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

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage
Publications, 2008.
Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Vintage Books, a division of
Random House, 1987.
"Moral Relativism: Neutral Thinking?" Moral Relativism. 2005. All About GOD
Ministries, Inc., Web. 11 Oct 2009. .
Noebel, David and Edwards, Chuck. Countering Culture. Nashville, TN: Broadman &
Holman Publishers, 2004.
Noebel, David. Thinking Like a Christian. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman
Publishers, 2002.
Schenck, Rob. Ten Words That Will Change a Nation. Tulsa: Albury Publishing, 1984.
"Summit Ministries Worldview Chart." Summit Ministries. 2009. Web. 11 Oct 2009.
.
The NIV Study Bible-New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Bible
Publishers, 1985.
"The Philosophy of Karl Marx." The Radical Academy. 2003. Web. 11 Oct 2009.
.
Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., Albury
Publishing, 1899.

Looking at Life at LAX

Gate 47B at the American Airlines terminal provided a great place to people watch without being noticed. As we waited the departure of flight 162 from Los Angeles to Boston, I observed a variety of folks. A college-aged, brunette girl playing a Nintendo DDS sat on my right. On her right sat an older gentleman wearing a gray shirt that had an American flag imprinted on it, and he was watching her while she was playing her computer game. His carry-on was an old, beat up guitar. It turned out that the girl and the man were together and were traveling with another girl who was in a US Navy uniform with her hair pulled back tight into a small knot. The sailor sat ramrod straight, never slouched, and appeared to be fresh out of basic training. It looked as though these three people were related. The sailor showed her two companions pictures from her Mac laptop and seemed to be explaining each picture. A corporate guy in a black business suit, who slightly resembled Pat Bateman from American Psycho, talked the entire two hours on his cell phone before boarding the plane. He would eventually sit in the first class section of the plane. An older Korean couple sitting behind my mom and me were quiet for the most part, but when they did speak, they talked sternly to each other in short abrupt sentences. In the seats directly in front of us sat two older ladies studying a clipboard that had numerous maps attached to it. The nature of their relationship (mother/daughter, sisters, or friends) was hard to determine. They talked about their upcoming trip and when they would be visiting in New England. The younger of the two women would periodically get a phone call upon which she would talk so loudly that everyone could hear exactly what she was saying. An elderly white haired couple sat quietly near the windows looking out on the runway. The woman read a newspaper from front to back while her husband simply sat next to her watching other people in the terminal. A few times the old man went to get coffee or water for his wife who never stopped reading her newspaper. Two young punk guys with their wild black and red hairstyles and abundance of tattoos and piercings, possibly in their early 20’s, literally ran to the counter to check in for the stand-by list. They disappeared as quickly as they had appeared at the gate; happily, they did make it on the plane. About an hour before the time to board the plane, an Asian couple walked into the waiting area. The woman wanted to sit in the seats to the right, but her husband wanted to sit in the seats on the left side of the room. The wife motioned for her husband to come over to her seats, but as she turned around to show him the seats, she saw that he was already sitting down in his desired seat. The woman then shuffled over to her husband and sat down next to him. Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage” (de Beauvoir, 6). This woman’s husband seemed to be almost acting as if she was more of his dependent than a partner in marriage. To him, she was a social insubordinate who was not even worth the effort to respond to about the available seats in the terminal. One of the last arrivals to the gate area was a young father and his little daughter. The dad looked slightly disheveled and confused as he looked at the screen behind the desk to make sure he was in the right terminal. The blonde, energetic little girl, leaving her dad at the counter, ran to the windows to look out at the planes. He suddenly realized that his daughter was no longer by his side and he located her quickly, then briskly walked over to her and lovingly put his arm around her and pulled her close. The young dad with the floppy 90’s hair cut went and sat down while his daughter, who was wearing a giraffe-shaped backpack that was larger than she was! She would repeatedly run from the windows back to where he was sitting.
The family with the sailor, the girl playing on her Nintendo game, and their father with his well loved guitar epitomized the "all-American" family. However, instead of having a son in the military, one of the daughters was in the service. Simone de Beauvoir discusses, in her Woman as Other article, how even though women make up about one half of humanity, women are characterized as "the other" and they have to work hard to make up for the difference between men and themselves (de Beauvoir, 1). The female sailor was able to easily show that she was pretty and feminine while at the same time she was able to exude a professional, militaristic quality, which could be seen in the way she conducted herself. She was a combination of the women de Beauvoir writes of: the feminine woman with the woman who is more comfortable with men than women (de Beauvoir, 4). The elderly couple by the window represented a past generation that was not ruled by technology. The man and woman never checked their cell phones or pulled out a laptop from under their chairs. Instead, they engaged each other in conversation without electronic distractions and the woman read an entire newspaper, which is something rarely done by the current generation. Also, the husband would get drinks and other necessities for his wife without her asking him to, which showed how selfless and how in tune they were to each other. The two punk kids wore almost the exact same outfit: black beanies, skinny jeans, band shirts, and spacer earrings. They reminded me of today's society, in which people attempt to be original, but in reality they are just clones of each other. Even though they looked the same, the way they were dressed was a “signification of difference and that their style constituted a group identity” (Barker, 415). Style is a signifying practice that, in the case of spectacular subcultures, is an obviously fabricated display of codes of meaning. The Asian couple that had a difficult time picking seats resembled Brick and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The man was wearing dress slacks and a dress shirt and his wife had a Chanel purse; however, their nice clothes and accessories did not hide the fact that they appeared unhappy to be together. A few times the wife would try to lovingly lean against her husband, but he would always pull away and say something that would make her sit up and lean away. Their relationship was not so much radical, but, perhaps, cultural. To Westerners, the distance in this couple's relationship could translate as "radical", but for other cultures, this might just be the normal way they view relationships. The father and his young daughter were the epitome of a loving relationship. The young dad was very protective and caring towards his little girl who in turn loved him unconditionally and wanted to show him every interesting thing she found or could see out of the windows. The father and his daughter's relationship should be among the norm. However in today's society, it is almost as if a pure and loving relationship devoid of perversity is rare and actually could be considered radical.
This assignment gave purpose to our long wait to board our flight. In normal situations, the wait would have seemed endless, but this time, viewing the crowd at the terminal in the context of love, gender, and relationships, was an exciting exercise in people-watching.







Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage
Publications, 2008.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Woman as Other. 1949.

My Contribution

Jacqui Vaccaro
English 313H
09/14/09


The group I chose to be a part of was the “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” group. I chose this group because I had not read the play and wanted to further study its role in a class that examines the “radical romance”. My group decided that, in order to get the entire class involved and interested in our presentation, a game would be the most beneficial way in which this could be accomplished. Two choices for a presentation format arose: a Jerry Springer type performance or a Jeopardy style game. My group lost one of its members when one of the girls dropped the class, which in turn meant that we could not do the Jerry Springer idea because it required seven people. My Jeopardy game show idea was then adopted. Each member of the group was responsible for creating a category and the questions for that category. I created the category “Lies, Lies, Lies”, in which the class is presented with a statement that is a lie from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and then the class has to come up with the truth. For example, “Maggie loved Mae and Gooper’s kids.” The class should then respond “What is Maggie hated them and called the kids “no necked monsters?”. This category should not be considered a true Jeopardy category in that the answers will not be simple, but rather my classmates should have different opinions about the answer. Every member in the group contributed to the creation of this presentation. A few ways I was able to help included suggesting the Jeopardy game format, organizing a meeting to prepare for our presentation, creating the “Lies, lies, lies” category, and purchasing/providing the candy as a prize for student participation.