Radical Love or Lack Thereof

Bret Easton Ellis’s, The Rules of Attraction, is a brutally honest and unabashed tale of lost souls, personified as college students, conveying their reckless abandonment of morals. Despite this, the novel manages also to be a radical romantic comedy, with its central characters constantly chasing after some kind of love yet never attaining it. This radical romcom may have a more sentimental, complex counterpart in the film 500 Days of Summer. These stories are inundated with power struggles between the characters, juggling between realism and romantic fantasy, and the duality between youth trying to find their own identity through love despite the oppression of the capitalistic cultures to which they belong.

The advent of the radical romcom brought about specific changes in this type of narrative form which can be linked to a shift in Western cultural values. According to McDonald, a new “spirit of self-absorption” came to the spotlight of romcoms (61). Stearing away from political and social activism, the romcom became radical when its characters initiated “self-reflexivity, a heightened consciousness of self…[and] about the romantic relationship” (67). This self-reflexivity leads to narcissism in the characters of The Rules of Attraction; Paul, Lauren, and Sean all refuse to see beyond their own preoccupations, and although unrequited, their hunger cannot be satiated. If they are not pining for the love and attention of their unattainables, Lauren’s victor, Sean’s Lauren, and Paul’s Sean, they numb the pain by sleeping with strangers, drinking, doing drugs, and in Sean’s case attempting suicide several times. These characters lie to each other, but essentially they lie to themselves, and the stories are set up so that the liars are the ones who suffer most.
Some other hallmarks of the radical romcom include an ending in which the couple is apart, juxtapositions between romance and realism, and response to the audiences’ memory of older conventions in the form of references, or intertextuality. In a film released this year, called 500 Days of Summer, the main character, Tom, falls in love with his dream girl and painfully realizes he is not her dream boy. One viewing the movie’s trailer would hear the voice over say, “This is not a love story. It’s a story about love,” followed by a descriptive list: “500 days of Los Angeles, of promises, of uncertainty, of summer. 500 days of magic, of distance,…of intimacy, of awkwardness, of passion,” and the list goes on (Fox Searchlight). Lauren, Paul, and Sean in Ellis’s novel all struggle through a similar list of obstacles, ultimately resulting in the loss of their lover. Tom constantly fantasizes about what could have been with Summer, his ex-girlfriend, utilizing a split screen, seeing clones of her on a bus, and being the lead in a highly choreographed and lip-synced dance sequence to the tune of Hall and Oates,’ “You Make My Dreams” (Dance Sequence). References to new wave and pop love songs are found throughout the Rules of Attraction as well, such as George Michael’s hit “Faith” about lust and cautiousness in playing the games of love.
To put the Rules of Attraction into a theoretical context, in “the History of Sexuality,” Foucault argues that sex is based on “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (688). We can see this in each relationship of the radical romcom, but especially in the love triangle of Lauren, Sean, and Paul. Lauren has the power over Sean who derives pleasure from her. Sean has the power with Paul and Paul gains pleasure from him. There is also pleasure in the “power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting” the sexual oppression of the dominant culture. The power of this oppression has been carried through various social organizations, but these powers do not cancel each other out; “they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another” as Ellis so aptly accounts in his novel, through the interactions of his characters (690).
Foucault seems to have used Marxism as a base for his argument. Marx delineated the ideas of interplay between a dominant culture from above and a subordinate culture from below. What Gramsci called “hegemony,” the class in power asserts its power through “force and consent” (Barker 66). During the 80s when Ellis’s book took place, the yuppie culture of consumerism and luxury was the dominating class. This class is represented by the idea that Camden students tuition is paid for by their upper-class, wealthy parents, and therefore, their children can do whatever they want and still be assured of a promising future. The counter-culture is personified by the recklessness of the students themselves; they are drug-abusers, sex addicts, unable to deal with their emotions, suicidal, narcissistic, hedonistic, drifters without direction or concern. Any concerns, such as Lauren’s pregnancy, or Sean’s suicide attempts, are drowned out by drugs and sex. Any attempt at romance is quickly denounced in that the characters simply do not know how to “deal with it” as Sean so often said (Ellis 19). The focus on capitalism and “Reaganomics” offered a sense of gratification of “people condemned to lives of work” (Rivkin 1025). But for the college student who has just been unleashed from the sexual repression of their parent’s homes in a brief period of independence before their careers would start, it has become a socially accepting time of sexual experimentation, intoxication, promiscuity, and recklessness, making love unnecessary.

References

“500 Days of Summer Dance Sequence.” 09 August 2009. Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed on 13 October 2009.

Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory & Practice. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage, 2008.

Ellis, Bret Easton. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Vintage, 1998.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden: Blackwell, 1998.

Fox Searchlight Pictures. “500 Days of Summer Teaser Trailer.” 2009. Online video clip. International Movie Database. Accessed on 13 October 2009.

McDonald, Tamar Jeffers. Romantic Comedy: Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre. London: Wallflower, 2007