I watched a movie earlier today called Laughter, a 1930 picture by Harry d’Abbadie d’Arras. It’s one of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s one hundred movies on his rejoinder to the original AFI Top 100, and seeing as I’m casually working through that list, the time had come. Fredric March plays this roguish theater type in the film, not one of the sweating and cantankerous geniuses of the 1933-and-on Warners model, nor one of the casually wealthy swingers hypnotized by the Great White Way. He’s not well off, he’s not a huge success, but he’s having a lot of fun and he has that gift of gab. He prances into the home of a former theater type (now respectably married to a magnate, you know the one), runs into the footman, and the footman tries to get rid of him. If you leave your card, the footman says, then they may reply to you later. March, because he is a big goof who does not have a card, writes his message on the footman’s clothes and then sends him upstairs to deliver it.

I don’t think about business cards much, partly because I don’t work in a job where I want anyone to talk to me unless there’s some legal compulsion to do so, but also because business cards are dead, right? Surely they’re dead. When Mark Zuckerberg gets his “I’m the CEO, bitch” business cards in The Social Network, even that feels like a weird thing to have in 2004. American Psycho takes place well before then, in what I think we might call the heyday of the business card. The footman in Laughter is not asking March for a business card, of course. March has jumped feetfirst into a Fifth Avenue of fops and fogies, and leaving a business card rather than a calling card would just be a good way to tell C. Mortimer Gibson that he’s poor. The men of American Psycho, the corporate financiers of the late 1980s who might run into Gordon Gekko or Ivan Boesky over some working lunch where people eat alcohol, are not elevated enough for the calling card. The calling card is gone, one of those casualties of a post-La Follette America that was no longer as comfortable with tycoons and patroons, and the business card is in. The calling card is pretentious in the literal sense, a way to show off that one is worth speaking to. The business card is pretentious in the way people mean it, which is showoffish but more importantly obnoxious about it. I am worth talking to, the business card says, and that makes me worth your investment of capital.

The business card scene in American Psycho is one of the signs that this film is a satire as much as anything else, one of the few satires of office culture in the past, oh, thirty years that still lands that way. (There’s a bitterness to this impression of the corporate world that’s more fitting Richard Yates than, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sloan Wilson.) It’s also the impetus for Patrick Bateman killing for the first time onscreen; his jealousy of Paul Allen, who has the perfect business card among other perfect indicators of quality, puts others to death. Calling the business card “deadly serious” is a bit much, but the point being made is as perfect as Paul Allen’s card’s off-white coloring.