James Van Der Beek’s Bad Guy Turn in ‘The Rules of Attraction’

It’s a movie based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis about a destructive young psychopath named Bateman. The movie’s leading man, a well-regarded former child actor now in his mid-twenties, is playing against type, meaning the movie gives him the opportunity to establish himself as a versatile, bankable movie star. Upon premiering, however, the film receives a response that ranges from tepid to hostile.

Movie fans and serial killer aficionados alike may recognize that as a description of the 2000 cult classic American Psycho, starring Christian Bale — but it is also a description of the mostly forgotten 2002 film The Rules of Attraction, starring James Van Der Beek. Rules is a weird, frenetic, garish movie that Van Der Beek, who died Wednesday at 48, believed in deeply and hoped would reboot and redefine his career as Dawson’s Creek came to an end.

He plays Sean Bateman, a human id who is, in the Ellis-verse, the younger brother of serial killer Patrick Bateman, the titular American Psycho. (In a bit of fan service, Sean at one point answers the phone, “Patrick?” thinking it’s his brother.) Sean isn’t literally bloodthirsty like his bro, though he does describe himself as an “emotional vampire.” He deals drugs to his college classmates, napalms the feelings of anyone attempting to get close to him, and at one point punches Jessica Biel in the face. Sean is too awful a person to rise to the level of an antihero, but he is most assuredly an anti-Dawson.

The year after Rules came out, I wrote a profile of Van Der Beek. Dawson’s Creek had just gone off the air and the actor, then 26, was eager to talk about his future. I was eager to ask him about The Rules of Attraction. I told him I’d enjoyed his performance, and noted how striking it was that he had chosen to do such a hard 180 from his previous work.

“One thing I was very aware of from the start is that I couldn’t ask people to pay 10 bucks to see me do in a movie what they could see me do on TV for free,” Van Der Beek told me. “Everyone said I was trying to change my image, but I didn’t look at it that way. It was the best unmade script I’d ever seen, and it meant I didn’t have to play the same character I’d been playing for five years.”

The script, by Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, who also directed, wasn’t the only thing the movie had going for it. In addition to Van Der Beek, it featured an impressive cast of young early-aughts actors. Shannyn Sossaman plays a virgin with whom Sean believes he’s in love. Biel is a pitiless cokehead who, we’re told, later marries a senator and has four kids. Ian Somerhalder’s character delights in seducing aggro closeted dudes. Kate Bosworth is a corny idiot. And Faye Dunaway, Fred Savage, Swoosie Kurtz, and Paul Williams steal scenes in minor roles thanks to Tarantino-lite stunt casting.

Before I interviewed Van Der Beek, I watched a promotional DVD of Rules I found lying on a table at the magazine where I worked. I had no idea what to expect in part because of the movie’s schizophrenic marketing campaign. One trailer began, “From the corrupt minds that brought you Pulp Fiction and American Psycho…” which is embarrassing for how hard it’s trying but at least gives an indication of the film’s DNA. The rest of the trailer, along with TV ads, positioned Rules as a fun teen movie not unlike others of the time, a golden age of fun teen movies roughly bookended by 1995’s Clueless and 2004’s Mean Girls and encompassing films like 10 Things I Hate About You, Bring It On, Can’t Hardly Wait, and She’s All That.

I had watched Van Der Beek be photographed for hours that day, forced to wear a series of increasingly ridiculous outfits in a series of increasingly ridiculous poses. He was doing it mostly outdoors at the imposing Bethlehem Steel Mill on a hot, rainy day. Yet his positive, polished demeanor never changed — until I asked him about the marketing campaign for The Rules of Attraction.

“I’ll get in trouble if I start talking about how frustrated I was,” he said, his mouth tightening. I remained silent, hoping he’d start talking about it anyway, which he did. “The TV spots and trailers were about a totally different movie! I wouldn’t have seen that movie. And I certainly wouldn’t have appeared in it.”

I wonder whether his feelings about Rules changed as the years passed, because as I realized upon a rewatch this past week, it has not aged well. Two graphic scenes of sexual assault and death by suicide are totally gratuitous, with no significant bearing on the plot — and to different extents both are played for laughs. While a New England college town in 2002 may very well not have had many people of color, the ones featured in the movie are a machete-wielding Jamaican henchmen of a local drug kingpin, a couple of football players, and a nurse who refuses to help an ODing student because, as she tells them, “I’m on my break.” And it fails to translate the peculiar magical realism of Ellis’s novels — one in which the magic is being done by nihilistic warlocks — to the screen as adeptly as American Psycho, resulting in characters who behave in ways no human person would ever behave, for no apparent reason.

Van Der Beek’s performance, however, remains just as great as it was 20 years ago. The way he manages to convey Sean’s pain, pleasure, rage, resignation, excitement — or somehow several of those things at the same time — every time he utters Sean’s lame catchphrase, “Rock n’ roll.” Or the way he glowers at the camera a la Jack Nicholson in The Shining (both actors have heavy brows and high foreheads ideally suited to glowering at cameras). Or the way he derisively sneers at the insanity of those around him even though he’s the one driving them insane.

For any Van Der Beek fans, it’s worth a watch. Rock n’ roll.