An all time great Christian Bale moment:
More simply put: it’s Easton Ellis’s attempt at dark humor. How to Wall Street executives peacock for one another. They compare business cards and evaluate one another.
The filmmakers take this directly from the novel which expresses the same thing: all of the guys in the room are in competition with one another and yet none of them can really see that they are just copying one another. There is no originality and none of them are unique. The only thing which matters to them is that they think they are somehow just a little bit better than the other guy sitting next to them.
There are several important visual distractions which happen during the card comparison scene:
If you look closely at the business cards in the movie they essentially all the look the same with only slight variations in the texture of the paper stock and the font lettering. However, they all physically look the same (white rectangle) and say the same thing (vice president). And yet all of the males in the conference room get excited in how these slight variations somehow distinguish their card over the others making it somehow better. If you look closely at Bateman he seems to be beginning to perspire over Paul Allen’s business card. A direct analogy to this would be male body builders in a gym measuring one another’s biceps or choice of workout clothing.
Bateman and Paul Allen look very similar. They have a similar hair style, similar glasses, similar outfit. This is interesting as Bateman considers Paul Allen his nemesis and yet they look almost identical. This begs the questions of why, exactly, does Bateman envy Paul Allen? The answer is very simply that Bateman thinks Paul Allen is better than him when, in fact, the differences between them are so minute as to be absurd.
All of the business cards identify the person as a "Vice President" at Pierce & Pierce, so all of those guys have the same job and yet they are in competition over the slightest visual variations of how a business card looks. Again, the absurdity of this is meant to be darkly funny.
The Fisher Account seems to be a coveted account and yet it is never explained. If it is so important why does it remain such a mystery? The answer is simple: no one really knows and that is why it’s so coveted. Vain, selfish people covet what they believe they do not have, even if they do not understand the meaning or value behind what they covet. They want it because someone else may have it and the virtue of not having it makes it desirable as the person who has “just a little bit more” is desirable even though explaining how and why just having one more thing would matter. Thus is the conundrum of the human heart which desires what it does not have even though the object/subject of desire may offer nothing of value at all. The Fisher account is a red herring and gives the characters in the book something to talk about although it has no relation to anything important and is never explained because it does not really matter.
This is dark comedy at its finest: adult men comparing themselves with one another by showing their business cards which are fundamentally and principally the same. The competition is meaningless. No one really wins at anything and nothing is accomplished. The audience can laugh at this knowing that the characters are playing this game with grave seriousness. This is the type of competition between upper-class New York professionals that also successfully masks the possibility that Patrick Bateman is, indeed, guilty of murder.
Now imagine the business cards being cars in this scene...