Rules of Attraction? What Rules?

Rules of Attraction, a novel written by Bret Easton Ellis, is a dark satire about students in a small Northeastern liberal arts university whose lives illustrate the tension of living the “rock and roll” lifestyle while trying to find love amidst the chaos of alcohol, drugs, and sex. Rules of Attraction is a literary reflection of the worldview of popular culture. A worldview is defined as an ideology, philosophy, theology, movement, or religion that provides an overarching approach to understanding God, the world and the relationships of people to God and the world (Noebel, 1). One’s worldview determines what he or she thinks about God. The prevalent worldviews of our postmodern culture include Biblical Judeo-Christianity, Marxism, Secular Humanism, Islam, and Postmodernism (Summit Ministries), and all but one of these worldviews are rooted in atheism, the doctrine or belief that there is no God. In Rules of Attraction, any acknowledgement of God seemed to be non-existent as evidenced by the characters’ apparent disregard of a moral code and lack of conscience as they lived their lives engaging in their continual sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyles. The three main characters, Paul Denton, Sean Bateman, and Lauren Hynde, expected that their lifestyles would provide them with happiness and fill the voids in their lives created by broken and shallow relationships with family and friends and apathy toward the concept of God. The book’s title—Rules of Attraction— is somewhat of an oxymoron because no rules exist in the story to guide the characters in their relationships and decisions. But do such rules even exist to provide guidance for every aspect of life, which when followed, would result in satisfaction and contentment in life, no matter the circumstances? The answer is yes. This set of rules regarding attraction and life in general is called the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments tell us 'do not misuse God's name, do not commit adultery, and do not covet what others have'. Rules of Attraction demonstrates what happens on a smaller scale when a culture outlaws God and legally bans the Ten Commandments and collectively violates any one of these. Society replaces them with manmade rules, which result in moral relativism. This worldview says "You decide what's right for you, and I'll decide what's right for me" (Moral Relativism). The lifestyle grounded in this worldview can be summarized in the words "Whatever" and "I don't care." Camden College is a microcosm of the popular culture in which the students live according to their own wills and desires, while desperately seeking satisfactory relationships with their families and friends. Without a foundation in God, however, the result would not be satisfaction, but angst and futility in relationships with family and friends. God's rules are fixed, life-giving, and eternal, but the post modern mentality looks for a change in the rules to fit the circumstances. The Ten Commandments are not followed by our culture because they go against "the markers of cultural modernism which are ambiguity, doubt, risk, and continual change" (Barker, 182).
And these are the precise characteristics of the lives and relationships of Paul, Sean, and Lauren. All three characters came from dysfunctional families which ultimately affected how they interacted with friends and acquaintances. Their relationships are characterized by ambivalence—they need and crave love—but they don't know how to give it or receive it. The concept of a traditional family in the Judeo-Christian faith acts as the basis for how people are taught to act in regards to their relationships. When families are broken and do not possess the ideals of a strong family unit, voids are created in children. The children will ultimately live their lives on a quest to find the love and attention missing from their relationships with their parents. However, without the foundation of God’s unfaltering love in their lives, this “love” and attention is commonly searched for among one’s peer group and in drugs and alcohol (Schenck, 93). What has happened to the traditional family? The humanists define family in a way that is fluid and changes with the times (Noebel and Edwards, 11). This definition of the family can be observed in this novel through the familial relationships of Paul, Sean, and Lauren. Lauren would avoid answering her mother’s phone calls. Paul was not concerned that his parents were getting a divorce and his flippant view of the ordeal was conveyed to his mother, which made her very sad. While at the restaurant in the hotel in Boston, Paul’s mom thought “And for a very brief moment there it seemed as if I never had known this child. He sat there, his face placid, expressionless. My son – a cipher. How did it get this way?” (Ellis, 158). Sean also had no loving relationship with his family. He showed no emotion at the news that his father was in the hospital in intensive care. Moreover, Sean acted with no respect for his ailing father when he went into the bathroom to get high. When Sean’s older brother Patrick confronted Sean’s attitude towards their dying father, Sean replied in a sarcastic comment. Patrick witnessed the lack of respect and interest that his brother held for their father’s condition and asked Sean why he could not be the son the father had wanted. Sean replied “You think that thing in there even cares?” (Ellis, 239). Patrick realized, with slight shock, that his brother also hated him and that the feelings were reciprocated. Thus, all three characters came from broken families where loving relationships were not modeled and instruction about a loving God was not given. Because of this lack of instruction and information, the logical outcome is that they would reject the fifth commandment which says “Honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” This commandment can be hard to follow because no one is perfect and parents can easily wrong their children. Rules seem restrictive; 'no rules' is more attractive. But God's rules provide clear standards for living, without which confusion, futility, and relativity prevail.
Furthermore, without a foundation based on Judeo-Christian principles, the quality of relationship with friends is also impacted. However, Barker assumes that capitalism, not atheism, is the cause of the characters viewing their peers as commodities, rather than as real people with feelings and needs of their own. This worldview is actually reflected in the behaviors the characters exhibited in their relationships with one another—using and abusing one another for the purpose of their own satisfaction. This, according to Barker, is unsatisfying just because it requires little work to consume and thus fails to enrich its consumers (Barker, 49). But people are not commodities, they are created in the image of a relational God (Genesis 1:27), and God gives clear guidelines on how to relate to one another. Yet these characters lived apart from these scriptural principles. Furthermore, while the Scriptural definition of a friend is one who 'loves and all times and is born for adversity" (Proverbs 17:17), the characters in this novel were very self-centered, not other-centered, in their pursuit of gratification of their own needs and desires. The philosopher Foucault disagrees with focus on one another when he states that "Ethics are concerned with practical advice as to how one should concern oneself with oneself in everyday life" (Barker, 232). In Rules of Attraction, every page is filled with the characters using each other and performing some act of self-serving gratification that included excessive swearing and profanity, promiscuity, and unfaithfulness in their relationships.
The characters’ faith in God included little more than using God’s name repeatedly in a string of curses. Followers of the Judeo-Christian worldview believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died to pay for the sins of everyone in the world. Paul, Sean, and Lauren did not live as if they believed in a God who loved them unconditionally enough to die for their sin so they wouldn't have to. Only Mary, the girl who was so obsessed with Sean and consequently committed suicide because of her loneliness, and Stump, a patron of Vittorio's party, mention that God is a higher power. Mary calls out to God after she slit her wrists in the bathroom saying "God jesus christ our my nothing savior" (Ellis, 174). However, she was not calling out to God to save her, but almost rebuking Him for doing nothing to provide Sean to extinguish her loneliness. Today's culture is increasingly rooted in Marxism, which is atheistic in practice and believes, in accordance to Ludwig Feuerbach's theory, that humans created God as a "projection of their own ideals". By creating God in man's image, Marx argued that man "alienated himself from himself" and if religion could be abolished, man would be able to overcome his alienation (The Philosophy of Karl Marx).
As Leo Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace "For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth" (Tolstoy, 1st Book, XIV, 18). Tolstoy's worldview shaped his opinions about morality. He said apart from Jesus Christ, God's son, there is no standard of right and wrong, goodness and truth. For followers of the Judeo-Christian faith, God is love. Psalm 1 illustrates the connection God makes between following His law with man's emotional happiness, stability, and productivity.
"Happy is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord…Whatever he does prospers" (Bible, Psalm 1:1-3).

However, the characters in Rules of Attraction are those of whom God speaks in Romans 1:21-22 who "although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Even though the book of Romans was written in A.D. 57, the characteristics of behavior of those who choose to live outside the parameters of God's rules apply to modern culture:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them (Bible Romans 1: 24-32).
Paul, Sean, and Lauren had expected that their lifestyles would provide them with happiness, but instead of following the life-giving and relational rules of God, the Ten Commandments, they lived by their own arbitrary and changing rules dictated by conformity to a godless culture in following the peer group. What rules we ask? The answer to this question depends on one's worldview.



Works Cited

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