Chris
Last week, we here at JoBlo were shocked and saddened by the passing of James Van Der Beek at only 48 years old. While best known for his long run on the teen series Dawson’s Creek, Van Der Beek never really got his due as an actor in mainstream films, which is a shame, as he delivered a couple of really memorable performances. Probably the one people remember most fondly is Varsity Blues, which holds up as one of the better teen movies of the nineties. But in 2002, Van Der Beek took a big swing by starring in the indie flick The Rules of Attraction, which is a movie we’re proud to add to the ranks of our Best Movie You Never Saw series.
What Is The Rules of Attraction About?
The Rules of Attraction is based on the 1987 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, which centers around the debaucherous behavior of a group of wealthy young adults at a liberal arts college in New Hampshire. Van Der Beek stars as Sean Bateman, the campus drug dealer who — in the shared Bret Easton Ellis universe — is actually the younger brother of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.
He becomes obsessed with taking the virginity of Shannyn Sossamon’s naive Lauren, a freshman at the university, while also being in the orbit of her bisexual ex-boyfriend, Paul (Ian Somerhalder), as well as her promiscuous roommate, Lara (Jessica Biel).
Roger Avary’s Passion Project
The film was directed by Roger Avary, who was one of Quentin Tarantino’s OG Video Archives cronies (they now co-host the excellent Video Archives Podcast together). He had previously directed the well-received Killing Zoe, and hopes were high that The Rules of Attraction would put him on the map.
But the film wasn’t very well received by critics at the time (although, importantly, Bret Easton Ellis himself loved it), and it was a financial flop. In the years following, Avary worked as a writer on Silent Hill and Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf, before a tragic incident resulted in him serving a stint in prison for manslaughter. Since his release, he’s bounced back nicely with the Video Archives Podcast, although his latest project — launching several AI feature films — is proving to be controversial.
The Best Bret Easton Ellis Adaptation?
The Rules of Attraction, to me, is Avary’s greatest film, and like Ellis has always said, it comes the closest to capturing the vibe of what Ellis puts on the page. It does so far more successfully than Less Than Zero, which really watered down his novel, or the horrible The Informers.
It’s really a toss-up between this and Mary Harron’s American Psycho as to what the best adaptation of Ellis’ work is — although Ellis seems to favor this one.
A Cast Shredding Their Teen Idols Images
Much of the cast was comprised of teen actors of the era, who took full advantage of the fact that they were able to shred their squeaky-clean teen TV show images. Van Der Beek was the biggest star, with his Sean Bateman far removed from the nice guy he played on Dawson’s Creek, but truth be told, he was a natural as the borderline sociopathic antihero.
It was also a huge swing for Jessica Biel, who at the time was best known for the faith-based 7th Heaven, with the movie arguably paving the way for her to become a sexy film star throughout the rest of the decade. Ironically, co-star Ian Somerhalder, as the bisexual Paul, would become a teen idol long after The Rules of Attraction came out, later headlining the popular TV series The Vampire Diaries.
Shannyn Sossamon was also a rising star at the time, having co-starred with Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale.
No Moralizing — Just Pure Ellis
The Rules of Attraction is free of any of the moralizing that plagued many other adaptations of Ellis’ work, with the film doing exactly what his novels do — showing us the bad behavior of a bunch of sexy, privileged teens and young adults, with no judgment. You probably won’t walk away from the movie liking any of them, but that’s kind of the point.
Killer Soundtrack and Controversy
Avary does a good job capturing the 1987 setting without making it “cartoonishly” of its era. The soundtrack for the film is absolutely killer, with Erasure, The Cure, Love and Rockets, and Public Image Ltd. all featured, along with a score by Tomandandy.
The most devastating soundtrack cut is Harry Nilsson’s “Without You,” which is used in a harrowing suicide scene that, among other sequences, is why the film was initially slapped with an NC-17 rating before being trimmed to an R.
Box Office Flop, Cult Favorite
It’s too bad the box office was so grim, with it only making $11 million worldwide. However, given the low budget (a reported $4 million), it likely at least broke even after DVD sales, with the film fairly popular on physical media at the time — especially among university students (which I was when it came out).
Avary was never able to continue adapting Ellis’ work, having planned a quasi-sequel by tackling Ellis’ Glamorama, which would have featured co-star Kip Pardue reprising his role as Victor Johnson.
A spin-off film, Glitterati, featuring Pardue, actually exists. In The Rules of Attraction, there’s a great sequence chronicling Victor’s debaucherous holiday to Europe, and Avary apparently shot a full film out of that footage, which has been screened a few times unofficially but will likely never get a proper release.
Ellis himself explained why in an interview several years ago with The A.V. Club:
“For many legal reasons, it will never see the light of day. You can’t really show Glitterati in public, it’s not possible. There are a lot of people who would be very upset. I don’t even know if they got permission from a lot of the people in it, which might be a big problem — why it’s only shown privately.”
Where to Watch The Rules of Attraction
If you want to see The Rules of Attraction, it’s pretty easy to find digitally, with it currently streaming on Prime Video in the U.S., and on the free CTV app in Canada. You can also buy it digitally.
It’s an underrated movie and a glimpse at what James Van Der Beek might have been able to accomplish had he not been pigeonholed as a teen idol.
