titans of American capitalism are vapid and they do it mean and, most important, they don’t live in the real world. They live in a world where success is measured only by whether you have more money tomorrow than you did today. That's it, that's all. By that standard, Lou Bloom ends the movie as the embodiment of the American dream. By every other standard, not so much.
