From Schizo Cinema: The Occult Text in Popular Movies

by Jake Horsley

American Beauty is a mutation of the yuppie-deconstruction comedy (After Hours, Something Wild, etc.). It gives us, one more time, the tired, old shtick of the family man reaching a point of desperation, of contempt for his life, and seeking any means to loosen up and rediscover his spirit. These means center (predictably enough) on sex and drugs, and even a little rock ’n’ roll. On the one hand Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) rediscovers pot, and this helps him to loosen up (even if, one might reasonably assume, it also exacerbates his growing sense of dissociation). On the other hand, Lester projects all his existential yearning for new beginnings, for rejuvenation (as so many middle-aged men are wont to) onto a young college girl, Angela, the “American beauty” of the title, a vapid and stuck-up friend of Lester’s teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch). Lester becomes obsessed with the idea of sleeping with Angela and, as a result (through this perhaps unhealthy but quite natural fixation), he finds a new lust for life. Of course, such lust can only lead to disaster, according to Victorian Hollywood morality at least, and so it does (though not directly).

How often does the long-repressed id get awoken by drugs or an illicit stirring of the libido, only to derange the ego with the unexpected intensity of its desire? Lester is unable to stand the drab, mundane repetition and the repressed rage and hostility of his marriage; but when he begins to break out of the artificial restraints upon which his life has been founded, he finds his freedom more than he can handle. More precisely, it sets off a series of events which eventually backfire on Lester and lead to catastrophe. American Beauty is a cliché from beginning to end and it behooves me to analyze it too much. It is a set of movie-contrived situations and characters, all taken from other movies, all stuff we’ve see before. The uptight husband smoking pot and quitting his job. The cold-hearted, superficial, money-grubbing wife. The alienated teenage daughter; the weirdo neighbor; the American psycho Marine dad. Bad movies that get hailed as great can make one despair, or else rail impotently at the steady lowering of standards. And indeed one rails in vain, so may as well sit back and enjoy the shallow spectacle for what it is.

Taste is a mysterious thing. There is nothing wrong with the acting or the filmmaking here; it is at the basic level of conception and writing that the dishonesty and cheapness of the movie lies. If Lester had fucked the teenage American beauty, you can be sure that Mendes’ film would never have won the Oscar. And yet the incredible success of the movie, and its reception by both audiences and critics as a masterpiece, is actually its primary point of interest. Obviously, American Beauty spoke to something in the collective, a feeling of frustration at the lurking hypocrisy of our lives, and at the growing pressure inside our skulls. It plays upon a deep sense of something being amiss, of something getting ready to blow. But the film plays up to this sense of uncertainty without really addressing it; it exposes its characters without ever making us feel any real affinity for them. As a social “satire” (which is what American Beauty can most adequately aspire to; as realism it’s a joke), it has its cake and eats it. It can debase and expose “society” (the family), on the one hand, while more covertly flattering and patronizing its audience on the other, by allowing them to distance themselves from the satire (by not including them in it). Hence audiences can feel that they are “seeing things as they really are,” while at the same time they can enjoy the smug assurance of being different, of being superior. I don’t suppose Sam Mend es, the director, or Alan Ball, the writer, consciously calculated their effects along such lines; but this is how they work, just the same.

American Beauty is entertaining and well done, but it’s offensive in its basic hypocrisy. It is so self-satisfied with its “deeper” (satirical) meanings that it has no qualms about backing away from the more provocative implications of its storyline. Not only is it smug, it’s spineless, about the most nauseating combination I can think off. When Lester has his attack of conscience in the literal nick of time, this is simply old Hollywood morality interfering with—and wholly invalidating—the previously hip satire we’ve been (half) enjoying until now. At that point I realized that the movie was nothing but a fraud. But whatever its minor merits and major flaws, American Beauty is a kind of watermark for the domestic psychosis (schizo society) movie at the turn of the millennium. It may be humbug, but it’s historical humbug.

If American Beauty is a masterpiece, however, then we may be in more trouble than we think. The message of the movie is that you have to be dead to “grok” what’s going on—unless you are Sam Mendes or Alan Ball, of course, who have a hotline to the truth (a truth which the rest of us are lacking). And the implicit message is, thank God for movies like American Beauty, otherwise we would truly be damned! The arrogance of the filmmakers in presenting this mildly amusing farce as illuminated wisdom, as a social critique on “the human condition” (to quote Spielberg, whose DreamWorks funded the movie), is truly mind-boggling. When Mendes talks about underestimating audiences, who prove their good taste by embracing and understanding his movie—and how it “warms the heart”—am I the only one who feels my stomach turning? If anything, the pious superiority of American Beauty is even more offensive than the mincing superciliousness of Philadelphia or the moronic moralizing of Field of Dreams.

Where the movie halfway salvages itself is in its semblance of a genuinely “mystic” vision. All of the scenes with Jane and Rickey (Wes Bentley), the two freaks, are genuinely touching, and the central scene of the dancing plastic bag is quite impeccable. But how Alan Ball manages to concile his occasional magical insights with his half-baked caricatures and contrived set-ups is a mystery. American Beauty is half a classic and half a travesty. There is beauty in the film, but then, as the movie also makes clear, there’s beauty everywhere. There are moments that are effective, haunting, mysterious, and poignant, moments that stay with us where other, lesser movies fade into nothingness before the credits have rolled. But all this is undermined by the explicitness of the movie’s “message,” its insufferable preachiness. American Beauty is an exercise in self-deception, and its success is an illustration of the audience’s capacity and willingness for complicity in the deception. Like the vapid teen queen Angela, we can imagine nothing worse than being ordinary at the same time as being repulsed and threatened by anything freakish. For most of its length, American Beauty is a terribly ordinary movie; besides the paper bag moment, there are no genuine insights here, either into “the human condition,” or the nature of existence, or anything else. There are just cheap jokes and platitudes. But it’s all done up so skillfully and piously that people are willing, anxious, to buy into the humbug. Since its message is that beauty rules and that even our “stupid little lives” will make sense to us some day (when we are dead), obviously audiences have a vested interest in embracing this message, and in embracing the movie. I am not suggesting that the message itself is phony, mind, but only the means by which it is sold to us.

American Beauty isn’t really selling beauty, much less truth; it’s only selling itself, and this is implicit in the self-congratulating arrogance of the filmmakers when their (dead) Lester tells us at the end, “You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry. You will some day.” People respond to this. It’s Big Daddy patting them on the head and telling them everything will be all right. They can go back to their stupid little lives and feel vindicated that someone understands their frustrations and disappointments—they even made a movie about them!But American Beauty is a defeatist vision. It’s not about acceptance or gratitude, much less illumination; it’s about resignation. Lester’s little revolt allows him a last look around his life before death comes to claim him (it’s inarguable that it was his awakening that brought his death about, if one follows the chain of events carefully enough). Perhaps within the contrived framework of the movie, Lester changes enormously in a few days or weeks; he even develops a conscience (out of nowhere), makes his peace with himself, and is thus ready to die. But Lester doesn’t really change, he just loosens a few inhibitions and fulfills a few fantasies, and lo and behold! Enlightenment, he had it all along! Though its best scenes are with the “freaks,” American Beauty is really a celebration of ordinariness which at the same time looks down on its (oh-so-ordinary) audience. And if people are telling themselves that the movie is about their lives, that it somehow taps into their unconscious feelings, doubts, and despair, who can argue with that? I can only say that (besides that plastic bag) it has all of zero bearing on mine.

Having the movie narrated by a dead man is a neat, quasi-mystical gimmick; it lets us know that the rules are different, that the movie intends to play with the conventions, and even with our perceptions, and, just maybe, offer some special insight into the petty doldrums of our lives. It sets itself up for great things, and of course it delivers its “wisdom” accordingly, on cue. The meaning of all we have seen is that all is beauty and we just have to “relax and not try to hold on to it,” let it “flow through” us, “like rain.” A pretty message; not profound, but pretty. Poignant and persuasive. But has the movie really shown us anything to support this wisdom? You can paint a picture and call it “Enlightenment,” but if the picture doesn’t do it, then the title never will, no matter how boldly embossed it is. American Beauty shows us a tacky, amusing, sensationalistic freak show and tells us that this is our lives. Then it tells us that it’s OK, we’ll be dead soon, and it will all make sense. And then it tells us to be grateful for this “enlightenment.” And damned if we don’t fall down on our knees in awe and gratitude at the altar of kitsch, and call it art. This is calculation posing as vision, and I for one don’t buy it. The ego can dress up all it wants as Id, but it will never be anything but a pretender. It’s bogus and shameless, and yet sufficiently charismatic that we fall for it. Never underestimate the power of denial.

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