Dubs Guy / “Check ’Em”

About

Dubs Guy, or Doubles Guy, refers to an image of the protagonist Partrick Bateman (played by Christian Bale) from the 2000 black comedy film American Psycho, which is used on 4chan in anticipation of submitting a "GET" post ending in double-digits. The image is often accompanied by the phrase "check em," alerting viewers to examine the post number.

Origin

The still image comes from a scene in American Psycho in which the protagonist Patrick Bateman murders his business rival Paul Allen (played by Jared Leto) after a lengthy commentary on Huey Lewis and the News (shown below).

On 4chan, the phenomena of predicting post numbers gradually formed into what is known as a "GET". It is unclear when the image of Patrick Bateman became associated with posts ending in double numbers, but the earliest search queries for "dubs guy" on Google date back to early 2010 according to Google Trends.^[2]

Spread

On January 9th, 2011, YouTuber SuperCunt5000 uploaded a video titled "Dubs: The Motion Picture," featuring an edited scene from American Psycho in which several businessmen compare their doubles posts displayed on business cards (shown below, left). On January 11th, YouTuber officialunofficial posted a video titled "Check out these doubles," featuring a rotated version of the Bale image (shown below, right).

On September 11th, 2012, YouTuber Youtube Archive posted a video titled "Dubs the Video Game," featuring pixelated footage from American Psycho accompanied by a chiptune cover of the 1986 pop rock song "Hip to be Square" by Huey Lewis and the News (shown below).

On March 10th, 2014, Redditor chaos_lord_307 submitted a post titled "Why is 4chan obsessed with Christian Bale?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop,^[1] where many cited Bale's presence as the Dubs Guy on the imageboard.

Search Interest

According to Google Insights, searches for "Doubles Guy" began to appear in significant volume beginning in January of 2010. Searches peaked overall during the week of February 21-27th and have shown a resistance to settling into equilibrium; showing many rises and falls. This peak coincides with both the 200M GET (Ninetails) and the decision to censor the last three digits of posts on /b/.

External References