American
Beauty
Academy
Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay and
Best Cinematography
By David Norris
Notice how it opens. It has shades of the John
Steinbeck story “Chrysanthemums.” We have a woman inside a white
picket fence who is pruning her roses. Flowers are womb symbols. She is
in her flower garden with a fence around it. Separation. She is taking a
pair of shears and clipping the long stems, which are phallic symbols.
We know immediately that she and her husband are estranged from one
another. We see hostility in her.
American
Beauty is the name for a famous rose. It is an actual prize-winning
rose. It is also the title of an album by the Grateful Dead, which has a
drawing of the American Beauty rose on the cover. This is another
symbol. We are looking at the old hippies again. The music soundtrack is
symbolic; listen to the words as the scenes progress. Watch for the
multiple interpretations of the term American Beauty, its many meanings
as the layers of the story unfold.
The
contrast of red and white runs throughout the movie. It is a Valentine.
Passion and innocence. Rage and the purity of heart. Roses are the
symbol of love. They are always rich red. The passion is deep. When the
adulteress is caught, she is in a red dress, the color of the harlot.
The
color symbolism runs throughout the story, even in the colors of the
clothes the characters wear. When the virgin is undressed she is wearing
white. Her panties are blue. The white shirt is easy. It is a symbol of
her innocence and purity of heart. We listen to her first utterances of
truth. But why blue panties? Black panties with the white blouse would
mean she is seen as innocent but is not underneath. Red could mean
passion and probably the harlot. But blue is the color of serenity. Who
achieves serenity at this moment?
Notice
also that the colors of the cars change. The colors of the cars
symbolize their lives. I find it amusing to see the wife riding around
in her gray Mercedes SUV in the rain, screaming that she will not be a
victim.
We
also see some fun moments with phallic and womb symbols. He holds a beer
in his hand and stands before the flowers when he makes his invitation.
The wife assumes the traditional masculine role in the movie, and as she
becomes stronger, she takes up shooting and carrying a gun. As she
becomes more masculine, she carries this phallic symbol with her. As the
husband assumes more and more of the traditional woman’s role, the
flowers become more a part of his world as they disappear from hers.
We
see several cases of metamorphosis and reverse metamorphosis. We see
pairings of characters where one moves forward and the other moves
backwards; one evolves and the other regresses.
We see this with the husband and wife, the two girl friends and
the father and son.
Why
do we learn in the very beginning of the movie that the protagonist will
die? Why is this not held a secret until the end? The first reason is
because of the film’s point of view. The story is told by the voice of
a ghost. This is a device we often see in literature. Randall
Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and Emily
Dickinson’s “Since I
Could
Not Stop for Death” both use this device. We know he is going to die
from the opening moments. As we grow fonder and fonder of him and want
more and more for his dreams to succeed, the tragedy is increased by
this foreshadowing. We keep hoping that it will not really happen. We
wonder how it will happen. We want to know why it will happen.
Furthermore, the story opens and closes with bookend camera shots of the
city where he lived, where the story takes place. This is another
leitmotif in the film. Often, the camera is looking down from the
viewpoint of the spirit that has left the body. This is especially a lot
of fun in the closing montage.
Does
he have to die?
The
two gay men play an important role in the movie, but not as political
statements. They are necessary to the plot structure and the resolution
of conflict. Their involvement in the first part of the movie is crucial
to the story’s ending. The ending would not be believable without
their having appeared in the jogging sequence in the earlier part of the
movie.
“Stuff
is more important than living,” Lester says after his wife rejects his
tender, amorous advances. It is a crucial part of the theme, an attack
on modern materialism as he slowly reverts to the idealism of the
counterculture.
Lester
is a classic initiation hero. In such a pattern, the protagonist either
gains knowledge or loses innocence, or experiences the combination of
both. He goes through the three classic steps of the rites of passage
ritual: separation, transformation, and return. In the end he is a
scapegoat, a person who suffers while others benefit.
The
rain is a symbol of sadness; the sky is crying. The wife sits in the car
in the rain, the father looks across the lawn in the rain. The woman’s
windshield on her car is so covered by the rain that she cannot see out
of it. Then when she does see the door to her home, it is red! Is the
red her rage, her husband’s newfound passion, or her guilt? Or all of
these?
In
the film, we have 7 important figures: the 3 couples and the virgin.
Three is the archetypal number that represents men, and 4 is the symbol
for women. Seven is the combination of the two.
Why
is the wife of the marine the way she is? What does this tell us about
him?
Does
the young man deliberately cause the death of Lester at the end of the
movie? Why? Does he have a single motive, a double motive, a triple or
even a quadruple motive? Notice the look on his face as he lies on the
floor talking to his attacker. I say he does it deliberately; my friend
Rob says he does not. What do you think? Does the ambiguity here lend to
the movie’s strength?
White
is the symbol of Lester’s purity and innocence, his pure honesty.
American
Beauty the flower.
The
young girl is an American beauty.
The
Grateful dead.
The
beautiful America and its corruption at the hands of materialism.
The
verbal irony of American Beauty.
What
a beaut!
The
American dream and its perversion.
Lester’s
two faces at the end of the movie—what is that a symbol of? We have at
work here a multiplicity of binary opposites. The way that we see him
versus the way that others see him. The different ways that characters
in the story see him. The life he leads and the life he dreams of
living. The life he lived and the life he lives for one summer. The
world of his present and the world of his past. The two sides of his
soul.
The
closing song, “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” written by Neil Young
and sung by Annie Lennox is just one of the songs that reflects the
action of the moment:
Don’t
let it bring you down.
It’s
only castles burning.
Just
find someone who’s turning,
And
you will come around.
In
this scene, a man and a woman stand alone in a dark room in the rain.
Again, the rain is sadness and the darkness is the unknown and evil. A
man’s home is his castle. His world is about to crumble; he will lose
his castle. He is turning, and she will come around.
The
movie takes place at the end of summer, in early fall. Spring is the
symbol of new beginnings, summer is love, fall is the harvest and
tragedy, and winter is death. We have of course a tragedy here, but also
we have a reference to the counterculture and its summer of love. The
summer of love is over, the hippies are over, and that moment in time is
lost forever.
My
friend Cordelia offers this reading of the movie.
The real hero in the move is Jane. The movie is in
fact about Jane. She is the future of America. The writer is wondering
about America’s future. Jane is the daughter of the present, the
offspring of typical worldly parents. Her mother and father are real
emblems of worldly people. The daughter is also a worldly person at
first, which we can see in her saving money to have breast surgery.
However, she is not completely worldly like Angela, her pretty friend.
Jane has the potential to see real beauty, and her boyfriend, Ricky,
helps her to see it. She decides to escape from her parents, who are a
symbol of the hopeless present. In this way, the writer shows a little
bit of hope, but her future is not clear. She going to go to New York
City, the most Americanized and at the same time the worldliest town.
She may be buried in the present. Or she may create another world with
her boyfriend.
I
noticed while reading the above comments, the daughter’s name. Jane.
Mary Jane is one of the many nicknames for marijuana. When dad starts
getting high, he begins to grow closer to his daughter, Jane. The young
man who lights a small fire in the darkness to spell out her name in
revealing his love for her is a dealer. He sells Mary Jane.
When
we first meet Ricky, the marine’s son, he is wearing a black hat. This
is a symbol of how others see him, and also how most of us watching the
movie for the first time see him. The black hat represents a mind filled
with evil or crazy thoughts. However, beneath the hat, he is an
intelligent young man who sees beauty and understands tenderness. Later,
when he and Lester stand outside of the club at night, he is wearing a
white jacket over black clothes. The white is the innocent way that
others see him; the black is the dark, hidden side of him that will soon
be revealed to us.
At
the end of the movie, Lester has cleansed his soul. His last words,
“Great,” echo the Grateful Dead, a slight pun. He has reached his
moment of understanding he has achieved happiness. And that is when he
leaves us. The closing shots again are red and white. Passion and
purity.