“Death is the mother of beauty.” – Wallace Stevens
“I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough.” – Marvin Bell
* * *
“A significant amount of existential philosophy is written into [American Beauty’s] narratives,” writes James Clark Ross, “and, as the drama unfolds, we, too, begin to ask ourselves what the hell we are doing with our lives.” Indeed, the purpose of good art is to prompt the audience to contemplate difficult and potentially life-changing questions. However, when it comes to our tendency to judge on the basis of appearance, too little has changed within the last 25 years, or since the release of American Beauty in 1999. Humans are, after all, naturally visual creatures, so we base many of our conclusions – prematurely, it often turns out – on what we see. But as the film also demonstrates, just because something is natural does not make it desirable, either personally or socially; nor is what appears – in contrast to “the entire life behind things” – necessarily true or real. Our tendency to forget or ignore this fact is subtly captured early in the film when Lester is on the phone at work. Among all the clutter covering his desk is a placard that reads “Look Closer.”
Viewers who are not acquainted with the work of Alan Ball and Sam Mendes (the film’s writer and director) likely wouldn’t think twice about the items on Lester’s desk, but that would be to miss an important clue: This is a film not about seeing but about looking, which requires the audience to move beyond the outer world of appearance to the inner world of our experience of it. Not just any audience but American audiences that rely too much on surfaces. As a much-needed and powerful critique of American culture, after a quarter-century, American Beauty has never been more relevant, timely, and important. While many films, past and present, are content to work safely within the limits of the status quo, American Beauty seeks to transform our way of looking at our lives by offering a more nuanced, artful, and, ultimately, human perspective of some of our most cherished and long-standing values.
American Beauty examines how we limit ourselves, and because of those limitations become unhappy, maladjusted, and “joyless” human beings. Perhaps one of the most prominent ways we limit ourselves, the film suggests, is through our narrow conceptions of beauty. For example, in the film’s devastating final scene, Lester sits at the kitchen table and admires an old black-and-white photograph of him, his daughter Jane, and his wife Carolyn during simpler (black-and-white) and happier times. It is a beautiful moment, in part because, though deeply nostalgic, it offers a rare glimmer of hope that things might still work out for the Burnham family. But like all moments, it is short-lived: A few seconds later, the newly liberated Lester is executed by his polar opposite Colonel Fitz, who epitomizes what happens to us when we base our lives on lies.
Several bouquets of roses are placed throughout the kitchen, including one on the table in front of Lester. Although roses – specifically, American Beauties – have appeared at different times throughout the film, what makes these roses seem more “spectacular” is that they are juxtaposed with a similarly sanguine and vibrant pool of Lester’s blood. Had the juxtaposition not occurred, the shot would not have had the same effect. But by associating the two, each comes to possess a new significance – a new beauty, finally – that neither could have attained alone. Thus, it is through the pairing of what’s familiar, predictable, and orthodox in its beauty (the roses) with something that is not (the pool of blood) that we realize beauty includes not just what we would predict and thus our narrow conceptions of it, but “every single moment of [our] stupid little [lives],” which, again in the words of Lester’s posthumous monologue, explains why he feels like “[he’s] seeing it all at once and it’s too much.” For when beauty is as all-encompassing as this, Lester’s and, presumably, our own “heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst” or, in Ricky’s words, feels like it “is going to cave in.”
However, the film does more than expand what qualifies as beauty. It also inverts the value we place on established forms of beauty with the lack of value we place on the unorthodox forms of beauty. That is, when everything is beautiful, including death – for example, the dead homeless woman Ricky describes finding in the street – the “ordinary” expressions of beauty become a kind of reprieve from the intensity of that recognition. For those whom – like Buddy Kane, Carolyn Burnham, and Colonel Fitz – everything is about appearance and “living the image,” and who therefore lack the awareness of the “entire life behind things,” just the opposite is true: Ordinary beauty is all there is, thus there is no reprieve from it. This is not to say that for those who do possess this awareness its application is automatic. It is not, for they must be reminded to “look closer.” “I need to remember,” Ricky says, explaining to Jane how his videos (he’s got hundreds) help him do exactly that.
A similar juxtaposition occurs when, after hearing the gunshot, Jane and Ricky enter the kitchen and find Lester dead. In a state of shock, Jane stops and says, “Oh my God.” In contrast to her response, which we would rightly expect, Ricky, in keeping with his enlightened outlook and ever on the lookout for unconventional expressions of beauty, calmly squats (though it appears he is sinking into Lester’s blood) in front of Lester and looks him straight in the eyes while tilting his head so as to align the angle of his head/gaze with Lester’s. It is a moment of both confrontation and exhilaration.1 Far from being horrified or afraid, Ricky notices the odd half-grin on Lester’s face, then grins himself, and says only “Wow.” Ricky’s response is as unorthodox as it is surprising (after all, a man has just violently lost his life), but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of truth or authenticity to it, however unsettling.
This raises the question as to why audiences – perhaps especially today’s audiences – might consider this or other scenes like it unsettling or even offensive; as if there is only one appropriate response to what is ultimately a complex experience, and that by suggesting otherwise we are somehow diminishing the other, more typical and socially acceptable responses to it. Or worse, that alternative interpretations might be used as grounds for justifying antisocial behaviors. In reality, multiple and conflicting interpretations can and do coexist: Ricky’s reaction jolts and prompts us to remember this, not for the sake of justifying Lester’s murder in the name of beauty but for the sake of wresting beauty from the tragedy of Lester’s death.
This possibility is reinforced by Lester’s baffling grin, which, like Ricky’s reaction to it, is not something audiences usually associate with having one’s head blown off. Lester’s grin invites us to reconsider and, ultimately, broaden our interpretation of and feelings about not only this moment in the film but about our attitudes toward life and death more generally. For why, the film seems to ask, should we be upset about Lester’s death if he isn’t? Admittedly, it’s an odd question to ask, but it’s also one that Lester, in a moment of postmortem reflection, anticipates when he says, “I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world.” This insight would be merely ironic if it weren’t for earlier moments in the film that challenge our overly simplistic views. For although Lester is dead and one would therefore assume he is no longer going to be “pissed” or “mad” or anything else, his reflection suggests that even our concepts of death are subject to revision once we “look closer.”
Because we spend so much of our lives focused on surfaces, we are often ill-equipped to fathom authentic beauty even when it’s right in front of us. Authentic beauty, or beauty that goes beyond appearance or surfaces and touches something deeper, makes greater demands on the audience because it requires our active involvement rather than simply seeing it only with our eyes. Perhaps the single greatest example of this challenge to the American aesthetic is the scene in which Ricky shows Jane “the most beautiful thing [he’s] ever filmed.” In an earlier scene, Ricky had filmed a dead bird in the grass because, as he explained to an incredulous Angela, he thought it was beautiful, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the most beautiful thing Ricky had filmed was a plastic bag swirling in the wind.
Although the beauty of the bag itself may be arguable, when coupled with Ricky’s reflective narration the scene achieves an almost transcendent quality. As we saw with the roses and pool of blood, a similar pairing occurs with Ricky’s voice and the image of the swirling bag. This suggests that beauty is never about appearance alone but about one’s perspective, one’s story, which, like Carolyn’s roses, needs to be cultivated and nurtured. More than anything else, the bag scene suggests that any definition of beauty that does not account for the full range of human experience is contrary to reality and, by extension, to personal fulfillment.
One of the consequences to “living the image” and, in the words of Buddy Kane, “projecting an image of success at all times” is that it blinds us to reality as well as to the truth of our own and others’ humanity. Take, for instance, the scene at school when Ricky approaches and introduces himself to Jane. After a brief exchange regarding the night before, when Ricky was videoing Jane outside her home, she says she “doesn’t need some psycho obsessing over her.” Ricky then looks Jane in the eye with his steely, blue-eyed gaze of his and tells the truth, which they both know: “I’m not obsessing. I’m just curious.”
Caught in her lie, Jane then averts her eyes. Her inability to hold Ricky’s gaze not only underscores the collision between her dishonest response (which was surely informed by Angela’s presence) and Ricky’s genuine interest in her (by this point in the film we know she appreciates Ricky’s interest in her), but also the collision between inauthenticity and truth. “He’s so . . . confident,” Jane says as Ricky walks away. “That can’t be real.” Her comment implies that if we live the image long enough, we forfeit our ability to recognize and become suspicious of truth beyond appearance (including Ricky’s “bible salesman attire”), a possibility that is best captured by an incredulous Angela who, in response to Jane’s comment, says: “I don’t believe him; he didn’t, like, look at me once.” For Angela, the only measure of beauty is appearance, not because other measures don’t matter but because they simply do not exist.
Insofar as Angela places a premium on physical appearance and attractiveness (“If men look at me and want to fuck me, it means I have a shot [at modeling]”), she clearly embodies and is a product of America’s prohibition against, and struggle with finding, authenticity and inner beauty in a world that seems determined to deny theses aspects of our lives and thus the life behind things. Like all good art, then, American Beauty confronts viewers with some important and unsettling questions. Whether we recognize that or not is a question for which the film offers a characteristically conflicting answer: “You have no idea what I am talking about, I’m sure,” Lester says. “But don’t worry. You will someday.”
Work Cited
Ross, James Clark. “The Philosophy of American Beauty.” The Human Front. March 3, 2020.
- As we saw earlier in the film, when Jane notices Ricky standing in the dark filming her, he turns on the light so she can see him and thus rebuts any perception she/we may have of him as a mere voyeur or stalker. Notwithstanding the “gigs” Ricky does “as a cover” so that his father “interferes less in [his] life,” Ricky neither shuns nor hides from life or from death, no matter what form they take, but rather he views everything as an opportunity to acknowledge and engage all the beauty in the world. [↩]
