Recently ‘Rogue Cinema’ took a foray into the dark world of David Lynch’s films, to explore his disturbing presentations of the decay of the body and inherited contortions of the mind. For all of you who joined me on that journey: thanks. It was a wild ride. Now, please join me to explore a counterpart and — in some ways – opposite interpretation to Lynch’s version of suburban America. These investigations, to my mind, really matter: for Suburbia has – to our parents’ generation and ours- become a cultural condition.
Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) is about nuclear families, squeezed to breaking. Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is sick of his job, and tired of his cold relationship with his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening), who is herself struggling to achieve success in the Real Estate business. After seeing his daughter’s cheerleader friend dance at a basketball game, he engages in a series of fantasies that offer a way out of his frustrated reality. As if inspired by this series of epiphanies, he begins to remake his life: he blackmails his work for a huge sum of money, and takes a new job ‘with the least amount of responsibility’ at a fast food drive-thru. At a networking party with his wife, he meets his new neighbour Ricky, who supplies him with high-grade cannabis, which he smokes while working out in his garage. He runs, and lifts weight: physical and spiritual. Following formerly-repressed and forgotten desires has rekindled a fire within him: from the cold, dead landscape he once inhabited, Lester has found life, and happiness. Beauty has re-entered his world.
Meanwhile, Ricky meets Lester’s daughter Jane, after she spots him filming her from next door. Ricky often carries a handheld video camera, and his room is filled with tapes, all with footage of the fragments of beauty he has observed. A dead bird, or a bag whipped up into a dance by the eddying wind… Later he films Jane as they share time together in his room, talking about their parents, and the pressure that they feel already closing in on their own lives. Ricky’s filming draws attention to the object, in all its wonder and interaction with the forces of nature. To be a worthless, weightless scrap of polythene, is to be the most beautiful thing ever seen.
Horrified by catching Lester masturbating in bed, Carolyn decides to have an affair with Buddy Kane, ‘The King of Real Estate’. After sex, the two of them go to the shooting range to enjoy the experience of firing a handgun. Carolyn experiences empowerment in a very different way to Lester: she enjoys the thrill of using a weapon, an object designed to turn a human being into dead material. As two people practised in how to sell property, they treat sex with each other as a way to relieve the stress of their lives. Automatic, just like shooting a gun.
The culmination of the film finds Lester caught — on multiple levels — between these tensions of the object and the human. Through the exercise of his moral agency, and forces out of his control, he becomes resolved to these dynamics.
We feel the horror of becoming an object in coldness or death, and
the desire to be part of the solid things of the world: to both regenerate and remain.
Our bodies will teach us what is true. The atoms of our bodies were not arranged this way by chance. Conscious or not, our bodies have learned how to survive in this world. To me, ‘faith’ means that peace and beauty are part of our arrangements, too.
Listen to the forces of nature.
We may learn something for the very first time: something that we always knew.
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NEXT WEEK: Past, present and future converge in a search for escape from death, in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain’ (2006). For our schedule, check here.
Just one of my favorite movies. The commentary this film offers on so many social issues, from consumerism to homophobia to drugs to teenage angst to passionless marriage to mid-life crisis realities to gender role stereotyping… it’s a beautiful and horrifying film. Most people I recommend this film only return to tell me how much they hated the movie. Unfortunate. I consider it a masterpiece.
It’s such a beautiful film. I would have loved to write another review where I just look at the film technically, for its creation of beauty in the cinematic space. Those scenes where Lester is fantasizing about Angela are just perfectly done: the soundtrack for those clips deserves an award all of its own.
Did they say why they hated it? Unless you just hate the message of the film from an oppositional worldview and philosophy, I can’t think why anyone could!
Most tell me it was too dark, ended on a note that left a bad taste in their mouth, or that it dealt with themes they just did not find appealing. I think they miss the big picture.
Seriously: I think there are some that may disagree with my conclusions (Heidi!!!), but I feel that the closing of the film depicts transcendence and complete resolution for Lester. You could see the ending as dark if your sympathies lie with Carolyn or Ricky’s dad: but even in those cases, I see their final realities as necessary: traps that were bound to go off. Perhaps now they can also find themselves, and move on to greater self-understanding.
If the viewer seeks to do the same, I think they will find the themes of the film deeply relevant. As you may tell from previous reviews in this column, I don’t rate ‘appeal’ very highly as a criteria for watching films. :)
OK, Andy, since you are calling me out. :)
I am in complete agreement about the ending of the film, I think it is really beautiful and I felt incredibly alive and uplifted after watching it. The only thing I questioned in your very well-written post is whether Lester is truly becoming enlightened and alive to beauty in the middle of the film (I don’t think this really happens until the end).
My husband and I have an on-going argument about this. He is always fantasizing about dropping out of life and going into the woods Thoreau or Into the Wild-style. I understand that impulse and have my own set of fantasies about breaking the rules and being free; yet, there is this part of me that knows that Thoreau lived on land owned by his family and was taken care of by the women in his family who fed him and did his laundry etc. Christopher McCandless died alone. Certainly, there is corruption, indifference, a deadness between Lester and Carolyn that is tragic. I found myself rooting for all of the much needed upheaval he brings to their lives by refusing to play by the rules of suburbia. Yet, I wonder how we can bring the spirit of this — staying alive to beauty and experience — without dropping out of normal life.
Feel free to question more things… this is a very interesting question.
I see Lester’s ‘coming to life’ happening as he allows himself to experience reconnection with his nature: speaking his mind to his employer and wife, the weight-lifting, the running, hitting on his wife on the sofa – or, at least, trying to – all these things bring life back. I do agree that something momentous happens when he is with Angela, and onwards. I suppose there’s a road to enlightenment, and then there’s Nirvana. Perhaps both are represented here, in some way.
About ‘dropping out’: this is an enormous question that surrounds much of what we talk about on D&S, I think. To be understood: to speak a comprehensible language in a community, we need to live, think and work in relation to agreed paradigms. If we don’t want to live by these rules, then we face living a life fighting against the tide, not accepted by our peers. This sucks the life out of us, as many of the characters in the film illustrate.
OR we can escape. Suburbia is a cultural condition though, I think, and it’s possible to drop out of these ways of thinking, and find other community. (Another version of “Zion”?) Ricky and Jane run away, but they run away together.
But it is so appealing — big themes, humor, fantastic performances, its gorgeous to look at.
It appeals to good taste.
Agree that American Beauty is about the various ways we avoid dealing with “the horror of becoming an object in coldness or death.” In some ways it is Kurtz’s “horror” transported to Everytown USA.
Carolyn (Annette Benning) avoids it via consumerism and career ambition.
Angela (Mena Suvari) avoids it via her looks, sexual power, and popularity.
Frank (Chris Cooper) avoids it by an inflexible and extreme fundamentalism.
Barbara (Alison Janney) avoids it by completely checking out.
Jane (Thora Birch) avoids it by adopting a veneer of teenage sarcasm and apathy.
I see these same faces of desperation or avoidance in the faces of my friends and family, and even when I look in the mirror.
Like Heidi, I also wonder about Lester’s epiphany – when/if/how it occurs, and whether it would have been enduring? I’d also like to check in on Jane and Ricky (Wes Bentley) 2-3 years later, or 10-15 years later. (I have a similar curiosity about Ben and Elaine from The Graduate.) Are they still able to stare into the horror and see “the beauty,” or like their parents, has fear, boredom, and/or need-to-pay-the-bills reality caused them to take on “avoidance crutches” of their own?
Matt, I’ve wondered the same thing about Jane/Ricky and Ben/Elaine.
I think that is one of the reasons that I love Before Sunrise/Sunset so much. In the second movie, we’re given that rare glimpse of what happens to these characters after the grand gesture and romanticism of the first film. Jesse and Celine are so dewy and fresh in Before Sunrise, so full of hope. In the second movie, they are both leaner, harder — weighted down by life and experience. Yet, you get these sparks, they haven’t lost themselves, they are still the characters you’ve fallen in love with, but Linklater (and Hawke and Delpy) never lets you forget the real consequences, the sadness that underlies their second meeting.
I always feel like Lester is coming to an epiphany (enlightenment seems too strong a word) when he decides not to sleep with Angela and steps back into being a parent to Jane, but there is a lot of ambiguity there.
Another set of films that I love, that give this view of characters over time is Denys Arcand’s ‘The Decline of the American Empire’ and ‘Barbarian Invasions’. The latter revolves around the illness and death of Remy, who is a loveable but flawed character, surrounded by his friends.
I feel that something happens when Lester decides not to sleep with Angela. After that he asks Angela about Jane, and reflects that ‘I’m great’. Seeing his face, reflected perfectly in the blood: as an object, in need of nothing… and then to hear the voiceovers where he is resolved in love to his family and the beauty of the world.
I must admit that I do wonder whether he would feel as high as he does during his final day, years in the future… It’s easy for films to bag on Suburbia, because they don’t have to live there. If you want to earn a living and have kids, you need to live in places more wearing than Lester inhabits. And yet, that makes me think about the job he gets… it’s a humorous aside, in one sense… but in another sense it shows us how he could have sustained his lifestyle beyond the time the $60,000 would have lasted. He set himself up outside of the culture of oppression.
I always loved that part about the plastic bag. And I see the finale of this film … as an excruciating climax to a long, slow, foreplay. The vise of the whole thing with his wife, and the neighbor’s self-hating and destructive –to family and community — closeted homosexuality. Compare it to sex. It’s all about the act. The climax is a kind of death. And it’s beyond beautiful.
Thanks for this review, Andy. Really enjoyed it. Reminded me that this is one of my favorite films of all time. That said, It’s one that I don’t have a strong desire to revisit – I think because it took so much out of me. That’s mind-stunnig beauty for you.
Hey thanks for reviewing one of my favorite films of all time! Great to hear Mormons discussing it, because I think it resonates with a lot that we believe.
I thought the film beautifully illustrated a point Terry Warner makes in his BYU philosophy classes. Lester undergoes a transformation near the end of the film, when he suddenly, and unexpectedly sees the object of his lust, Angela, as a real person, and he suddenly loves her, rather than lusts after her. He is horrified at the violation he is about to inflict upon her, and starts to act selflessly and kindly for the first time in the film. This mental switch that goes on in his brain transforms everything about his life, as if by magic, and he is filled with a kind of transcendent love, gratitude, and forgiveness of himself and others.
I feel this transformation from time to time, these moments of grace and love, a sudden switch from selfishness to selflessness. But rarely are they depicted so dramatically, so raw and truthful.
Thanks for the review!