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"A fanlisting is simply an online list of fans of a subject, such as a TV show, actor, or musician, that is created by an individual and open for fans from around the world to join. There are no costs, and the only requirements to join a fanlisting are your name and country. Fanlistings do not have to be large sites (although some are), they are just a place where you can sign up with other fans. TheFanlistings.org is the original (but not official) web directory for fanlistings, dedicated to uniting the fans." -thefanlistings.org

Novel

The Rules of Attraction is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis published in 1987 and made into a film in 2002.

Plot

The novel is told from a multiple first-person point of view. The main narrators are three students: Paul, Sean and Lauren. A number of other characters also provide first-hand accounts throughout the story, which takes place at the fictional Camden College. The three main characters end up in a love triangle, amid End of the World parties, drug runs, and classes never attended.

The story begins part of the way through a sentence in order to give the effect that it begins somewhere closer to the middle, rather than at a true beginning. Another interpretation is that the story has neither a beginning nor an ending, which signifies the endless cycle of debauchery in which the characters of the novel engage. This is sometimes mistaken by readers as a typo or the result of a missing page, but in truth it was purposely done by Ellis. The novel also ends in a similar fashion, with the last sentence cut off before it ends.

Major themes of the novel include the death of romance, the materialism of the time period, the hopeless feeling dominating the characters life in college, and the heavy use of drugs and fantasy to deal with real life problems.

Main characters

* Sean Bateman - has slept with many of the girls on campus. He has fallen in love with Lauren, whom he believes shares the same sentiments; meanwhile he has been getting letters from a young lady known only by the italic texts in the novel. He has a relationship with Paul during the novel, which may or may not be sexual since these encounters are often omitted from his daily entries. He impregnates Lauren and plans to marry her, but they later call it off. His relationship with Lauren dominates a large portion of the text and is the centerpiece of many themes.
* Lauren Hynde - a virgin upon entering university, who was saving herself for an upperclass drama major, Daniel Miller. The first page of the novel begins with her recounting her first time, which was the first weekend of Freshman year: "and it's a story that might bore you but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that." She is sexually active throughout the novel (not so in the film, in which she is a virgin), and eventually takes an interest in Sean, who believes that she is writing him love notes. Spends most of the novel missing Victor and believing that her life would be better if they could be together, grasping on to a fantasy of how she thinks life would be better if she could be with him.
* Paul Denton - a bisexual guy who used to date Lauren. He is attracted to Sean, but doesn't know if he also likes him or not. He references the fact that they frequently have sex where Sean is "crazed, an untamed animal, it was almost scary" despite the fact that these accounts are entirely absent from Sean's entries. The details of this relationship remain ambiguous. Paul has also had relationships with two important characters Mitchell and Richard (Dick).

Film

The Rules of Attraction (2002) is a dark satire based on the novel The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It was directed by Roger Avary and stars James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder, Jessica Biel, and Kip Pardue.

Plot

The film takes place at the fictional Camden College, a liberal arts school somewhere in New England (the film was actually shot at the University of Redlands in California).

The opening sequence introduces the three main characters - Lauren (Sossamon), Paul (Somerhalder), and Sean (Van Der Beek), in turn. They are three college students at an "End of the World" party, and although they don't interact at the party, they share a certain apathy about the situations they end up in. Lauren, previously a virgin, is raped, Paul is gay bashed, and Sean recalls (in the third person), "he couldn't remember the last time he had sex sober". After the introduction of each character, time moves backwards until we meet the next character. Essentially we observe the party from three different points of view.

The story then jumps back in time, and for the remainder of the film we follow the lives of the characters and learn how they came to know each other. Throughout the film, the characters (Sean in particular) exude somewhat of an indifference toward the people and events around them. For example, despite being set at a college, not one of the characters is ever shown attending a class. Sean Bateman is the younger brother of the character Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, although this is only obliquely referenced in the film.

Characters

* Sean Bateman - A drug dealer who decides he is in love with Lauren. He eventually sleeps with her roommate, Lara (Biel), although he doesn't feel that this makes him unfaithful - "I only did it with her because I'm in love with you." Unlike his contemporaries, Sean is aware that he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
* Lauren Hynde - A virgin who is saving herself for Victor (Pardue), her ex-boyfriend, who is traveling through Europe. She develops feelings for Sean which dissipate when she discovers him in bed with her roommate.
* Paul Denton - An ex-boyfriend of Lauren's who has since recognized he's bisexual. He falls in love with Sean, who eventually rejects him.
* Lara Holleran - Lauren's sexually promiscuous roommate, who, after sleeping with Sean, ends up with Victor. Deliberately insults Sean by pointing out that he "fucked up" with Lauren by sleeping with her, only to receive a punch in retribution.
* Victor Johnson - Lauren's promiscuous ex-boyfriend who, upon returning to school from his trip to Europe, cannot remember who she is.
* Rupert - A high strung, hotheaded drug dealer in business with Sean, who owes the unstable Rupert (the result of much drug taking) a serious debt.
* Mitchell Allen - A weaselly cohort who seems to idolize brutish Victor. He sponges off Sean for the drugs.

Trivia

* Sean Bateman's brother Patrick Bateman, the main character of American Psycho, appears in the Rules of Attraction novel, but not in the film. Bret Easton Ellis, the novel's author, revealed in an interview that director Roger Avary asked Christian Bale (who portrayed Patrick in the film adaptation of American Psycho) to reprise his role as Patrick Bateman. Bale turned down the offer, and Avary asked Ellis himself to portray Bateman. Ellis refused, stating that he "thought it was such a terrible and gimmicky idea", and Avary eventually shot the scenes with Casper Van Dien as Patrick. The scenes, however, despite being Avary's favorites, were ultimately cut from the final version of the film for reasons of length. A snippet of this scene can be seen in one of the "iTeasers" that Avary cut and released onto the Internet during the film's initial theatrical release.
* The film was one of the first studio motion pictures to be edited using Final Cut Pro. Using a beta version of FCP 3, it proved to the film industry that successful 3:2 pulldown matchback to 24fps could be achieved with a consumer off-the-shelf product and that high-priced Avids were no longer necessary. Roger Avary, the film's director became the spokesperson for FCP, appearing in print ads worldwide. His advocacy of the product gave confidence to mainstream editors like Walter Murch that the product was ready for "prime time."
* Eric Stoltz's character, Lance Lawson, is named for the former owner of Video Archives, the Manhattan Beach video rental store where director Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino both worked during the 1980s. This marked the second time that Stoltz had played a character named for Lawson, following his turn as the drug dealer "Lance" in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino also worked Lawson's name into the script for True Romance, as the name of Clarence's boss at the comic book store who paid Patricia Arquette's prostitute character Alabama to sleep with Clarence (played by Christian Slater) as a birthday gift.
* Jessica Biel's line "Rusty Pipes" while snorting cocaine is identical to the one another girl speaks in the exact same situation in another adaptation of Ellis's novels (Less Than Zero).
* The film contains a number of palindromes encoded into it, from the palindromic music compositions of tomandandy, to the year of the films release, 2002, to its very structure.

Significant changes from the book

As with many adaptations from one medium to another, many changes were made to The Rules of Attraction. These include:

* An implementation of a "beginning is the end," plot structure, where we are introduced to the characters at a party which is chronologically at the end of the events of the movie. The book is linear.
* The book takes place during the 1985-86 school year. The movie is updated to a more contemporary time period (though ambiguous).
* Many minor characters are eliminated (such as Clay, Roxanne and Franklin).
* Lauren Hynde being portrayed in the movie as an energetic virgin, while in the book she is seen sleeping with multiple partners.
* Lauren loses her virginity in the beginning of both versions. However, they are during different periods of time. In the novel it is recounted as taking place during her freshman year, while in the timeline of the movie it is after most of the events of the movie have taken place. However it is still under the same circumstances (semi-passed out with a local townie while a film student she was earlier flirting with films it with a camcorder.)
* A new character, Lara, is added as Lauren's roommate. She is highly promiscuous and fills much of the role the version of Lauren from the novel used to.
* Lauren and Sean never date, nor have sex, in the movie. Or if they do, we do not see it, because at one point, Lauren says, "It's over."
* In the novel, Sean and Paul's relationship (or lack of one) remains ambiguous. It is referenced in Paul's narrations, but not Sean's. The movie portrays this as a masturbation fantasy of Paul's while he stares at a passed out Sean. In the book, it is hinted that they had sex. It does not happen here.
* Lauren discovers the girl who committed suicide in the dorm bathroom, as opposed to Roxanne in the novel.
* Lauren never becomes pregnant, nor gets an abortion in the movie. The relating event (her and Sean going on a drug-laden road trip) also never occurs.
* Sections of the text from the novel are preserved, but are presented within a different context. Sean's description of having sex with Lauren for the first time in the novel, is then narrated in relation to the girl at the beginning of the movie.
* Sean never visits his dying father, nor physically encounters his brother, Patrick Bateman, in the movie, only mentioning him on the telephone (which happened in the book anyway).

Source: wikipedia.org



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