Xclusive

Xclusive is a private health club on the Upper West Side, four blocks from Patrick Bateman’s apartment, and one of the clearest institutional settings for his obsession with appearance, bodily discipline, and status. Its polished abundance turns exercise into both a consumer privilege and a daily performance: Bateman carefully maintains his body there while using the club’s ordered environment as a temporary framework for impulses that increasingly resist order.

Facilities, Cost, and Social Position

Xclusive has been remodeled three times in the two years since Bateman joined. Its equipment includes Nautilus, Universal, and Keiser weight machines; extensive free weights; ten tennis and racquetball courts; aerobics classes; four aerobic dance studios; two swimming pools; Lifecycles; a Gravitron; rowing machines; treadmills; cross-country skiing machines; personal training; cardiovascular evaluations; individualized programs; massage; sauna and steam rooms; a sun deck; tanning booths; and a cafe with a juice bar. The club is designed by J. J. Vogel, who also designed the new Norman Prager club, Petty's, and membership costs five thousand dollars a year.

This inventory makes Xclusive more than a place to exercise. It is an institution organized around abundance, specialization, and continuous bodily improvement, where machines, services, and expert programs convert health into a purchasable lifestyle. Bateman’s membership places him within the same competitive world as the restaurants, clothing, financial offices, and private clubs that structure his social existence. The club’s exclusivity is therefore both practical and symbolic: it filters access through money while offering an environment in which physical perfection can function as another visible marker of rank.

Bateman’s Routine and Bodily Discipline

Bateman arrives after work, removes a Ralph Lauren double-breasted suit, and changes into black Lycra shorts and a tank top that can be folded tightly enough to fit in his briefcase. Before entering the gym, he checks his reflection, applies mousse to slick back his hair, uses moisturizer, and covers a blemish beneath his lower lip with Clinique Touch-Stick. The preparation establishes that even a workout begins as an exercise in presentation. His body is not simply trained; it is inspected, corrected, and arranged for an imagined audience.

He prefers the Stairmaster when no one is waiting, despite recognizing that he should stretch first. He completes twenty minutes on it, then stretches for fifteen minutes before moving to the Nautilus machines. His program alternates aerobic work with resistance training, using both computerized machines and free weights. The machines permit adjustments in resistance without leaving the apparatus and are valued for reducing soreness and injury, while free weights offer versatility and variations unavailable on the machines.

The routine is described with the precision of a private accounting system. Bateman performs five sets of ten repetitions for the legs and back, six sets of fifteen on the stomach-crunch machine, and seven sets of ten on the biceps curl machine. He spends another twenty minutes on an exercise bike while reading Money magazine, then completes multiple sets of leg extensions, leg curls, leg presses, barbell curls, bent-over lateral raises, latissimus pulldowns, pulley rows, dead lifts, bent-over barbell rows, incline-bench presses, lateral raises, seated dumbbell presses, cable pushdowns, and close-grip bench presses. After further stretching and a hot shower, he leaves the club for the next item in his schedule.

The exact counts make the body resemble a portfolio being managed: every muscle group is assigned a quota, every movement is measured, and every perceived defect demands correction. Yet the discipline produces no stable inward self. The more thoroughly Bateman regulates his appearance, the more visibly his consciousness fragments between exercise, sexual fantasy, consumer calculation, drugs, and violence.

Social Relations and Dehumanizing Perception

The club’s staff and members are filtered through Bateman’s status-conscious gaze. Cheryl, the dumpy receptionist who is in love with him, brightens when he approaches and greets him, but Bateman moves past her because the Stairmaster has no line. He evaluates the gym’s occupants according to whether they are attractive, sexually available, socially prestigious, or contemptible. He notices Muldwyn Butner of Sachs, whom he knew at Phillips Exeter Academy, at the biceps-curl machine, while dismissing other men as unemployed actors or night waiters.

The same setting that promises health and self-improvement thus reproduces Bateman’s broader habit of sorting people into surfaces and functions. Cheryl’s affection becomes an inconvenience, acquaintances become status references, and other bodies become objects for appraisal or hostility. The club’s emphasis on physical optimization intensifies rather than corrects this reduction of persons to visible attributes.

Bateman also links Xclusive to the media and consumer routines that occupy his days. He listens to music through his Sony Walkman while exercising, recalls an episode of The Patty Winters Show about breast reduction, and phones Craig McDermott so that they can ridicule the woman featured on it. The gym’s ostensibly healthy discipline therefore coexists with misogyny, spectacle, and contempt for bodily difference. Fitness becomes another channel through which the culture’s evaluative gaze is reproduced.

Violence, Restraint, and Institutional Order

Xclusive becomes especially significant when Bateman brings a weapon into its orbit. After working out there for two hours on a moonless night, he sits in the stark locker room with an Uzi, which cost seven hundred dollars, stored in his locker. He also carries a Ruger Mini costing $469 in his Bottega Veneta briefcase, but considers the Uzi more dramatic and more masculine. A Valium is beginning to take effect as he stares into the darkness of the locker, tempted by the gun.

The weapon is not presented merely as an instrument. Bateman calls it a symbol of order, a revealing description in a place devoted to controlled movement, measured repetition, and managed appearance. The club’s institutional routines and the gun’s imagined authority occupy the same mental field. Both promise command over bodies, yet neither resolves his instability. On this occasion, reflection leads him to put the Uzi back in the locker because he has videos to return, money to withdraw, and a difficult dinner reservation at 150 Wooster. The postponement is governed less by moral transformation than by the continuation of a tightly scheduled consumer life.

The scene also places Xclusive beside Bateman’s recent violence without allowing the institution to acknowledge it. He regards the rape and murder of an NYU student as satisfying, then returns to the practical sequence of exercise, weapons, errands, and reservations. The club’s clean, regulated environment does not interrupt his brutality; it absorbs it into the same timetable as grooming and entertainment.

Narrative Significance

Xclusive is a compact model of the world Bateman inhabits. Its high membership fee, specialized machines, individualized programs, and carefully maintained bodies express a culture in which identity is built through consumption and relentless self-management. The club offers an apparently rational system of improvement, but Bateman uses that system to stabilize a self that is increasingly empty, hostile, and uncontrolled.

Its repeated appearance also creates a structural contrast between visible order and concealed disorder. In the gym, Bateman counts repetitions, selects equipment, monitors his skin and hair, and moves through a sequence that can be narrated with almost bureaucratic precision. Outside it, his memory fails, his anxiety becomes overwhelming, and his violence intrudes into ordinary schedules. Xclusive can regulate the surface of his body without producing ethical or emotional regulation.

The club consequently functions as both a setting and a diagnostic instrument. It reveals how privilege turns health, leisure, and bodily appearance into institutionalized status practices, while showing that the most meticulously managed exterior can coexist with profound depersonalization. In Xclusive’s mirrors, machines, locker rooms, and schedules, Bateman’s ideal of control reaches its most polished form—and its most disturbing failure.