A snarling portrait of a group of desperate college kids, Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction was branded by many critics a callow exercise: as cruel as its bricked-up, empathy-starved protagonist, Sean (James Van Der Beek).
In the 2002 film, overprivileged teenagers numb themselves with weed and breakfast cigarettes, roll their eyes at the news of a classmate’s overdose and quickly forget the faces behind their merciless sexual escapades. Somewhere between a black romantic comedy and a psychosexual horror show, it’s a film so delightfully bratty that it could be easy to miss what lies beneath.
Based on the book by Bret Easton Ellis, which Avary has described as a manifesto for “the death of romance”, The Rules of Attraction brims with doomed yearning. Missing her wayward ex Victor (Kip Pardue), the sweet and studious Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) schemes to lose her virginity at an apocalypse-themed party. Meanwhile, misunderstood Paul (Ian Somerhalder) repeatedly collides with homophobic abuse in a scrambled search for human connection. Both of their daydreams soon come to settle on Sean, who is busy selling drugs to his trust-funded Camden peers, hasty to repay his debts to a comical, karate-trained crime boss.
In many ways, this story of pretty, alienated youth is typical of Ellis, the controversial author infamous for spawning Patrick Bateman, the taut-faced woman-killer of American Psycho (who, in the author’s universe, happens to be Sean’s older brother). Psycho is only one among many examples of Ellis’s extreme, mordant fictions; another is Glamorama, about a vain club owner suspended in a world of empty sex and celebrity name dropping. Like these, The Rules of Attraction is obsessed with status and surfaces – complete with shots of swelling biceps and glossed lips. Yet Avary’s adaptation convulses with something more than just lust: the frantic heartbeat of young adulthood.
There is an innocence to the film’s cast, many of whom hail from simpler worlds and can’t help but deliver a certain naive charm. In the wake of his starring roles in Varsity Blues and Dawson’s Creek, the late 90s heart-throb Van Der Beek commits to his against-type role as Sean, whose iciness nevertheless at times gives way to reverie. Grinning at their outbursts of glitter, he can’t resist being moved by the anonymous love letters appearing in his pigeonhole. Like Lauren and Paul’s persistent attempts to find true romance, these letters are a reminder that sentiment can survive in the harshest of climates.
Even more stirring is the performance of Somerhalder – who would soon become a bloodthirsty bad boy in The Vampire Diaries – as Paul, whose freakishly Dionysian looks and bored attitude are constantly undercut by his bright-eyed sincerity and explosions of awkward, anxious gestures. In one of the film’s many bittersweet gags, set to an upbeat Serge Gainsbourg number (L’ami Caouette), we watch him dress and undress over and over in front of the mirror, as he prepares to take out the painfully heterosexual Sean for a quesadilla. (Elsewhere, we savour a moment of unabridged queer joy: a brilliant hotel-bedroom dance scene with a familiar lover, set to George Michael’s Faith.)
“From the corrupt minds that brought you American Psycho and Pulp Fiction … ” reads an original poster for the film, referencing Avary’s famous credit as Quentin Tarantino’s co-writer on Pulp Fiction. While these marketing tactics sensationalise the film’s wickedness, they neglect its moments of peculiar idealism and beauty. After an opening sequence saturated with violence and humiliation, the film reverses itself, eventually launching into credits that feature snow falling upwards, small puffs of smoke retracting into mouths, and autumn leaves uncrumpling on the earth.
And despite its misanthropic storyline, The Rules of Attraction repeatedly lingers on hope. When Lauren and Sean first meet in a hallway, after their Saturday morning tutorial on “the postmodern condition” is cancelled by their presumably hungover, sleazy professor, their faces are separated by a split screen as they talk. It’s only when Lauren insists that Sean removes his sunglasses and they look into one another’s eyes for the first time that the two screens merge; we finally see them together, sharing space. In this moment, Avary’s bold approach to editing – embracing romantic cliche to the point of glorious cheese – flies in the face of his characters’ coolness.
One of the film’s most famous sequences is a high-speed montage of Victor’s trip to Europe: a carousel of shots of half-naked women, pints, sacred sites and sessions of shower masturbation, which Pardue narrates in a deadpan stream. After four minutes of grimy bacchanalia, his voice slows to a note of naked melancholy. “I no longer know who I am,” he confesses. “I feel like the ghost of a total stranger.”
More than an artefact of postmodern despair, The Rules of Attraction is spliced with candour when you would least expect it. Amid the dizzying irony, it manages to become a potent collage of confusion and thwarted desire. What feelings could be more human than these?
The Rules of Attraction is available on Stan in Australia and Fandango at Home in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
