Shot of Jack #43: Perspective In Rules of Attraction & Year Two News!
Hello again. This is a big week for me and a big week for A Shot of Jack. This Friday the final installment of A Better Lie is released. It’s taken almost a full year, but the story is finally out there in the world. You have no idea how much that means to me.
The month of March is going to be full of me preparing the physical copy of A Better Lie and getting Bad Pennies ready for its debut on Friday April 5th. Speaking of which…
Bad Pennies
I want to try something new this year. I’m more thankful than I can say to those of you who are paid subscribers. It’s what makes this whole thing possible. Paid subscribers have access to A Shot of Jack Top Shelf, the crime fiction that appears here every Friday.
That said, for Year Two I’m going to try an experiment and see how it goes.
Like last year, if you are a paying subscriber, you will get a physical copy of the book.
What’s new is this.
If you want access to A Shot of Jack Top Shelf, but you can’t afford a paid subscription, write me at jackcameronis@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Scholarship’. And I will give you one full year FREE. However, you will not get a physical copy of the Subscriber’s Edition of the book.
Perhaps to my own detriment, more than I want to make money I want people to read my stuff. So if you’re someone who wants to read my stuff, but you don’t have the money to pay for a subscription I want you to have an option to read it.
As a reminder A Shot of Jack Top Shelf subscribers receive:
Full Access to Year One’s serial crime novel A Better Lie.
Weekly Installments of Year Two’s serial crime novel Bad Pennies.
An Exclusive Signed Subscriber’s Edition of Bad Pennies (to be published mid-2025)*
* Physical copies do not go to scholarship subscribers.
Reliably Unreliable: How Bret Easton Ellis Uses Perspective In The Rules of Attraction
The Rules of Attraction is a novel in which many different and unreliable character perspectives are used. By dispensing with the omniscient narrator and strictly using the viewpoints of various characters, author Bret Easton Ellis is able to create a narrative that is more personal and more fleshed out, but less clear. For example, when the homosexual Paul Denton runs into the heterosexual Sean Bateman at a party, Ellis gives us Paul’s perspective of the event:
And then he said the strangest thing. The thing that started is all off. I wasn’t that drunk to misunderstand and I was taken aback at such a bold proposition. I didn’t ask him to repeat his invitation. I simply rephrased what he had asked me: You wanna get a quesadilla?
“You want to go and get a quesadilla?” I asked. “You want to go out to dinner tomorrow night? Mexican? Casa Miguel?”
“And he was so shy, he looked down and said, “Yeah, I guess.” (60)
For Paul, the conversation is the beginning of a romantic relationship. It means something to him. He’s surprised and excited at the prospect of getting a date with Sean. If Paul’s were the only perspective the reader was given, it would be safe to accept that interpretation. But the narrative follows that up with Sean’s version of events:
I walk over to the keg and Paul Denton’s standing by it and somehow the keg has run out and Tony’s selling bottled beer for two bucks apiece over in his room and I don’t want to spend the money and I’m not in any mood to snake it from the guy and I suspect that Denton’s got some bucks so I ask him if he wanted to go with me and get a case of beer and the guy is so drunk he asks me if I want to have dinner with him tomorrow and I guess I’m drunk too and I say sure even though I don’t know why the fuck I’m saying that, confused as hell. (61)
After reading how things appeared to Sean and comparing it to Paul’s, it becomes clear to the reader that Sean said ‘case of beer’ not ‘quesadilla’, but that Sean was so out of it that he just went along with the conversation without really paying attention to what it might mean to Paul. By giving us these different and somewhat contrary sides of the story, Ellis is allowing the reader to figure out what really happened rather than simply taking one perspective or the other.
Later in the novel, when Sean, who is in love with Lauren, gets her into his room, the reader is presented with her version of events first:
We’re in his room and he plays me a song. On his guitar. He serenades me and it’s almost embarrassing enough to sober me up. “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I start crying only because I can’t help but think of Victor, and he stops halfway through and kisses me and we end up going to bed. (165)
Sean, of course, sees things differently:
She sat on the bed and leaned against the wall, her eyes closed. I plugged in the Fender and played her a song I’d written myself and then segued into “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I played it quietly and sang the lyrics slowly and softly and she was so moved that she started to cry and I stopped playing and knelt before the bed and touched her neck, but she couldn’t look at me; maybe it was the grass we smoked at the dykes’ who want to blow up the weight room, or maybe it was the Ecstasy I’m pretty sure she was on; maybe it was that she loved me. (166)
Ellis uses differing narratives again and again throughout the novel. The technique forces the reader to read between the lines (and the different versions of the story) to see what happened, but it also allows the writer to present differing accounts of the same events in a way that both deepens the character and allows for more creative interpretations of the story.
There is also a deeper meaning to be found in the radically different views of the same story. It is a reminder that personal perspective changes everything. What for one person is a romantic gesture is blatant sexual harassment to another depending on how far outside of reality an individual’s perspective might be. Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction is a reminder of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s old line, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
Make With The Clicky!
One Last Thing
A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Starfield in my X-Box GamePass. Starfield is a video game created by Bethesda, the folks behind the massively popular Skyrim. I don’t follow video games and I don’t like fantasy games. So I had no expectations whatsoever when I downloaded the game.
Turns out, it’s a fun, open, expansive game full of all sorts of entertaining adventures. I asked around online about others’ experiences with the game and learned that after a huge buildup of anticipation, Starfield was deemed by most to be a glitchy, frustrating, misfire from Bethesda. The hate against the game is strong.
And this made me think of something that has made me appreciate art of all sorts:
Instead of complaining at what it isn’t or what it fails at, appreciate it for what it is and what it succeeds at.
This approach abandons preconceived expectations and attempts to simply appreciate what is. (It doesn’t work with everything Rise of Skywalker remains a mess.)
- Jack Cameron
Free issues of A Shot of Jack come out Wednesdays for all subscribers. A Shot of Jack Top Shelf subscribers receive a new chapter of Bad Pennies every Friday (beginning April 5, 2024).
To become a subscriber, simply click the link below.
If you’d like to become a Top Shelf subscriber, but cannot afford it, write me with the subject line ‘scholarship’.