Top Ten Alternative Pin-Up Countdown: The Emotional Vampire

“A great numb feeling washes over me and I let go of the past and look forward to the future. I pretend to be a vampire. (Takes a swig from a bottle of Jack.) I don’t really need to pretend because that’s who I am. An emotional vampire. I’ve just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. Feed off other people’s emotions. Search for this night’s prey. Who will it be?”

Number Ten on the Alternative Pin-Up Countdown, James Van Der Beek as Sean Batemen in The Rules Of Attraction has a glare that reveals pissed-off disenchantment and an undeniably attractive hostility. He's the brother of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and a fellow inhabitant of Brett Easton Ellis’ bleak and drug-infested but always good-looking world, where too much dirty money and good raw personal material has gone sour. More on why this black-as-coal, utterly contemptuous and corrupted dude makes it hurt so good in the second part of the post.

LIKE A MOTH TO THE FLAME..

Sean’s a second rate drug peddler, ineffectual sexual predator and Magnum user. His indifferent, what-the-fuck motto “rock and roll” is almost a junior 80s version of Roy Scheider’s “It’s showtime!’ from another trip to the basement, All That Jazz. He uses people, for sex, for drugs, for the brief reminder of what being a real person feels like. And his dogged, commited pumping of an empty keg resembles nothing so much as desperate, druggy masturbation. I know this guy, I’ve wanted him, I’ve even been him. It's not his failures that make him so appealing, however-it's his complete lack of apology.

The movie’s only intermittently satisfying, but the high points drip with meaty goodness. It’s a congenially depraved portrait of the moral wasteland of affluent college students struggling with the defintite possibility that they might not be good people. But Sean Bateman has passed beyond that doubt and into the certainty of the fallen. Certainty is very, very attractive to all the mixed-up little molecules in the normal person’s heart. Nothing good can come of getting involved with him and sometimes that’s just the kind of romantic self-destruction you need.

As Ian Somerhalder’s unnaturally creamy skinned homo Paul muses on the object of his unrequieted affection, “I figured out then why I liked Sean. He was kind of, well, slutty. The kind of boy who’d been around, and couldn’t remember if he was Catholic or not.”

And Sean is pan-corrupt, taking the edge wherever it presents itself. When Paul offers what is clearly a seduction joint back in his dorm room, Sean hands him the beer he's been sent to fetch for Jessica Biel, says “want a beer?” and nonchalantly follows him upstairs.

The film also delivers one of the more authentic conflicted fantasy male seduction scenes ever—it’s a crackling vision of the electricity and unique smell of male sexual friction. Of course it’s just Paul’s fantasizing while he jerks off staring at a passed-out Sean, but even that scenario has its own sick thrill.

Comments

[rowan]

Yes! Yes! And yes. Or can he just play more cool jerks like this part or Paul Newman in Hud or Steve McQueen in anything.

[d.nial IS just a river, biatch!]

okay, wait. you didn't HATE the fact that paul and sean never hooked up in the film. they were totally fucking in the book. i guess it made the movie easier to digest as a whole. had they actually started having an affair, the already overly ambitious attempt at a plot would have been impossible to tie up. but i have to say, i loved the performances as well. i've read the book twice (because i'm a sicko) but i've probably seen the movie, like, 4 times. i love ian's paul (again, nothing like the blonde himbo of the book) although i think i might just like the unnaturally creamy skin. but it really was james' sean that pushed the movie beyond the point of pointless teen flick jack-off fodder. he is kind of brilliant in the role. made me want to see more of him. but more of him as sean...