American Beauty Redux

 Watching “American Beauty” all those years ago had enough of an impact on me that I’m still thinking about what it all meant, all these years later. Because it informed my thinking about what it meant to live a good life. 

“American Beauty” cannot be understood outside of the context, “what is the good life?” Everything in the movie is related to this question. Kevin Spacey is the middle aged geezer who feels the walls closing in on him, and feeling that his life is increasingly dull and meaningless. 

Annette Benning is the careerist wife, who is a great careerist and a go-getter, and is disappointed at her husband for allowing his career to stall. 

The younger generation – Thora Birch as the daughter, Mena Suvari as the Lolita character, Wes Bentley as the boy who develops a relationship with Thora Birch – have less developed character arcs, but they are actively negotiating and discovering their place in this world. 

One of my favourite aspects of this film – I watched it during late adolescence. Which means that I was almost 23 years old and not yet fully grown up. Some of my favourite literature has to do with people who are growing and changing. The plays I wrote for school all involved people who were facing growing pains. 

There is also the image of the rose, where there are layers and layers of petals. This is also a puzzle of a movie, whereby everything is not what it initially is, or what it initially seems to be. People either undergo change, or they are revealed to be somewhat different from your initial impression of them. 

But it was pretty crazy, looking back, that that movie was one of the most acclaimed movies of the year. I remember conversing with a college classmate about that movie, and she was a more mature person, with a more grown-up mindset. She wasn’t that impressed by it. There are a few things about that movie: first, it’s sensational, in that it delivers the element of surprise. This makes a great impact on first viewing. But in retrospect, when the element of surprise is lost, then it gets knocked down a few pegs. 

1999 was a great year for movies. It was a vintage year, one of the last vintage years. 2 years later, 9/11 would change the mood of the US, and it would be a more militaristic country. 1999 was one of the last years for Gen X to be dominating the popular culture. After that, movies would be more like marines training (how Jason Bourne movies influenced the James Bond reboot, for example). The Marvel Cinematic Universe would start to dominate. Christopher Nolan would make movies super serious and super earnest, without the sense of fun of the 90s movies. Being super preachy and super didactic would no longer be considered a vice in movie making. 

“American Beauty” asked “what is the good life”. And one of the reasons why “American Beauty” has undergone an evaluation downwards is the way they answered this question. There is the adult version of the answer: a good life is based on traditional values, being an upstanding member of your community, being successful in your career, being a pillar that other people can lean on. There is the juvenile / adolescent version of the answer, which is that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. That somehow, in spite of the wanton irresponsibility that is exhibited by Lester Burnham throughout this movie, he finds some kind of spiritual redemption. He quits his job, and god knows how he’s going to continue making a living. He spends the paycheck on buying the car of his dreams. He pumps iron and makes his mind and body young again. Perving over a girl who’s the same age as his daughter becomes a rejuvenation process. Masturbating over her at night somehow isn’t considered as committing adultery or rape in his own mind. Throwing tantrums at his family to express his dissatisfaction with his own life is a necessary stage to help others confront the fact that he’s in a rut. But it is hardly the model of responsibility. 

Quite obviously, “American Beauty” comes to the conclusion that the juvenile version of the good life rules OK, even though it is somewhat leavened by one aspect of the adult good life: Lester Burnham somehow gains some kind of spiritual enlightenment, and manages to lead the youngsters a little closer to what he has discovered. It is a questionable premise, in a certain way. However it can be argued that this process is a form of self-care, and you have to dig deep within yourself to find that spiritual side, to remind yourself about the beauty of everything. Still, this movie stopped short of showing how Lester Burnham was going to balance the juvenile side of the good life (which is amply represented in the movie) with the adult side of the good life (which the movie portrayed as so abhorrent – at least it was a jail that he had to break out of.) 

Next few paragraphs is a comment that I left on somebody's blog post: 

This is a film that's very rich in ideas, but with a lot of such films, it's quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. When it first came out, it was striking in its originality. Over the years, its originality and bravery has faded somewhat, which is why there is a downward appraisal.

So you can say this is a film about a midlife crisis, and the lolita narrative is definitely one of the striking parts of the plot. But it misses the bigger picture: Angela is on the posters because sex sells. But she's not the main character. In fact, she's by far the least developed character, which serves the real purpose. The only character development you see in her is when she and Lester are about to make out, and she suddenly admits that she's a virgin. It's meant to be jarring - oh my god, that's what she really is! No, a big clue in who she is is in her name: she's an angel, and she's the catalyst for the spiritual journey that Lester Burnham undergoes over the course of the movie. The fact that he was on the verge of consensual sex and didn't even think about seeing it through - I think it speaks volumes about what Angela was really all about.

The main narrative arc of this movie is the spiritual journey. Lester starts off being a walking dead man, but slowly, and bit by bit, he comes back to life, through being defiant towards the dead end life that held him in, through putting himself first some of the time, through channeling his lust towards Angela into rediscovering the more awesome aspects of his own youth.

And the secondary part of the film is that it poses the question, "what is the good life". This is typical of the pre-millennial films, which is why 1999 was so good: the new millennium was coming, and it was pushing quite a few filmmakers to get existential: there was “The Matrix,” “Being John Malkovich,” and "The Fight Club".

"American Beauty" answers the question in the most hippie manner possible. It's not very judgemental about Lester, but very judgemental about what it did not consider to be the good life. Having a steady job. Living in a nice suburban house. Tending to its beautiful garden. Having a great career as a real estate agent. Fine dining while listening to classical music. Listening to your wife. Being a dutiful soldier who is at the same time a repressed homosexual.

These were considered to be the good life: working out. Having a young person's mindset, and through working out, having a young person's body. Fapping away to chicks who are too young for you. Buying fancy cars. Working in jobs with low responsibility (like manning a fast food counter). Throwing asparagus at a fancy dinner. Introducing your daughter's boyfriend to pot.

Looking at the ledger, it's easy to classify what it considers to be the good life as "juvenile / adolescent", and what it does not consider to be the good life as "adulting". The movie is not entirely wrong, but it is too simplistic to do this. A lot of people who watched this movie in their youth and loved the juvenile message, would have grown into adults and have embraced the more adult aspects of their lives and start to recoil from the message of this film.

Of course, you have to end this film, and ending it with Lester Burnham dead is not necessarily a bad way to go. But it begs the question, what if he had to carry on living, how was he going to deal with the consequences of this long bout of irresponsible behaviour?

And it goes back to my own life. I’m not going to reject totally the message of “American Beauty”. But I know that I have to balance the juvenile idea of the good life with the more adult side of things. I had basically turned away from being an adult. I thought it would be temporary. But I’ve come to realise that you have to live both versions of the good life. 

I’ve come full circle. I’ve returned to the place I used to work for. I still don’t know why I left for a few years – probably 10 years – to live in “Mexico”. I don’t regret it because for me to have spent those 10 years working for the factory, that would have worn me down. Going somewhere else is refreshing, coming back is refreshing. But then I would have grown and would have to be more grownup. 

Seeing all those people after so many years will trigger some thoughts about what it means to be growing old. I’ve thought about what it means to be living a good life as an older adult. Do people get less happy? Do people indulge themselves less? Sometimes I look at one or two of the best years of my life, and those were years when I was thrust into something new, where a bright new future beckoned, where I found abilities that I never knew that I had before. But I have to make peace with the fact that past a certain age, I am no longer a growing person. And a non-growing person is either going to be consolidating what he already has, or he’s going downhill. 

People my age are no longer juveniles delighting in making new discoveries about the world. Or maybe they are, because they are negotiating new challenges and realities that are somewhat different from when they were young. But in many ways, I have not changed my circumstances by much since I was younger. The themes are the same. I will be working in tech. I will be a music lover. I will be managing my ADHD. 

I have a mind that loves change, and loves novelty. In a way, that’s good because learning new things is good for growing and becoming a more knowledgeable and intelligent person. It will be good for innovation, because I can sometimes see things that others cannot. But it is not good because older people tend to rely on old and accumulated wisdom, and a novelty seeking mind does not excel at retaining this wisdom. 

People my age are managers. We will be focusing on solving real life problems. I remember making a breakthrough, to become the person who could see things from a higher level and a higher perspective. That was nice and exciting. But after this, it means that you will be saddled with responsibilities. Going to school was fun because learning was fun. But you’re no longer learning because learning is fun: you have responsibilities and duties to solve real world problems. After a while, the joy of no longer being stupid will fade away, and what will replace it? 

When I first watched "America Beauty", what struck me was that it was very forgiving towards the "juvenile" mentality. But when I grew older, I realised that it was not sustainable. Now I'm more thinking: "it's alright, feed your inner child, and don't starve it. But don't forget that you have to be more like an adult."

So middle aged life becomes a little more complex: how do I balance the juvenile version of the good life with the adult version of it?