The Rules of Attraction

Seeing the movie adaptation of The Rules of Attraction is what got me into Bret Easton Ellis in the first place several years ago. It's far from a perfect movie- all the main characters are unsympathetic, and by the end nothing is solved. But one thing it certainly had going for it was that it was hilarious. Plenty of memorable lines have stayed with me over the years. Also it is really creatively shot- take a look at the split-screen shot of two students getting to a Saturday class, or the out of nowhere frenetic account of Victor's trip to Europe. The movie plays out like some hyper dream-like version of the best and worst college has to offer for spoiled kids with too much time on their hands. And the book, set about 15 years earlier in the 80's, really expanded on those themes better than any other Ellis book I've read. I mean, no matter how iconic American Psycho may be, it still just felt like a very well researched evisceration of rich people. The Rules of Attraction sorta takes money out of the equation, instead the people in the novel are mostly free to do whatever they want because they're bored at a small college somewhere in New Hampshire. The drug dealer Sean Bateman (brother to Patrick!) pines for the art-student senior Lauren after concluding that she has been sending him childish love notes; Lauren is futilely holding hope for her long gone boyfriend Victor to return and save her from her disappointing college life; Lauren's ex, the bisexual Paul makes advances on Sean and may or may not enter a relationship with him- is it all in his head? We witness all of these characters at their worst, pathetically desperate for eachother yet unable to think straight from all the drunken and drug-fueled debauchery. Regardless of whether they get what they want, no one ends up happy. A blurb on the back of the book called it a 'poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance' and that seems a pretty apt description. The lifestyle these kids live makes them fall in love with eachother one minute and forget their names the next. It's a pretty harsh, depressing book the more I think about it- not even close to as graphic as the excessively violent American Psycho and Less Than Zero, but one with a pretty grim outlook nonetheless. Yet it was the source for so many of those snappy lines from the movie that I couldn't help but laugh. So yeah, I'm four books in and Ellis has definitely hit a high point with The Rules of Attraction. He's got three more books published, and he's just so low-investment that I'm sure I'll get to the rest at some point.