American Beauty is more than a movie

In the previous post about American Beauty, I just told one side of the movie when it is an ugly picture of the American dream. After that post, I watched the movie again and realized this movie has more things to talk about. And yes, it is more than just a movie. It is the reality that we are living in right now. I would like to focus on the rose petal, which is the main symbol in American beauty that contains many different meanings. Although released nearly two decades ago, indeed, the message conveyed by the film still retains its pristine value of the American Dream by which, exposing its dark side. American Beauty also owns one of the most beautiful posters in the history of Hollywood cinema: Simple content with a background of a young woman's soft belly dotted with a bright red rose, just like harmony blends with the orange-yellow color of the skin, creating a provocative accent. It is a sensual beauty. The poster's focal point is the tiny, pretty navel that forms a perfect question mark with the hand holding a red rose, and right above it are the words 'Look closer' printed in small, deliberately small letters. In a sense, the rose is about the fire of lust, about passion for love. But throughout the film, each time red roses appear, they bring a different meaning which is not beautiful as it looks. It’s ugly in many ways, making viewers always have to “look closer.”

There is a truth about magnificent roses that few people know. This flower often rots at the roots and branches. It's like the Burnham family. At first glance, this family is the American dream that anyone wishes for: A successful couple, a stable job, living in a spacious house on the outskirts of the city with a lovely daughter. However, when people open the red door of that house to enter to see that behind that flashy exterior, everything is on the verge of collapse.

American Beauty revolves around the male protagonist Lester Burnham, a successful middle-aged man with a beautiful wife, house, children, and a good job. But Lester always felt like a perfect loser, a failure on all "fronts." At home, he was despised by his wife, Carolyn; hated by his daughter, Jane; no voice in the family; at work, being despised by the boss… “I am 42 years old; in less than a year, I will be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet, and in a way, I am dead already.”, Lester himself admitted. Themes about the characters feeling left out in life and relationships or life without purpose were heavily exploited in the 90s with movies like American Psycho, Office Space, Falling Down, Fight Club, American History X, and many more. They all have a common that characters are facing with their depression in life. Lester hates work and family life. Lester is struggling with an identity crisis, a concept used to refer to the estrangement of people in society when they do not know who they are, what they should pursue, where they belong, or when others do not accept the values they hold. Anyone can experience an identity crisis at any stage in their lives. People may apply various values to their characteristics and freely identify themselves based on some while excluding others. They can characterize themselves in ways they do not possess. On the outside, they still wear cheerful masks to hide the confusion inside their hearts. Lester tries to survive daily without a clear purpose, often wallowing in negative thoughts.

The death that Lester mentioned at the beginning of the movie is spiritual death. That death started from being lost, disoriented, and losing the purpose of life when everything seemed to have stabilized. That death crept deeper inside through the contempt of the wife and children, the contempt, suppression of the boss, and the boredom when watching the spouse become a slave of empty exhortations quoted from self-help books. Everything slowly went downhill. Lester felt that he no longer existed. Even with his wife and children, the awkward conversations, smiles, fake voices, and half-open eyes filled with boredom and dissatisfaction. To highlight the repression that Lester is experiencing in life, some scenes have been carefully calculated to place Lester's character in a 'cage within a frame' state. For example, Lester's reflection on the computer screen made columns and rows of figures seem to turn into iron bars imprisoning him.

Another extremely frustrating thing for Lester is that he always has to try to be happy every time he attends events with his wife, who always remembers Buddy Kane, her rival in the real estate battle, said. “In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.” Carolyn represents a part of society that puts success of themselves first. Carolyn is engrossed in petty materialistic values. She obsesses with the perfect image of life in which success is the key to everything. It is her American dream, and it is about instant success. The idea of transforming riches was practically at their feet, ready for receiving and enchanted the American imagination in a profound and long-lasting way. The allure of seemingly simple wealth drove Americans to move mountains in pursuit of this ideal. The majority of them failed. However, Carolyn is also living a fake life where all frustrations and pain are only really revealed when she pulls back the curtains of her room and repeatedly slaps herself. The rose is also associated with Carolyn, symbolizing a beautiful, flashy, meaningless appearance. Every day, Carolyn Carolyn diligently takes care of the rose beds in the garden, cutting them daily to decorate the house because she believes that the red color of the flowers is a symbol of the complete success she is striving for. But she forgot that when she cut the rose from its root, its beauty would soon fade away, like souls slowly rotting from stagnation in a beautiful, spacious house.

The two supporting characters of the film, Jane's friend, Angela, and Colonel Fitts, are also two roses worth mentioning. Angela was a typical blonde of the time. She is aware of her good looks, even somewhat addicted to the lustful gazes of the boys around her, even a man worthy of her father's age. As a slave of attention, and praise, it is understandable that Angela always wants to appear cool in the eyes of her friends, and that has led to the fact that despite being a virgin, Angela always brags about how sophisticated sex she is. Despite being called a “total prostitute” by her friends, she still seems to take pride in a misguided belief that it makes her extraordinary. She lived by compliments because only that made her feel confident in herself. The reason she plays with Jane is also taking advantage of Jane's flaws to feel good about herself. Furthermore, just one word of disparagement, how much confidence she had been trying to show the world for so long, suddenly seemed to crumble. As can be seen, Angela is also a rose. She has a flashy appearance but a soul, a shallow perception, and many insecurities in her heart.

Or to Colonel Fitts. At first, Fitts emerges as a true alpha male: patriarchal, authoritarian, harsh in parenting, and homophobic. He was willing to beat his son with a bloody head when he found out that his son was doing drugs or having a homosexual relationship, although it was just a misunderstanding. But the most shocking revelation in the film is when he kisses Lester and reveals that he is gay. The audience went from being surprised and confused to suddenly finding everything reasonable. In the book “The History of Sex in American Films” by Jody W. Pennington, he attributed the disgust that Fitts showed when he met the gay neighbor couple Jim - Jim is not “homophobic” but “anguished self-interrogation”. Or to put it simply, Colonel Fitts' other question was not a rhetorical question but a question in the truest sense (Pennington, 106). While he himself is always tormented about his sexuality, the other couple is comfortable living their true selves and that makes it impossible for him to relate. After all, he is also a rose, with a the solid masculine exterior of a longtime soldier is rotting inside because of guilt, torment, and suffering about his gender.

Lester and Carolyn reluctantly went to see their daughter Jane perform at school, unaware that their lives would be about to take a complete turn that night. It is interesting how when people lose their way, the most primitive instincts become a guide.

From the moment Lester saw Angela, he was utterly captivated. In him began surging carnal desires for the teenage girl, and then lustful thoughts about little Angela filled his mind. Instead of seeing a group of schoolgirls, including his daughter, dancing, his eyes were filled with images of Angela curling erotically, slowly opening her coat and starting from her taut breasts. The head overflowed with many thin rose petals. Rose petals continued to follow Lester's mind until that night when he continued to dream about Angela. The image of Angela lying naked in the middle of a large tank filled with roses is still considered one of the film's most beautiful and iconic scenes. In these scenes, the lighting is reduced to the maximum, giving the scene a blurry look. The movements in these scenes are also chopped into several shots, making them stretch and stretch as if there was no end. Thanks to those extremely careful calculations about editing, Lester's steamy fantasies were portrayed with so much emotion.

Listen to Angela confide in Jane that if Lester built up his chest and arms, Angela will sleep with him. Lester was determined to regain his muscular physique from his youth. Lester began to be optimistic. In the book “Emotional Mental Imagery Generation during Spontaneous Future Thinking: Relationship with Optimism and Negative Mood” by a group of researchers, they pointed out that although optimism is usually believed of as a dispositional trait that remains relatively stable over time, there is evidence that it can also be seen as a state construct that varies from one moment to the next and over the lifespan. That was the beginning of being young again: He smoked marijuana, bought a new car, sat in the car singing along to pop songs from the 60s, and quit his current job to work at a fast food restaurant because he wanted a job with as little responsibility as possible. The climax was when Lester shouted back at his wife and children by throwing the dish of asparagus into the wall. He let out all the things he had been holding back for so long and gained back his right to control. “I’m sick and tired of being treated like I don't exist. You two do whatever you want to do whenever you want to do it and I don't complain. All I want is the same courtesy--” It can be said that it was the passion for sex with Angela that partly revived Lester's barren soul, making him move from living without purpose, dragging from day to day, to living more actively and more optimistically. Interestingly, the names of these two characters are puns from the names of the two main characters of the movie “Lolita” (1962), a film also about a middle-aged man who suddenly falls in love with a teenage girl. Lester Burnham is from Humbert Learns and Angela Hayes is from Dolores Haze.

It is worth mentioning that the film does not try to pedophilia, but on the contrary, it advises people to stay away from it in a very subtle way through Lester's journey to find himself. On a rainy evening, his daughter Jane and his wife were both not at home, and by chance, Angela came over to play that day. It seems that all conditions are too favorable for Lester to realize the desire he has cherished for many months. He was overjoyed and immediately set about making a storm with his “lolita girl”. But the moment Angela confessed that she was still a virgin, that this was her first time, Lester suddenly stopped seeing Angela as a lover. Her virginity and vulnerability awakened Lester from a long coma. This extremely natural construction of the situation was praised by Professor Vincent Hausmann in his essay "Envisioning the (W)hole World "Behind Things": Denying Otherness in American Beauty" which portrays Lester's incestuous pursuit of Angela as a foolish but virtually essential step toward his resumption of fatherhood (Hausmann, 118) . Indeed, Lester suddenly remembered Jane and asked about her, this time very sincerely, full of care, not just a few forced words like at the beginning of the film. He picked up a family photo, taken when his family was still happy. Lester's face now showed a strange peace, a face completely different from the bored expression at the beginning of the film or the careless joy throughout the middle of the film. Ironically, while at the beginning of the film Carolyn is the one who scolds her husband harshly about his sexual passions, Carolyn ends up falling in love with her “like-minded” colleague Buddy Kane.

After the death of the soul, Lester died once again. It was a sudden physical death as soon as he found himself again. Too disgusted and ashamed of himself for revealing his true sexuality to Lester, Colonel Fitts returned to Lester's house, shooting him in the head with a gun while he was staring intently at his family's photograph. The camera went from behind Lester's head where suddenly, but very gently, an unidentified pistol appeared, past a vase of scarlet roses, slowly, slowly, then stopped at the white wall in front of Lester. The weight of the silence overwhelmed the viewer's breath. And then "Bang!". Gunshots rang out, and blood splattered on the white wall, tinting the whole area red, a red like the same color as the red roses. Death came so quickly that Lester didn't even have time to panic or grieve. That's why his face when he died still showed a strange serenity. It is truly the beauty of life. But ironically, that beauty was carved on the face of a corpse.

Lester's death reminds us of the character's opening line: “My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This... is my life. I'm forty-two years old. In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet” one year from now, I'll be dead. Of course, at the moment I don't know that yet.” The opening of this film is reminiscent of the classic movie “Sunset Boulevard” which opened with the narration of the dead protagonist. That makes viewers curious about the reason and perpetrator of the murder. Is it Jane's eccentric boyfriend Ricky, who at the beginning of the film mentions being able to help Jane kill his father? Or is it that Carolyn's wife who always obsessed with the idea of success and towards the end of the film, she becomes more and more resentful of her incompetent husband, especially after she is not only caught by her husband in the middle of the affair but also being left alone in the car in the rain for a very material reason? Will the humiliation plus the deadlock be the motivation for her to finish her husband? Or maybe it was Lester who would put an end to his boring life with no way out? Everyone is capable and motivated. But in the end, the one, who pulled the gun barrel, was Colonel Fitts after he was rejected by Lester. Nobody could expect a person who served the country to kill an innocent man. Probably, Colonel Fitts will torment himself in sin for the rest of his life. It is sad that the shot did not come from hate but it was from emotional repression. Between what the socially accepted and what Colonel Fitts belonged to, there is a deviation. American life always emphasizes freedom because it is a goal of the American dream. Regardless of how diverse the use of freedom, which includes both the freedom to commit and the choice not to commit, all concepts of freedom are based on a sense of agency, the idea that individuals have influence over the path of their lives. And yet, people like Colonel Fitts could not have the freedom to live with their true personalities. That is so unfair and it led to his action of him. And in front of society’s pressure, he had to wear a shield of strength, discipline, and strictness to keep his masculinity. In a precious moment when he could live with himself, he committed a crime.

It is a surprise that made us suddenly have some really good reflections on life: Death can come at any time, for unforeseen reasons. So don't let yourself become Lester, wasting so many days and then dying on the threshold of life. Live each day to the fullest as if it were your last. The pluralistic nature of freedom can be a source of frustration, but also a source of hope.

Like the roses in Carolyn's garden, which looked exactly like each other that had the color red, the story of the Burnham family, which Ricky calls “America's Weirdest Home”, is symbolic of the entire middle class in America. “American Beauty” is a satirical picture of the concept of beauty and pleasure of the middle class in America in the late twentieth century, a time when people did not know what their purpose in life was. the point that many even consider being the last page of history when territorial or ideological conflicts have become a thing of the past. This is the perfect time for one's mind to look in the mirror and wonder what the meaning of one's existence is. And many people, like Lester and Carolyn, have lost their way, mistakenly thinking that beauty and happiness lie in the affluence of material possessions.

Opposite the image of those roses is a very simple image: a plastic bag fluttering in the wind recorded by Ricky using a camera. Ricky has a habit of capturing all the little things of everyday life on camera as if he is afraid to lose the little things in life. The most beautiful video that Ricky has ever filmed and wants to share with his girlfriend Jane is the image of a balloon bag being blown by the wind and flying around in the air. An image that is so ordinary but makes Ricky realize many important things, that "there is a life behind those trivial things", and that “there is a lot of beauty in this world”. The image of the ball bag reappears again in one of the film's most emotional scenes when Ricky shows Jane a tape of "the most beautiful thing he's ever seen". The image of a plastic bag fluttering in the wind is like dancing, like a child begging others to play with it. That was the day Ricky realized there was life behind everything and realized how filled with beauty the world around him was. Ricky also revealed the reason for always holding the camera and filming everything, including a dead bird, saying: “...it helps me remember... I need to remember… Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it... and my heart is going to cave in.” That seemingly odd habit makes him, along with Jane, the only ones in the movie who understand the value of life. It's not a race for trivial material things. It's not even sexual passion or self-denial.

For those who are in the habit of summarizing the content and meaning of the film, "American Beauty" will be a challenge because even critics have many interpretations of the message that the film conveys. No one can define "American Beauty", so one can't be sure what "beauty" the film is aiming for - is it the meaning of life, is it secret desires, or is the meaningless existence that we sometimes feel in life…? A beautiful red rose has so many meanings in this movie. But it helps to emphasize both happy and funny, sad and gloomy; both beautiful, humane, ugly, and disgusting of every character. In this world, nothing is perfect, everything is flawed. We must learn to see and appreciate the beauty in imperfection. It's easy to call a red rose beautifully because it’s something everyone can see. But it takes an open heart, and a wise and unbiased mind to see the beauty in all the things of the world. The wise will see beauty both in the blooming rosebud and in the plastic bag blowing in the wind. American Beauty is both hideous and beautiful, has ironic humor, and is intense and tense in exposing the dark side of the American dream. The film has such beautiful scenes that viewers almost hold their breath as if a single strong breath is enough to ruin the perfectly aesthetic atmosphere on the screen. To live is to appreciate all the beauty, and every moment that life has given us. This is also the message that movies released in the same year (1999) such as Fight Club, Bringing Out the Dead, and Magnolia want to convey to a large part of the American audience: Live a life. Life is more meaningful!