In her book on Romantic Comedies, Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre, Tamar McDonald offers, “By withholding the revelation of the man’s deceit, the radical romantic comedy can be seen as suggesting both that everyone lives a lie, and that the liar, in the end, is the one who suffers the most” (65). Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, “The Rules of Attraction,” operates off this characteristic, as each of its characters fail to realize their mendacity and malice toward one another. In this way, “Rules” is the most disparaging breed of radical romantic texts in contemporary literature to date. The students at Camden live according to their own self-reflexivity and hedonism, as they strive to find their identities and meanings in a loveless world. Moreover, Spike Jonze’s film, “Adaptation” deals with the same types of characters in the same apathetic and vapid postmodern world that threatens any lasting and meaningful romance. Spike Jonze’s film, however, makes explicit what Ellis’ implies in his long running and dense narratives; “Adaptation’s” narrative elucidates the death of romance, real romance that is, in a postmodern world, as well as in the despairing world of Ellis’ Camden—namely Spike Jonze unburies what McDonald’s assertion on mendacity has to say about contemporary love, or the lack thereof, in “Rules.” The film pointedly marks the romantic and ontological dilemmas of Ellis’ Camden— how self-reflexivity leads to a confusion of passions, which in turn, fuels their constantly shifting sense of meaning, which ultimately leads to a dissolution of relationships both with others and with the subjective self.
Not only does Bret Easton Ellis’ “Rules of Attraction” fall within the category of a Radical Romantic Comedy, it does so primarily because of its narrative presentation of several voices; through each self-serving, pragmatic narrative, Ellis uncloaks the downside of such self-reflexivity for a generation who seeks to mollify their very own versions of romance, sexual appetite, and, perhaps, love. In Ellis’ novel, his moralist statement on the lost generation of the 1980’s epoch of abundance, the now-turned-gay character Paul comments, “No one ever likes the right person” (Ellis 261). This concept, the lack of genuine relationships and ties within a college community which is comprised of predominantly self-serving individuals looking to fulfill their own romantic desires, embodies the dilemma of an entire population at Camden. Essentially, Paul is saying that, at Camden, nobody can maintain real, lasting, and meaningful ties with anybody else; everybody is dissociated, detached, and alienated from another. What Paul hints at here speaks to what is perhaps the most distinguishable and critical axis of appeal for the Radical Romantic Comedy, Tamar McDonald establishes self-reflexivity as the cause to the social disease Paul laments in “Rules.” McDonald says that, “The major thematic concerns of the radical romantic comedy all derive from issues of self-reflexivity” (67). Because every character at Camden loves somebody else, no two people can meet each other mutually in romance or understanding; every character is similar because they search for an idealization of a love that doesn’t and cannot exist in their vapid society, while every character differs in deciding who embodies such an idealization for them individually. Yet Paul’s poignant, if not temporary, insight into Camden desire gains an even deeper understanding aside a key scene in the Spike Jonze’s film, “Adaptation.” Caught within a moment of impending danger, anxiety, and inundation, the Kaufman twins share a moment together, which succinctly sums up the entire film’s theme of realistic, difficult romance:
Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at *me*. You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago. (Jonze “Adaptation”)
This definitive scene from “Adaptation” eloquently splays out the allure of the Romantic dilemma Paul so concisely outlines. Donald Kaufman’s character beautifully, if not overly tersely, defines the major pitfall of a self-reflexive love in the Radical Romantic genre, which, by definition, examines both women’s and men’s romantic needs on a more equal plane than earlier Romantic Comedies have before. Moreover, Donald’s revelation reveals the appeal of self-reflexive love in modern society; everybody’s version of romance is different and polarized from anybody else’s, while there is something hopeful in our own, unique versions of love whether they are realized or not. When Donald says, of his unnoticed, unrequited love of Sarah, “It was mine, that love. I owned it,” he suggests that self-reflexive love, although illusory and potentially blinding, can offer insight into one’s own identity, into one’s own values, morality, and desires. In discussing theorist Giddens’ argument on self-identity as a project, author Chris Barker concludes that, “Self-identity is not a distinctive trait, or even a collection of, traits, possessed by the individual. It is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her or his biography” (Barker 217).
Barker ties the scene from “Adaptation” in with Paul’s quote from “Rules” in one crisp breath. Barker implies that identity isn’t a possession or collection of traits that, we decide, makes us unique. Rather, he says that identity is our own invention, our own way of viewing ourselves in a confusing world; it is a procession of discoveries and desires through the changes in time. Self-identity, thus, is a self-reflexive construction of our own making; it’s our way of making sense of the changes in our lives and the un-fulfillment of our desires. Concordantly, Ellis’ “The Rules of Attraction” is an amalgamation of self-reflexive voices, each lost and struggling to find its place within a changing definition of romance and love, within the heterogeneous mess of romantic desire at Camden. Each character spirals out of control within their personal existential crises while they define themselves using the idealization of romance in other, uninterested individuals. They are vexed by their self-reflexivity while they are simultaneously defined, and in a sense, empowered by it.
However, in Ellis’ “Rules,” the characters also seem to not entirely know who or what they want. They merely have a desire, an insatiable void, which they try to mollify. A great example of this unknown, fleeting and finicky desire is the scene where Sean Bateman wonders if the girl at the dining hall is the girl who has been sending mysterious and passionate love letters in his mail box. Trying to put a face to his incessant desire, to love, to feel loved by somebody real, Sean comments, “So, I’m looking at that girl, wondering if she’s the one who’s been putting those notes in my box and I get excited—even if it’s not her” (Ellis 44). In a sense, Sean simply wants to know what real love is. He is in love with a faceless admirer, and, thus, he is in love with the concept of real love, even if it isn’t fully or clearly realized. Everybody wants to be loved in Ellis’ book but they do not understand the mutuality real love requires or its consequences. In this light, Ellis’ characters are dispassionate and apathetic; they float through a seemingly endless path of hedonistic enterprise and at the cost of their own expectations and sober, personal introspection and growth.
Perhaps the forlorn romantic, Susan Orlean, captures Sean’s, and by extension, Camden’s, bottomless appetite for passion and substance. She says, “I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately” (Jonze “Adaptation”). While all of Jonze’s and Ellis’ characters search for the capacity to feel, the capacity to love outside themselves, Susan Orlean is no exception. Her quote provides the subtext to Sean Bateman’s quote—like Orlean, Bateman and his peers draw their impetus to exist from wanting to want to love. Chris Barker cites novelist Milan Kundera in discussing choice and determination in relation to an individual’s subjective identity: “‘We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come’ (Kundera, 1984: 8)” (Barker 235). As Barker points out, Kundera implies that the individual has no point of reflection within the modern confusion they are subject to and consequently suffer from a lack of solidarity in identity coupled with an unclearness of what they desire. This aptly speaks to “Rules.” Sean Bateman, as well as all of Camden, is passionate about finding passion. Camden’s inhabitants are so obsessed and lost within their own self-reflexive plight that they don’t even know what they want. They have selfish desires that ultimately devour any semblance of morality and decisiveness in their stupor, misrecognition, and truculence.
Jacques Derrida is immediately recalled when examining Sean Bateman’s love for Lauren in “Rules.” Barker sums up Derrida’s “Défferance,” in one swift sentence—“The Production of meaning in the process of signification is continually deferred and supplemented” (Barker 85)—and sums up Sean’s, and Camden’s, romantic endeavors. At the pinnacle of his illusory and misplaced love in Lauren, Sean is fixed on her superior qualities as a woman; he explains:
I knew she loved me, and not only because of the notes, which I refused to bring up (why embarrass her?), but because when she looked at me, I could see, for the first time, just sense, that she was the only person I'd ever met who wasn't looking through me. She was really the first person who looked and stopped. It was a hard thing to explain to myself, to deal with, but it didn't matter. It wasn't the most important aspect. Her beauty was. (Ellis 181)
Aside from the fact that Sean starts off admiring his personalization of Lauren to his needs, he rests his confidence in her beauty a couple sentences later. The reasons for Sean loving Lauren, if at all certain or warranted, change even at the height of his admiration and desire for her. Later, as Sean and Lauren’s “relationship” deteriorates, Sean marks the end of his struggle to try to find something substantive and appealing in Lauren. Right before entering Vittorio’s party, Sean thinks, “This is the end of the relationship. I knew it was coming to an end. She was starting to bore me already. And maybe this party is a good excuse to end it, to lay blame somewhere. I don't care. Rock’n’roll. I look at her one last time, in the seconds before the door opens, and desperately try to remember why we even got together in the first place” (Ellis 191). In just ten pages of “Rules,” Sean goes from being madly and inexorably in love with Lauren to sharply despairing of any future with her. But Derrida’s claim only provides some of the answer to Sean’s question—why he has connected, or pretended to connect, with Lauren in the first place. Not only does Sean’s relationship change meaning, albeit drastically and quickly within the narrative, it begs the question: why do Sean’s, and his Camden peers’, passions shift so greatly?
Again, Jonze’s “Adaptation” elucidates the drive to engage in an ultimately listless vacuous desire to feel Ellis’ lost generation so adamantly search for. Susan Orlean, Jonze’s most hapless romantic, mirror’s Sean Bateman, who is arguably Ellis’ most hapless romantic. In discovering why people desire to love, Orlean notes, “There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something, is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size” (Jonze “Adaptation”). Just as Bateman and the Camden kids are passionate about finding real love, Orlean does, too. However, Orlean explicitly encapsulates why the characters in her world, as well as those in Ellis’ world, are sucked into predictably tenuous and condemned relationships with each other. Orlean’s quote links the Camden kids’ self-reflexive identities, search for passion, and shifting relational meanings with each other; the “Rules” kids live in their own, independent, self-reflexive worlds, struggling to clarify identities for themselves and unaware of the real consequences real love and passion require—thus, their self-reflexivity hinders their capacity to be distinct, genuine, relatable characters who operate with decisiveness in a changing and overwhelmingly disparate world. They are really seeking simplicity in a postmodern dissociation of identities and meanings.
It has been repeated that taste is a matter of morality, but Ellis’ “Rules” argues for the reversal of this statement. Without a selfless consideration outside themselves, the kids at Camden disable any possibility of realizing a lasting and meaningful relationship. Roxanne, Lauren’s dining hall friend comments early in the novel, “I’m beginning to think romance is a foreign concept” (Ellis 41), and illustrates the consequences of an unrealized identity in relation to other people outside the self. Although, the self-reflexivity and emotionless relations of Ellis’ characters can be read as mechanism in which they adapt to a changing and increasingly confusing, unforgiving and apathetic world of excess, their indecision can be read as their only means of survival. The problem with this reading, though, is that Ellis’ characters struggle to survive without lasting reflection or the hope for improving themselves as sensitive humans. Jonze’s eccentric character, John Laroche speaks with his romantic admirer, Susan Orlean in a seminal moment of “Adaptation.” Their interchange suggests that we shouldn’t sympathize with Ellis’ lost generation in “Rules.” To Susan, John poses, “You know why I like plants? Because they're so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world;” Susan retorts, saying, “Yeah, but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting is almost shameful. It's like running away” (Jonze “Adaptation”). Ellis’ Camden kids inhabit both standpoints. They adapt to their situations pragmatically, often at the expense of other people’s emotions and wellbeing, and their self-reflexive, existential and ontological crises are a result of their need to survive at Camden, albeit without a firm understanding of themselves.
Every character in “Rules” is figuring out how to survive in their world, but not necessarily how to thrive in it—they are only struggling to survive; they are not surviving to grow as people but as separate and equal entities. Unlike plants, the Camden kids, are humans with memories, albeit selective ones tailored to their hedonistic whims. They run away from each new crisis in their lives yet they are about as shameless as a plant is in its adaptation. In this fashion, Ellis’ characters are the dregs of humanity. They resemble the shells of human potential while exuding humanity’s worst attributes: avarice and gluttony. As Chris Barker notes, “There is no essence of identity to be discovered; rather, cultural identity is continually being produced within the vectors of similarity and difference” (Barker 229), Ellis’ lost generation are all similar in their vacuous self-reflexivity and moral-relativity, while they differ from another in what and whom each loves. Their desire is rooted in the same empty desperation, as their objects of affection shift along a continually reconstituting chain of meanings and emotions.
Works Cited
Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Nicolas Cage. Columbia
Pictures, 2003. Film.
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Sage Publications Ltd, 2008.
Print.
Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Random House, Inc. 1987. Print.
McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London and New
York: Wallflower Press, 2007. Print.
