The Rules of Attraction

Originally published on 16/12/22 on Letterboxd

Gregg Araki for straight people. Deeply crass, in bad-taste and mostly abandons any of the (sparse) humanising qualities of Ellis' novel in favour of dialing up the ruthlessness of its satire and just generally making everyone twice as sociopathic. Probably one of the best films of the 2000s? A remarkable adaptation in that it not only conveys the parasitic dread inherent to his literature even whilst excising much of the tension that builds up said dread, but is also oddly one of the more moving explorations of how youthful memory is fragmented by duelling temporalities- that which you experience so painfully in the moment, and that which propels you into the future so fast you lose track of where things started; hence, Ellis' resignation to unknowability within the novel functions less as an obfuscation and denial of sensory experience and more as a coping mechanism. Immensely glad I didn't see this in high school because of both how much it reflects what much of it was like and how insufferable I would have been had I come across this at age 14. Will probably elaborate upon how this operates as Y2K-doomer-exorcism at some point but for now, this just made me immensely sad and dug up memories I would have preferred stayed hidden