The Most Diverse Film Which Offers Capacity
Who in the writing or reading community is not familiar with the American novelist Bret Easton Ellis. While [American Psycho], starred by Christian Bale may be named his most noted and well-known mainstream success, it is his cinematic collage [The Rules of Attraction] which offers many perspectives over many different circumstances, all orbiting a campus life which holds all of the various lives colliding and merely brushing one another, if only for mere seconds.
While the films dedicates plenty of scenes and various views and point-of-views of the hand full of central characters with a soundtrack represented by a funky, dark, hip and alternative, it too is a representation of the film itself, which pulls the viewer into first moments of gut aching humor then suddenly shifts you into a life ending, returns you back to idle college confusion and sexuality, more short spurts of humor and finally capture you in a waylay, stepping into a snare trap Easton-Ellis composes so cunningly, to not feel what may be felt by one who suffers something they’ve dedicated so much to continues to unravel, comes apart and nothing, not a single thing, can be conjured or concocted to prevent the disintegration.
If there is to be a chosen main character, it can be said to be either Sean or Laura, who have links between them long before they met.
Sean, perhaps to build additional income, begins to peddle drugs around the campus, but he is not a drug dealer with clout or season, everyone owes him and refuses to pay him, leaving him in debt and facing sure physical harm from his supplier, Rupert, a coke-headed former military unpredictable and uncontrollable spastic exacerbated by his heavy coke use.
If one has the gift to being very observant or rewinds or watches this film enough, throughout every scene where the screen of a switched on television is displayed, you’ll notice they are all muted. This is classic Easton-Ellis, developing something trapped and near hidden inside a scene to give the scene a whole existence, refusing to offer anything in small doses.
University is indivisible with experimentation, a place almost always depicted as the very place, the perfect atmosphere, diverse and vast, in which students are able and are obliged to step outside of the many various sorts of insularity they may have become of age in, a time to discover the other side of the moon and to even perhaps ask such questions as to why the darkside of that dead thing never wishes to look down into such a vibrant planet swarming with life forms represented by hundreds of thousands of both discovered and waiting to be discovered species. University is the very epitome where the world at large which exist is to be represented and presented to all those familiar and unfamiliar, where the Christian learns of Islam and the followers of Judaism discovers something relatable in Buddism.
If Easton-Ellis aimed to find an atmosphere in which to build diversity, then tear it down to its bare essential, he does so in [The Rules of Attraction] in the mood of Ayn Rand, proclaiming our sameness beneath the flesh and more than willing to skin all of mankind alive to prove such a notion so long ignored.
Sean the terrible drug dealer, Laura the naive virgin still struck with a clingy romance, Paul, the gay metrosexual who pursues a crush who could care less for his adoration and/or his existence, Laura’s roommate Lorna, who squeezes Laura dry of her personal preferences only to beat her to the punch and exploit those pursuits for herself, sex being the tool she’s able to effectively utilize, as Laura’s inexperience and a naivety, so apparent when she’s reeling over Victor, a rich kid who’d fuck any and everything in motion, one of those things in motion, her roommate Lorna, who sleeps with Victor upon his arrival, even gives Laura a wave as she jumps in Victor’s bed, wearing naughy lingerie.
What else adds to the timing and intrigue of [The Rules of Attraction] is while drama, death, humor, love and the futile and idle mesh together in no particular chronological manner, heartbreak trickle down through the focal characters, giving us the only sense of order in a film composed and filmed to depict the reality of chaos alive on possibly every campus in the US. Sean loses the interest of Laura, in turn reveals to Paul he doesn’t care for him in the way he wants, and Laura, who idolize and nurture an infatuation to a point so grandiose, its almost insufferable to witness that very admired man to not remember her whatsoever, then dismisses her to sleep with her roommate, the “friend” who was well aware of her feelings for Victor.
Career film critics and viewers both may come to ask, “What was Easton-Ellis after?” “What statement was he attempting to make with and throughout the collage of scenes?”
by Dontrell Lovet't
The answer lies in the perspective of the viewer and because while some personalities hold optimism, others harbor pessimism, and others bring to the table ambivalence and absolute indifference. [The Rules of Attraction] was an abstract masterpiece placed in the hands of those whose curiosity wouldn’t allow them rest nor respite, the fatigued needing some distraction, some source of entertainment worthy of more than an hour, stories broken into fragments, difficult to follow, leading more and more of cinematic wanderings beyond the few minutes the average person attention span is said to last before it expires and lead to an entire surrender, blind to what is the most pretentious and most apparent established in the very first scene and maintained throughout the last; chaos was the aim, inciting it, then depicting the aftermath, exacerbate the line separating art from the counter-revolutionary
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