“The consumer society needs its objects to be. More precisely, it needs to destroy them.”
-Baudrilliard
The world Bret Easton Ellis creates with his fictional Camden College in the novel The Rules of Attraction is a dark and disturbing place, full of what appears to be shallow characters lost in a pursuit of meaningless carnal pleasures. But are these privileged and self-centered youths a product of their small and relatively isolated environment or is something larger at work? A juxtaposition of this novel against another of Ellis’ works, The Informers, clarifies that what is being displayed within the pages of The Rules of Attraction is much bigger than Camden College. By looking at these two works together, an understanding of the motivation behind the self-destructive actions of the characters can be achieved. As Anne in The Informers states in a letter to Sean Bateman of The Rules of Attraction, “I realized that no matter where I am it’s always the same. Camden, New York, L.A., Palm Springs – it really doesn’t seem to matter” (The Informers 134). Because they live in a society in which everything, and everyone, is seen as an object that has the potential to be possessed, they base their happiness on the process of consumption, but since they cannot actually consume one another, “it is the idea of the relation that is consumed,” and they wind up unable to find satisfaction in their personal lives (Baudrilliard 418).
In both novels, what could be labeled a consumerist approach to sexual relations can be seen in the ways the characters refer to one another. In The Rules of Attraction, Lauren describes losing her virginity at an event titled “The Dress To Get Screwed” party. At this party, everyone comes for a singular purpose, to get intoxicated and find a sexual conquest for the evening. Lauren describes her prospects the way one might describe produce at the grocery store; “only a little gay, with blonde hair, a great body and these amazing gray eyes,” is how she labels one individual up for the task of taking her virginity (The Rules 13). She also compares her fellow females in the same physically descriptive way, her competition for the boy is Kathy Kotcheff, “who was wearing a black bra and black panties complete with garter belt” (Rules 13). Lauren looks at others and herself in terms of packaging, which brings to mind Baudrillard’s theory that “this efficiency is obtained at the price of a radical simplification, of an impoverishment, and of an almost irrevocable regression in the ‘language’ of value: ‘All individuals are described in terms of their objects’” (416). But these characters take Baudrillard’s concept one step further, they do not just define themselves in terms of objects, they actually begin to see each other as objects. Their value to one another then, becomes purely corporal.
So Lauren and her fellow classmates are not only objectifying each other, but are also finding their own value in how they themselves measure up, as objects. But is this a phenomenon unique to the social scene at Camden College? When comparing Camden to the L.A. depicted in The Informers, it is obvious that though these locations are on opposite coasts, they do not lie so far apart. In one scene, the unnamed narrator has just been told that his dead friend had been having an affair with his ex-girlfriend. He recalls the girl, Carol Banks, who was “cute, blond cheerleader…nothing too great,” and then goes on to say that he “never really liked Carol that much,” except for during sex (The Informers 12). Much like Lauren, this unnamed male sees his partner as a conquest, and what he recalls about her is little more than her outer casing.
It is clear that the characters in both these novels see one another as merchandise fit for use and subsequent disposal, but there remains the question of why. Gramsci’s theory of ideology can be applied to both of these texts in order to demonstrate that these characters behaviors are in a large part determined by the culture of their times. Gramsci stated that ideologies “provide people with rules of practical conduct and moral behavior” akin to a religion (Barker 66). Both The Informers and The Rules of Attraction take place during the 1980s, a time when the United State’s capitalist society was experiencing a consumptive peak. Marvin Prosono asserts in his article, “Fascism of the Skin, that such a society “commodifies everything in its path, including the body, thus subtly shifting the manner in which the mind itself incorporates the body into its calculations” (635). This casts a much different light on the risky sexual behavior of Lauren and her fellow students at Camden. Their bodies, because they are viewed as exchangeable products, are no longer valuable to them. They are only “objects of self-negation,” and as such, they use them the way one would use up a disposable product purchased at a convenience store (Prosono 650). These individuals that Ellis is portraying are in part products of their consumerist environment, and their very bodies have become nothing more than consumables to them.
However, all the blame cannot lie solely upon the culture of the time. There is another important factor at work, and that is the way in which these characters are being cared for and looked after by the adults in their lives. They have parental figures who believe that money, rather than attention and support, can solve all their problems. Ann in The Informers has been sent to live with her grandparents while she works through a depression. But instead of nurturing her, they simply throw money at her. “They buy me anything and everything I want,” she states (135). And yet these same caregivers “Don’t really notice [her] absence” either physically or mentally when she begins to slip away from them into the L.A. party scene (149). Similarly, in The Rules of Attraction, Sean’s brother asks what has happened to the seven thousand dollars he placed in Sean’s bank account but never bothers to ask how Sean is feeling, and this is at a time when they have come together due to the pending death of their father (239).
All this emphasis on possessions as the resolution to tribulations is passed down to this young generation, but instead of helping them, it leaves them feeling empty. This is because “within the very framework of this homogeneous system, we can observe the unfolding of an always renewed obsession with hierarchy and distinction” (Baudrilliard 416-417). Since their every need is met with no effort on their own part, and there are no expectations placed upon them, they are left with nothing to strive for other than the fleeting distractions they can get from their varying reckless behaviors. But the very act of consumption is a temporary solution that needs continual repeating; it only leaves these characters feeling hungrier in the end, and constantly in search of their next fix.
Every individual Ellis portrays is desperate and hungry, but the more they try to satiate this hunger with parties, drugs, alcohol, and casual sex, the more unsatisfied they become. Worse still, it places so much value upon the unstable act of sexual conquests that it leaves these individuals dependant on an unreliable variable. Sean Bateman attempts suicide when Lauren rejects him. Mary succeeds in her attempt to end her life after a perceived rejection from Sean. “”I’m doing this because I’ll never have Him,” she states (The Rules 173). It seems ridiculous for these young men and women to be so dramatic in their romantic pursuits, but they are acting in accordance with the social structure they live within. This consumerist world that they are within the confines of “does not structure social relations: it demarcates them in a hierarchical repertoire. It is formalized in a universal system of recognition of social statuses: a code of ‘social standing.’” (Baudrillard 415). This is how they form their very place in their world, and to fail at it is to lose an invaluable part of their identity (Barker 225).
Furthermore, they must continue the behavior because they are trapped in the ideology of their time. Towards the end of The Informers, an unnamed female character lies on the beach, wasting away. She has ridden the hierarchy to the very top and what she finds there is not happiness, but rather the AIDs virus. She receives no sympathy from her boyfriend, however, who describes her decline in the following manner: “her body was supple, carefully muscled, aerobicized, and now she basically looks like shit” (214). He does not have any compassion for his own dying girlfriend, he only mourns for the loss of her objectified body. She fed the system, with not only her physical form, but her very substance, and now there is no more use for her (Prosono 650). He leaves her alone on the beach to die; she is past her expiration date.
In both The Rules of Attraction and The Informers, people are viewed as products meant to be used up and discarded. Ellis uses the scenery of a small college in New England against the opposing large and vapid entertainment world of L.A. to demonstrate that it does not matter where these individuals are in the physical sense; they must live within the boundaries of their 1980s consumptive society in which consumerism dictates the hierarchy, and as a result they all relate to one another only as objects for the sole purpose of obtainment. Their affluent parental figures also contribute to the problem by seeking to connect to their children with money and possessions instead of through guidance and nurturing. This leads to a hollow existence in which “the body has become an emporium, over every detail of which a commodity may be marketed (Prosono 650). Unfortunately, this also leads to a void of inner satisfaction, because fulfillment through objects, even if the objects are people, can only be felt temporarily, while the object is being used. The world Ellis creates gives the reader a warning of sorts, against the extremes of capitalist commoditization of the individual. The only predictable result from that type of objectification is the shaming, vulgarizing and wasting away of each person who subscribes to the system.
Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Sage Publications Ltd, 2008. Print
Baudrillard, Jean. "The System of Objects." Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 408-19. Web.
Ellis, Bret Easton. The Informers. New York: Random House Inc. 1994. Print.
---. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Random House, Inc. 1987. Print.
Prosono, Marvin T. “Fascism of the Skin: Symptoms of Alienation in the Body of Consumptive Capitalism.” Current Sociology. 2008; 56: 635-655. Web. 11 October 2009.
