The Rules of Attraction

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This article is about the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. For the film, see The Rules of Attraction (film).


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The Rules of Attraction is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1987 and made into a film by the same name in 2002.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

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The novel is written in the first-person, from the point of view of multiple characters. The main narrators are three students: Paul, Sean and Lauren. A number of other characters also provide first-hand accounts throughout the story, which takes place at the fictional Camden College. The three main characters (who rarely attend class) end up in a love triangle within a burning calendar of drug runs, Dress to Get Screwed and End of the World parties.

The story begins midway through a sentence in order to give the effect that it begins somewhere closer to the middle, rather than at a true beginning. Another interpretation is that the story has neither a beginning nor an ending, which signifies the endless cycle of debauchery in which the characters of the novel engage. This is sometimes mistaken by readers as a typo or the result of a missing page, but in truth it was purposely done by Ellis. The novel also ends in a similar fashion, with the last sentence cut off before it ends'.

[edit] Main characters

[edit] Sean Bateman

Sean has slept with many of the girls on campus; his first a hippie girl from Pennsylvania with "JIMI Lives!" painted in purple on her door, whose dad is an executive at Visa; another, a very young girl in a toga who makes him think of the last time he had sex sober, if ever. His main love interest is Lauren, who first sleeps with a guy named Steve she can't say a good thing about, while pining for her boyfriend Victor. Sean is oblivious to these sex interests, mainly because he's always high or drunk and has been getting anonymous love letters he thinks are written by Lauren; instead they are from a nameless young woman who speaks in haunting chapters written entirely in italics. Near the end when Sean gets Lauren pregnant he plans to marry her, but they later call it off. This warm Grolsch beer drinking Fender guitarist, who changes his major every term, also has encounters with the fashionable, bisexual Paul, that are usually omitted from his daily entries.

Sean detests his brother and father and the hollow, privileged lives they live, even though deep down he is not much different. He accepts that he was born wealthy, but resents it. Sean's other interests include playing the guitar and faking seizures at the school infirmary to be excused from classes.

Sean is slightly suicidal. He gets a thrill from ripping off Rupert Guest, a drug dealer who would not hesitate to kill him if need be, and despite having the means to pay him back, he does not. After breaking up with Lauren for the first time, he attempts suicide by hanging himself with neck tie, a gift from his brother, but fails. Later he tries to slit his wrist with a razor and overdose on Actifed, but fails on both counts.

The character is the brother of the notorious Patrick Bateman, and has also appeared in Ellis's other novels, American Psycho, The Informers and Glamorama.

[edit] Lauren Hynde

Lauren is a painting student who wants to change her major when she learns Jackson Pollock "freed the line," a concept which she deems difficult to apprehend, and would prefer spending her money on drugs rather than on art supplies. The first lines in the book: "and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was..." are referencing her. Still a virgin upon entering Camden, the first page of the novel begins with an explicit recounting of her first time on her first weekend at Camden with an NYU film student and a townie who tells a vulgar elephant joke when she awakens. The sex ends in a vomiting incident. Lauren soon takes an interest in Sean, who drives his motorcycle when high, but spends most of the novel missing Victor, while he whores his way around Europe, believing her life would be better if they could be together.

[edit] Paul Denton

Paul is a young bisexual man who used to date Lauren. He is attracted to Sean and claims that in bed Sean is "crazed, an untamed animal, it was almost scary;" these accounts are entirely absent from Sean's entries. The details of this relationship remain ambiguous. Paul, also, had relationships with two other important characters, Mitchell and Richard (Dick). Paul is highly intelligent and cynical, but is not above obscuring these facts in the course of seduction. Several characters in the book remark upon his physical attractiveness, brought out by Roman features and soft blonde hair. Paul's relationship with his mother, Eve, is complex; she yearns to reach out to him but is led towards iciness by Paul's flippancy, which in turn feeds their animosity. He also appears in American Psycho as a friend of Paul Owen. He has a brief encounter with Patrick Bateman (page85)

  • "But Paul Denton keeps staring at me, or trying not to, as if he knows something, as if he's not quite sure if he recognizes me or not, and it makes me wonder if maybe he was on that cruise a long time ago, one night last March. If that's the case, I'm thinking, I should get his telephone number or, better yet, his address."

[edit] Other characters

  • Victor Johnson — Lauren's boyfriend. Victor took the term off to backpack through Europe, where he country-hopped by plane and boat and stayed in youth hostels, spent one night at a bus stop, smoked hash at the Duomo and in Amsterdam where he also got mugged and saw the Vermeers and Van Goghs, had many flings, and on the island of Crete he lost his tan lines while learning to sing Bruce Springsteen songs in Yugoslavian. A montage of his trip appears as a movie within the movie by Roger Avary. Victor returns to school unable to remember Lauren, who has been gazing at his picture all term, yearning for his return.
    He is the main character in Ellis' later novel, Glamorama, with his name changed to Victor Ward.
  • Clay - Clay is the protagonist of Less Than Zero, aka "the guy from L.A." with only one appearance in this novel. His trademark lines begin "People are afraid to..."
  • Patrick Bateman — Patrick is Sean's older brother, an investment banker who is much more focused and successful than Sean. The brothers loathe each other for their very different outlooks on and approaches to life. As it turns out in Ellis's follow-up novel, American Psycho, Patrick is a psychopathic serial killer who is defined by the brands of his suits, nouvelle cuisine, the excessive cash he gets from his ATM, his love of mainstream pop/rock music, his utter lack of any emotions (save greed and disgust), and his finely wrought business card from Pierce and Pierce.
  • The Handsome Dunce — The Handsome Dunce is a cute, blonde 'goon' from Long Island whom Paul loathes himself for adoring. He is harassed by more artsy fags in the Sensory Deprivation Tank, the Camden college pub, on pages 234-236 and is a perfect example of a student suffering from ADHD. Lauren sleeps with him while thinking of Victor. His name is Steve.
  • The Phantom Unnamed Female — The unnamed female student commits suicide after a series of spooky, italicized, short first-person chapters. During her inner dialogue, at one point, she calls herself Mary. Her frame of reference is usually one of surmise about the people she observes, mostly Sean; in her lonely voice she questions whether there is ever love and sex together and quotes the Thompson Twins song in this way: "Lay! Your! Hands! On! Me!" She tries to reveal her love for Sean by putting anonymous notes in his mailbox. Sean mistakenly thinks Lauren is writing the notes and so never comes on to her. After a chapter in which she speaks in the third person about her visit to a party that ends with "It's last call". This phantom character slits her wrists in a bathtub that turns "impossibly red" like the sea in Lauren's earlier dream.

[edit] Camden College

Camden College is a fictional liberal arts college in northeastern New Hampshire. In many aspects Camden mirrors Ellis's alma mater, Bennington College and Hampden College, the setting of Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History. Both books contain cross-references to each other's story lines and characters. Tartt mentions the suicide of a freshman girl in passing, while Ellis repeatedly mentions a group of classics majors who "dress like undertakers" and are suspected of staging pagan rituals and slaying farmers in the countryside. There is also mention of a "nice girl from Rockaway" in one of Lauren's narrations. This is possibly Alex from Jill Eisenstadt's novel From Rockaway who attended Camden College in the novel.

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Main article: The Rules of Attraction (film)

The Rules of Attraction was adapted into a film of the same name in 2002. It was directed by Roger Avary and starred James Van Der Beek as Sean, Shannyn Sossamon as Lauren, Ian Somerhalder as Paul, and Kip Pardue as Victor.

[edit] Significant changes from the book

As with many adaptations from one medium to another, many changes were made to The Rules of Attraction. These include:

  • An implementation of a "beginning is the end," plot structure, where we are introduced to the characters at a party which is chronologically at the end of the events of the movie.
  • The book takes place during the 1985-86 school year. The movie is updated to a more contemporary time period (though ambiguous) but features music from the era.
  • Many minor characters are eliminated (such as Roxanne and Franklin).
  • Lauren Hynde being portrayed in the movie as an energetic virgin, while in the book she is seen sleeping with multiple partners.
  • Lauren loses her virginity in the beginning of both versions. However, they are during different periods of time. In the novel it is recounted as taking place during her freshman year, while in the timeline of the movie it is after most of the events of the movie have taken place. However it is still under the same circumstances ( Date raped while semi-conscious with a local townie while a film student she was earlier flirting with films it with a camcorder. )
  • A new character, Lara, is added as Lauren's roommate. She is highly promiscuous and fills much of the role the version of Lauren from the novel used to.
  • Lauren and Sean never date, nor have sex, in the movie. Or if they do, we do not see it, because at one point, Lauren says, "It's over."
  • In the novel, Sean and Paul's relationship (or lack of one) remains ambiguous. It is referenced in Paul's narrations, but not Sean's. The movie portrays this as a masturbation fantasy of Paul's while he stares at a passed out Sean. In the book, Paul mentions they had sex several times.
  • Lauren discovers the girl who committed suicide in the dorm bathroom, as opposed to Roxanne in the novel.
  • Lauren never becomes pregnant, nor gets an abortion in the movie. The relating event (her and Sean going on a cocaine-fueled road trip) also never occurs.
  • Sections of the text from the novel are preserved, but are presented within a different context. Sean's description of having sex with Lauren for the first time in the novel, is then narrated in relation to the girl at the beginning of the movie.
  • Sean never visits his dying father, nor physically encounters his brother, Patrick Bateman, in the movie, only mentioning him on the telephone (which happened in the book anyway).
  • Although the love triangle happens simultaneously in the movie, Paul and Sean's relationship is ended when Lauren and Sean's begins at the Dressed to Get Screwed Party, half-way through the novel.
  • The character of Mr. Lawson (Eric Stoltz) does not appear in the book. However in the book there is a lecturer that Sean is very suspicious of, Professor Vittorio who teaches poetry.
  • Sean's drug and alcohol intake is much greater in the novel. He spends most of the novel intoxicated.
  • In the novel, Paul has a pseudo-sexual encounter with a young woman, illustrating that he is bisexual rather than homosexual. This does not happen in the film, however it is hinted that he and Lauren were once involved.

[edit] Publication details

[edit] See also

[edit] External links