The Rules of Attraction (2002)

The Rules of Attraction arrives from 2002, a year when a filmmaker could still assemble a cast of impossibly attractive white people and let them treat each other terribly without a single character pausing to explain why this was wrong. Roger Avary's adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel follows three Camden College students through a fog of drugs, indifference, and misread signals. It is a film about spoiled people behaving badly, and it never once suggests we should admire them for it. That restraint is now nearly extinct.

The cast is uniformly pale and wealthy, and the film sees no reason to comment on this. Paul Denton is bisexual, and his advances earn him a beating from a closeted jock and cold rejection from Sean Bateman. The film treats his longing as one more dead end in a landscape of dead ends. It is not affirmation. It is a shrug. The women fare no better: Lauren is raped, humiliated, and abandoned, and her roommate exists chiefly as a cautionary blur. The film observes all of this without a flicker of corrective instinct, and it offers no vocabulary for dignity, agency, or self-acceptance. Everyone is a surface, and the surface is the point.

There is a faint sneer at inherited wealth here, the kind that buys a European summer and a casual indifference to consequence. But the target is personal emptiness, not a system, and nobody delivers a speech about it. The interior monologues are self-absorbed and cruel, and they end mid-sentence, which is the closest the film comes to a thesis. Ebert found the characters reprehensible and the film skillfully made, and that remains a fair verdict. It is a cold, well-crafted artifact from a less instructive era, and it makes no attempt to improve anyone.