Is Tiger Woods more like Ryan Bingham or Patrick Bateman?

In the big Vanity Fair cover story that’s making the rounds, sports scribe extraordinaire Buzz Bissinger writes that Tiger Woods is like Ryan Bingham, the soulless axe-man played by George Clooney in the Oscar contender Up in the Air.Writes Bissinger,

Nothing was left to chance, not even his wardrobe during major tournaments, a careful mix of dark pants and golf shirt and hat picked out in consultation with Nike. He had the trappings of a life…

Change Nike to Ralph Lauren and that’s pretty much right out of the book/movie, American Psycho.From one of Patrick Bateman’s voiceovers:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.

Now, there’s obviously a pretty big difference between serial axe-murderers and serial personal infidelities. But both actions were undertaken to fill a personal, spiritual emptiness that being the best, the wealthiest, the finest-dressed, the most-desirable can’t fill. The whole point of “American Psycho” is that the pursuit of meaningless commercial goods is bad for the psyche. Perhaps the same can be said of the pursuit of meaningless commercials.