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.