Patrick Bateman And Joker Lightning Eyes — Split screen of Patrick Bateman with lightning eyes and Joker with green hair and clown makeup

Patrick Bateman And Joker Lightning Eyes

2023viral videodeclining

Published August 11, 2026

Patrick Bateman And Joker Lightning Eyes is a Sigma edit video format that pairs Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman and Joaquin Phoenix's Joker with glowing electric eyes over Brazilian phonk music. It appeared on Instagram in late 2023 and blew up across Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts in early 2024 as a stamp of approval on so-called sigma moments.

sigma memes mashup video memes brain rot memes 2024 memes phonk memes

Overview

Patrick Bateman And Joker Lightning Eyes is a short video clip stitched into Sigma edits where Christian Bale's Patrick Bateman from American Psycho and Joaquin Phoenix's Joker from the 2019 film both appear with glowing, crackling electric eyes1. The clip is scored to Brazilian phonk and gets tacked onto a preceding video, usually a guy pulling off something clever or supposedly alpha, to signal that the moment counts as sigma3.

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The format took off on Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts in early 2024 and became one of the defining shapes of that year's Sigma edit wave3. By mid-2024, users on X were reposting the edits as evidence of what they called brainrot, lumping the Lightning Eyes clip in with other worn-out Sigma tropes like Phonk Trollge and the Bryan Cranston Barbershop Quartet3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Instagram Reels (viral spread on TikTok and YouTube Shorts)
Creator
@troll_face1997
Date
2023

The earliest known Reel using the Patrick Bateman and Joker Lightning Eyes clip was posted by Instagram user @troll_face1997 on December 31st, 2023, and racked up more than 3,200 likes over the following six months2. On January 1st, 2024, @troll_face1997 posted a second Reel built around the same footage, which pulled in over 279,000 likes in five months2.

@troll_face1997 kept using the format through the winter, and on March 1st, 2024 dropped another Reel with the Lightning Eyes clip that hit roughly 1.4 million likes in three months, cementing them as the originator3.

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Instagram

How It Spread

On April 9th, 2024, X user @Keegan59992745 reposted one of @troll_face1997's Reels showing a man and a woman blowing out birthday candles using the same number 2 candle, with the punchline that he was 21 and she was 244. The tweet, captioned "wtf does this even mean," gathered around 25,000 likes in two months and pushed the format in front of a confused Twitter audience3.

On May 1st, X user @blephin_ reposted a different Lightning Eyes Reel with the line "Sigma edits have become incomprehensible," earning about 21,000 likes in a month and helping frame the trend as cringe3. Parody edits followed. On May 24th, 2024, Instagram user @stewie.feels20 mashed the Lightning Eyes clip into an Overstimulation Video that piled up Sigma tropes and used the "No Problem! Here's the Information About the Mercedes CLR GTR" caption, hitting more than 35,100 likes in 11 days3.

On June 2nd, 2024, X user @realwow_mao posted another Overstimulation Video layering the Lightning Eyes clip with the Ambatukam sound and the Yapping Idk Sterling format, drawing roughly 212,000 views and 12,000 likes in two days3. Voicemod also archived the audio in its meme sound library, letting people drop the clip into their own edits5.

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How to Use This Meme

A typical Patrick Bateman And Joker Lightning Eyes edit runs a short setup clip first, often a guy doing something clever, awkward or vaguely alpha, then cuts to the Bateman and Joker lightning-eye footage set to Brazilian phonk to mark the moment as sigma1. Creators commonly stack it with other Sigma tropes and captions like the Mercedes CLR GTR line when going for an Overstimulation Video look3.

Frequently Asked Questions