Explanation: American Beauty
American Beauty is, as you might expect from the title, a beautiful film, full of beautiful imagery, the most prominent of which is the image of a paper bag blowing around in the wind. That this should be the most memorable of the film’s images is unsurprising, as it was just such a discarded bag blowing around the plaza of the World Trade Center that was that inspired writer Alan Ball to create the script for the film.
In a way, the story of American Beauty is just a vehicle for the imagery as if Alan Ball took that one image, of a bag blowing in the wind, and just went with it, building this entire story around it. Doing this congruously, in anything other than an abstract art-film, is not easy. Often, as a writer, I’ll see something, some little event or some interesting object, and think “that’s a nice image”, and want to use it. But it’s so easy to force such an image into a story to the point where it over-shadows the rest of the narrative. Even when I can work such images into stories, they are only short ones. The writer of American Beauty is therefore to be commended for what he achieved with this film.
So what is the deal with a paper bag blowing around in the wind? It’s certainly not the only of the myriad images in American Beauty, but it is the strongest. The build-up to it lasts longer than for any of the other images in plot-points in the story, and so much importance is placed on it be the character of Ricky Fitz that it could very easily have failed, been dismissed as cheesy or over-romantic. The bag image succeeds though; it’s so unexpected and off-the-wall that when Ricky says “do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?” and starts talking about how “this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes,” we believe him, and we empathise with Jane as she has her eyes opened to this new meaning of ‘beauty’.
This is the sort of idiosyncrasy that is often found in Indie films, but rarely portrayed as well as in American Beauty. And this isn’t a unique instance within the film, there is the more organic imagery, such as Colonel Fitz soaked in the rain after finally admitting who he is to himself, or the recurring imagery of the roses. There is also the beautiful black-and-white shots at the end where the Lester as narrator looks back on his life and describes “yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined my street” and “my grandmother’s hands and the way her skin seemed like paper.” Beautiful as these are, however, I find them the most incongruous of the images in the film. Before this part, right at the end, there is no reference to Lester’s childhood, except that midway through the film he buys a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, his dream car, which we are told in the images at the end he first wanted when he saw his cousin’s brand new one as a child.
The reason that these images stick out or me as unfitting however is most likely because the rest of the film is so well written, and not just in terms of dialogue, which is not only believable throughout but, at times, incredibly funny. This film really excels in the focus of its plot-lines and its dedication to its themes. The stories of all the characters are interlinked in a very natural seeming way, and the film never shies away from exploring the effects of one character’s actions on another’s story. And the tag-line, ‘look closer’, is perfectly apt, because that is what the viewer, and the characters, are encouraged to do right throughout the film. Although it seems like a fairly straightforward representation of life in suburban America, there is a lot more than first meets the eye to every one of the characters, the truth about which is revealed that or near the end, not in an M. Night Shyamalan twist, but in a subtle realisation that you suddenly understand the film has been building up to throughout.
Perhaps what I find most attractive about American Beauty is that it follows in the same vein as that Modernist literature I like so much in that it seeks to show the beauty within every day life, using realistic characters and, if not exactly mundane, entirely plausible events. Yes, it deviates from the everyday with a few flights of whimsy and Lester Burnham, though not in any way an action hero, is not a typical Modernist hero either. Still, as a contemporary and thoughtful Modernist piece, no film I’ve seen comes closer than American Beauty.
Tags: Alan Ball, American Beauty, Beautiful, Beauty, Contemporary, Lolita, M. Night Shyamalan, Modernism
