Gloriously Inappropriate

By this point, my guess is that I’ve enjoyed Roger Avery’s The Rules of Attraction more than just about anybody on earth not involved in its production. Of course, considering how nearly every single thing I heard about it upon its release in 2002 was unhesitatingly negative, this may not be much of an accomplishment, but facts are facts, and the fact is simply that I can watch this movie forever in a completely unironic way. Everyone who writes this movie off as “shitty” or “empty” is both wrong and stupid (though mainly wrong), and I am right. It’s that simple.

It’s not that I can’t understand why people hate Rules so much – far from it, since their reasons were pretty much sufficient to keep me away from it for close to two years after its release. When people complain about how it’s oppressively stylized (read: “annoying”) or how it doesn’t come to a resolution (“depressing”) or how it takes the cheap way out with lots of drug use and sex and pop music (pretty self-explanatory, although I never really saw it as a negative), I can’t really mount an argument. Rules is absolutely a movie that offers no reassurance whatsoever and inflicts a degree of artistic oppression on its audience usually reserved for the two loathsome Andersons; being opposed to it is simply the other side of the coin of being opposed to Reality Bites because it’s “too Hollywood”. This is, of course, a perfectly reasonable stance to take.

Of course, I love Reality Bites too: movies about philosophical concepts are rare enough, but movies about philosophical concepts that don’t come down to the formula of Story + Talking About Philosophy, that actually operate under the conditions that they propose – those are rarer than hen’s teeth. We’re ten-plus years removed from the release of Reality Bites and, if the post-9/11 media is to be believed, at least four years removed from the “death of irony”, but I continue to be impressed by the way the film’s definition of irony (paraphrase from memory: “It’s when the situational meaning is completely different from the literal meaning”) plays out in the film’s resolution; what else is the conclusion to that movie besides characters making a choice between the literal and situational meanings of the term “love”? Movies like this are incredibly useful if you like to think about what nebulous concepts like irony have to do with your life – certainly useful enough to put up with all the bullshit that led the movie from conception through production and right up to the point at which you saw it.

I guess it’s possible to describe myself as “lucky” in at least one way: if someone asks me to define my life in terms of one idea, I can comfortably say “propriety” without feeling like I’m leaving much out. My guess is that I’m not alone, if simply because I can’t be the only person whose parents did their damnedest to instill values in them contradictory to their place in society. My dad was a respected ophthalmologist for Duke University, and my family kept some correspondingly high-brow company; when I went home for Christmas, my mom told the story about how she nearly had to decapitate Stanley Fish when, at a party, he knocked a glass of wine out of her hand and shrank into the background to avoid being blamed. Yet in spite of that, I was essentially raised as a post-sixties liberal – I still remember being “corrected” when I came back from elementary school having been shown and impressed by a video of one of Reagan’s speeches, for instance, and I can’t even begin to count the number of lectures I sat through about notions of equality between races or genders or whatever.

My point is this: while I certainly don’t begrudge my parents even a little bit for their efforts or their net worth, I can say without hesitation that to a certain extent, it does play hell on a kid’s mind to reconcile notions of equality with the presence of the housekeeper. It’s really not even so much the contradiction between the two as it is the fact that you have to deal with it seemingly straight out of the gate: it turns issues of class into day-to-day stuff, and the process of learning about issues of class and other issues like it almost becomes part of the background noise rather than the developmental signal itself. Over time, you barely even recognize that you’re making a decision in the first place, and that’s where the trouble starts.

I don’t mean to imply that Rules is all about class (although the three protagonists clearly come from some level money), but it is about the result of the same kind of process – the effects that arise when people confuse “instincts” with “decisions”. Rules goes above and beyond most movies ever made in an effort to get you into the characters’ head-spaces; you may be horrified and outraged by what the characters are doing, but moments where you’re unclear as to what you’re watching happen in Rules are few and far between. Following Rules, in other words, is easy; it’s just that the characters themselves are so profoundly and distinctly fucked up that it’s occasionally a little difficult to make any sense out of any of it.

This is, I think, because Rules doesn’t necessarily try to make sense; it merely plunges you into the subjectivities of the characters and leaves everything else up to you. Rules has a very long and complex pre-title sequence; it opens with Lauren (Shannyn Sossamon) telling you that the story you’re about to hear isn’t necessarily worthwhile right before throwing you into a maze of voice-over and editing tricks and oppressively subjective shots. And yet right from the jump, you can tell that there’s a profound disconnect between the values these kids project onto the world in order to make it make sense and the way the world actually works. Deciding whether someone’s gay or not is a profoundly political action with legitimate real-world consequences, and yet Paul (Kip Pardue)’s first line in the film is a conclusion to that effect. Clearly we’re not following these characters from the beginning of their story – only from the beginning of the film’s story.

I eat shit like this up with a spoon. One of the main problems that I always have with reading and discussing movies is that since they’re pitched as such complete and self-contained products, I’m tempted to draw conclusions about reality from a thing which offers artificial openings and conclusions. Suppose that twenty years after the conclusion of Casablanca, Rick decides that he hates Captain Renault and gets back together with Ilsa – what does that do to the lessons of the movie itself? More importantly, what if we don’t get to see any of that; what if it just happens and we have no way of knowing about it? By contrast, Rules is clearly “incomplete” (it even ends in the middle of a line of dialogue), and as such we’re free to take whatever we want out of it. It’s just a movie, right?

But here’s the thing about Rules: it matches its realities up the same way real-world realities match up. Put another way, we can’t necessarily point to things in the movie and say “reality”, but we can talk about the movie using the same terms that we’d use to talk about the real world. Midway through the movie, Paul goes home for some reason and suffers through an incident where a friend of the family (named “Dick”, hurr hurr hurr) makes a gigantic scene seemingly for no reason. That’s fucked up, no matter how you slice it; my friends might not have picked a fight with my family exactly like that or for Dick’s reasons (whatever they are), but friends picking fights with your family = fucked up. The open-endedness practically forces you to make independent value judgments.

And then it throws you completely for a loop. It’s a little tricky to discuss the central scene in the movie without giving a lot of the movie itself away; for the sake of convenience, I’ll call it the Harry Nilsson scene, since the whole scene is set to A Certain Amazing Harry Nilsson Song. Formally, this isn’t unusual for the film; as soon as the opening credits stop rolling, it dives right into a montage set to the Cure’s “Six Different Ways” (AKA the good song by the Cure), and not too much later there’s a VERY neat split-screen montage to a Donovan song. Unlike these earlier side-trips, however, the Harry Nilsson scene isn’t just a fun/interesting way to get to Point B; it’s about showing you something and making damn certain that you understand how serious it is.

If you haven’t seen the movie, I doubt I’m making any sense (although you’ll thank me when you see the movie. Which you will). What’s important that you understand is that all of a sudden, the world of the movie will treat some things with profound gravity. However, this movie being what it is, I do have an alternative example of the kind of seriousness I’m dancing around.

Rules occurs at a college, and consequently a lot of the events take place at parties. Now, because Rules was adapted from a (presumably loathsome) Bret Easton Ellis novel, these parties are all given coolly apocalyptic names – the “Dress To Get Screwed Party”, the “Pre-Saturday Night Party”, and most relevant here, the “End of the World Party”. Yeah yeah yeah; all in good wry collegiate elitist fun, right?

Well, according to IMDB, the End of the World Party was filmed on September 11^th, 2001. Hell of a downer, innit?

The value of this movie, then, is based entirely on its capacity to call your sense of propriety before the judge. Set next to the Harry Nilsson scene, the logic of the characters seems trite and petty, just like the logic you use to figure the movie out seems pretty small next to the events of September 11^th; it has power because it can all of a sudden make you confront things which are much bigger than you ever expected. The term I want to use to describe this movie (even though it’s patently unfit for service here) is “wake-up call”, simply because few movies actively call your judgment into question on any level, let alone two at once. And while I understand that not everybody wants or needs to have their values checked (and as such should probably stay far, far away from this movie), I can’t see how that diminishes the accomplishments of this movie in any way. That it works at all is miracle enough.

 

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Comments

[Chris Lening]

I was totally meaning to ask you why you ended up coming around on this movie. And here I thought it was just the nonstop Jessica Biel in her underpants thing that did it for you...

I think the whole reason I saw the movie when it came out was just because somebody had lent me the book like a month before it came out, so I thought it'd be interesting to compare the two with as little space in between as possible. Also, Jessica Biel, but that's a whole other issue. I actually liked the book, although I dunno how it compares to the other Bret Easton Ellis novels, since I haven't read any of them. I always thought the people who said the movie was depressing were kinda stupid, since it left out the most depressing subplot of the book (the one where there's a blank page) in order to make the relationship between the three main characters more focused, which gives the whole last part all the gravity.

Come to think of it, I think my whole Rules of Attraction experiment was buried in my Hooray-For-Narrative period of college, so probably every reflection I have on either of them is going to revolve around how they told the story.

I haven't seen the movie since, although I remember using it as a go-to source for a few months afterwards, and there's a couple of pieces of it I've just completely stolen for various Projects. (Which makes me the nine millionth person to try and appropriate the big Kip Pardue scene, but hey, it's pretty awesome.) I probably should again, although I'll probably just end up finding more stuff to steal, and it'll be that much hard to get Van Der Beek's angry whacking face out of my head.

It is difficult to describe the movie without spoiling. So I'll stop here.

[David Turner]

Ahh James. You have the talent to defense crap more succintly and more awe inspiring than Ebert can write rhapsodic verse about the great films. As much I love reading your views on why a film is a bad one, (like spin kick) I am far more impressed to read your works that inherently show a intellectual stab at protecting the films we cherish for reasons other than quality and simply for mere personal enjoyment against one's better senses.

There is something of a critical paradox in telling someone you hated Ray or Mystic River both of which have the Forrest Gump ratio of 70% good artistry versus 30% artistic fraud of making the point of the story so accessible that the leyman can understand yet the smart person smells on cinema like old spice covering 7-11 nacho smell on a tuxedo during a formal gala. Too often we heap praise on films for what is not said and not done to make the point while ripping the movies people in mass seem to enjoy(like Raging Bull vs. Boogie Nights. Same movie, one is infintely more regarded for what is doesn't do, yet I'd rather watch the longer more relatable one about porno 8 out of 10 times).

It is of course a false point, as you simply changed the critera for which merits to prove in a simple wording of enjoying a film not for merits, but for what it is, and the ease that comes with watching a film as such. Instead of measuring the film on it's artistic values, you criticised the criteria of the others. Obstensively it's a callous and cowardly move that shfits the point of the finger instead of standing one's ground, asking not to hate the player but hate the game.

Beneath all of the subsuming the actual idea of whether or not our criteria is flawed, you simply are able to make the marvelous sentiment that maybe there is a merit to simply make a choice on ones own instead of one's own politics.

It would not be hard for a memeber of either side of the politcal rainbow (I'm sorry spectrum is too cliched today, and it's about time for some color in politics {I'm sorry I'll stop the pseudo-inherent racism}) to cut at paste most of your arguments heart and rejigger it to backwater politics or reform it to anti-progressionist tactics.

Maybe there is a need for us to watch reality shows that is becoming iv'd into our lives by constant pressure. While the post does not suggest that we should not canonize those who do not make art for art's sake, it does however infer that maybe, we shouldn't hate oursleves for not taking the same approach in our viewing habits.

[brian]

wow, that guy before me sure wrote a lot of garbage in response to your post. i was just going to say, 'bret easton ellis novels are not "presumably loathsome", they are actually excellent, you jerk.'

then i was going to say, 'i also liked this movie in the face of a lot of people hating it, and thank you for writing an interesting dissection of why maybe i was right all along, even though i think my real reason had more to do with the style and humor and less with the artistic mission of the film to make me re-evaluate my worldview, although you might be kind of right, because that's part of the standard ellis moral, i think.'

but saying either of those things without using as many big words and impressive references as the other commenters will probably just cause me to be written off as irrelevant here, so instead i will say, 'that movie rules, you're right. i want to date the lauren character, and the fred savage cameo is fucking brilliant. let me know if you ever want to organize a viewing, i'm so there.'

[brian]

oh shit, and i also forgot, i saw this before it was released at a special screening at the egyption, with roger avary and a lot of the cast in attendance (not jessica biel, sadly). so i had your back from the beginning on this one. benefits of living in hollywood, say 'what'.

[jen]

i loved this movie too. for it's style. the style of the people in the movie and the style of the way the movie was made. i too will spare using unnecessarily big words to get my point across like brian.

(note to brian: the "guy" who wrote all that "garbage" before you is in fact "stupid dave." and his name is for a reason. he's a smart guy. and yea he knows a lot of SAT words. but he also spews a lot of "garbage" a lot of the time too. haha)\

i too would love to attend a screening if set up. i own the film!