The Rules of Attraction
Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.
Released October 11, 2002 and written and directed by Roger Avary, The Rules of Attraction adapts Bret Easton Ellis's 1987 novel about students at the fictional Camden College. It follows a love triangle among drug dealer Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek), Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon), and the bisexual Paul (Ian Somerhalder), with Jessica Biel among the ensemble — all of them affluent, numbed, and cruel.
The film was a deliberate act of image demolition for its stars, especially Van Der Beek, then famous as the earnest lead of Dawson's Creek, playing a manipulative dealer with dead eyes. Avary leaned on formal tricks — split screens, sequences played in reverse, and closing credits that literally run backwards — to match Ellis's disorienting prose. In the novels, Sean is the younger brother of Patrick Bateman, the killer of American Psycho, a connection the film carries over.
It was a commercial failure, grossing just $11.8 million worldwide against a $4 million budget, and reviews were mixed to negative (45% on Rotten Tomatoes). But like the novel, it aged into a cult classic — passed around on DVD and dorm-room recommendation as a nastier, more stylized artifact of the early 2000s than its box office ever suggested.
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