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Can you ever truly know anyone? That’s the question posed
by The Rules Of Attraction, Roger Avary’s adaptation
of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel of the same name, in which
sex and attraction are looked at as both the creators and
the destructors of human relationships. The answer? No, no
you can’t know someone, unless you are willing to forgo knowing
yourself.
The Rules Of Attraction follows the story of Sean
Bateman (Van Der Beek), an ambivalent student at a
small liberal arts college in New England. A borderline sociopath
(and, incidentally, he’s supposed to be the brother of murderer
Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, also written by
Ellis, so perhaps it was something in the water back home?),
Sean is one of those people who goes out of his way to avoid
knowing others because of the feeling that he is somehow above
the boring routine surrounding him. That is until he becomes
infatuated with Lauren (Sossamon), a serial dater who
changes boyfriends like she changes socks but is still in
love with her ex, Victor (Pardue), who really couldn’t
give two shits about her and has taken off to Europe. Meanwhile,
another of Lauren’s exes, Paul (played by Somerhalder
with the perfect mix of drollness and rage), openly bisexual,
has developed his own crush on Sean and is fairly determined
to be in the guy’s life. And so follows that age-old dance,
where the people being pined over are oblivious to their admirers
even as the people they seek don’t notice that they’re
alive. In between getting trashed at Dressed to Get Screwed
Parties and getting trashed at Thirsty Thursday Happy Hours,
the three find that the rules of attraction are, in actuality,
a myth.
And that’s to the point of The Rules Of Attraction.
A game without rules seldom has any winners, and even when
you do win, there’s always a price. According to the film,
you can let others in your life, but only to lose yourself
in the process. It’s kind of a nihilistic philosophy, but
this is also one of those nihilistic pictures in the vein
of Greg Araki (though nowhere near as bleak or abstruse).
This slanted view on reality is at once the main strength
of the film’s outlook and a major anchor for the story at
hand. While the characters here are fascinating in their idiosyncrasies
(Lauren remains abstinent by perusing a book of venereal diseases
before parties; her roommate Lara despises drug dealers, even
as she maintains a nasty little coke habit) and the film’s
attitude is refreshingly and brutally unsentimental, the story
never breathes, never gets beyond its own disaffectedness
long enough to realize that the only way to look at lives
like this is from a comic vantage point. The film takes itself
way too seriously, when the best way to get across its perspective
would be to tell things with a cocked eyebrow and the ghost
of a smile. This ultimately trivializes what we’re seeing,
because it lowers it to the level of exploitation. There’s
too much style, too little fun, and way too many shots of
James Van Der Beek glowering at the camera. The Rules Of
Attraction wants to illuminate the death of romance in
young America, but it ends up just being a showcase for Dawson’s
darker side.
—Cole Sowell
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While we would never encourage anyone to destroy a video... 
