2. As a Nation in Translation

Like all stereotypes, the ones in American Beauty emit dialogue aimed less at establishing characterization than caricature. Sometimes, though, it's not clear if the actors themselves know which of the two they're going for. Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening, both up for Best Acting Oscars, for example, seem to have the mutant power of picking the exactly wrong expression at the exactly right time. Any of their own attempts to aim for 'characterization' fail miserably because their dialogue seems written purely to evoke a generalized simulation of feeling rather than  feeling itself. Let's say, for example, that you're trying to depict a character as unhappy with their life. Let's say you want to hint that he is spiritually dead. You would not probably write, as Beauty-writer Alan Ball does in just the first few pages of the script (selected at random), "My name is Lester Burnham...In... a year, I'll be dead...In a way, I'm dead already." What's the point of telling a story if you're going to state everything with the delicacy of a local news anchor groping for a segue? Why not have all the characters wear signs explicitly detailing their name, character type, favorite color, hobbies, and turn-ons? Let me say in advance: American Beauty is not satire--it's just bad writing. At best, most lines aspire to the status of cliché--things that everyone says too much (Colonel Fitts: "This country is going straight to hell."). And at worst, Beauty's characters fail the first test of dialogue by saying things that no one would ever say (Ricky: "When you see something like that, it's like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you're careful, you can look right back." Jane: "And what do you see?" Ricky: "Beauty."). American Beauty has the arduous task of translating the American vernacular through the mouths of American stereotypes. And it sucks. 

3. As Cliché as art

In a way, American Beauty is like the anti-Being John Malkovich. While Malkovich rears its essentially original premise, only to dispatch it the same way it would any comedy this side of Naked Gun, Beauty toils to wring something original and nuanced out of its collection of clichés. But, like incorrect grammar and driving nails into your forehead, some things just don't work, regardless of context. By trying to turn stereotypes into archetypes, American Beauty succeeds only at becoming a tired catalogue of American daydreams, an ideal social artifact of late Twentieth Century Americana.

4. As the Sweet Sixteen of Venus

From the same pop-cultural family as Britney Spears, and the rest of American youth pop culture, American Beauty seems determined to bring out the pedophile in all of us. The movie's main icon--a teenage navel sans the redundant clothes--presents a 'nubile young body,' as Beauty's shooting script creatively calls it, without all the cumbersome details, like a face, a personal identity, or any identifying characteristics--just pure 'nubile young body"-ness. The movie posters intimate that navel's owner is the title character, and the connection is appropriate. Also appearing in American Pie as virgin to her virgin-whore in American Beauty, actress Mena Suvari seems not just any  teen sex object but our teen sex object. A teen sex object for America!

5. As Your Inner Goth Child

American Beauty is a movie about teenagers--regardless of the characters' respective ages. For one thing, it tries to approximate teen behavior by having every young actor precariously hop back and forth from self-absorbed vulnerable insecurity to, well, self-absorbed, haughty insecurity. But this nuanced immaturity isn't just the property of the younger characters but of the film itself: all of the characters act this way, responding to a yearning for youth that Kevin Spacey's Lester Burnham, for example, can only answer by acting like a complete and utter jackass. Eager to reappropriate the signs of his childhood, Lester starts acting just like the kind of barely post-pubescent, acne-textured creature who would be named Lester. It's the avoidance of delicate characterization that makes American Beauty perhaps the most successful film ever to mine teen angst fiction for its junior high oriented tropes, like having the blond cheeleader open her blouse as the plot's climax, the pubescent romanticism of 'let's runaway to New York' with no education but ample drug hook-ups, and the strategic use of plot construction to make every character completely unlikeable.

6. As Inanimate Animation

In the first thirty minutes of Princess Mononoke, Japan's highest grossing domestic film, the main character catapults an arrow at an enemy. The arrow beheads him, nailing his scalp to a tree. In sharp contrast to Disney's attempt to make all narratives suitable for bed-wetters, Mononoke's arrow and its potent violence strikes us, American Little Mermaid-viewers, as much as it does the character onscreen. This last year in movies, many people have noted, is a year of cartoons. But, the word 'cartoon' has long been used as a derogatory adjective, an indicator of characters that are two-dimensional in both emotional and visual depth. With The Iron Giant, Toy Story 2, South Park, and Princess Mononoke, the new cartoons are interestingly non-cartoonish, and surprisingly adult. The same blurring of genre, however, is happening on the other side of the film spectrum. Rather than being an isolated revolution in animation, our late Twentieth Century films are like a continuum that loops together, where the children's films become more adult, and the adult films more childish. The Matrix, for example, bares such an uncanny resemblance to a comic book, from the superhero pacing to the superhero code names, that DC Comics writer Grant Morrison nearly sued the filmmakers for plagiarism. Comic book giant Will Eisner advised comic artists to make purposely stereotypical characters that could be instantly identified and easily drawn. And, like The Matrix, a number of modern movies act seem to have taken this as their philosophy--preferring plot, novelty, and stereotypes, over characterization: Being John Malkovich, every special effects vehicle since Star Wars, and, of course, American Beauty. 

7. As a New Refutation of Death

(AKA "The Section Where We Reveal The Ending to Every Movie Out This Year")

By having Lester Burnham narrate American Beauty while dead, the film not only swipes its main gimmick from Sunset Boulevard, but commits itself to a league of movies about death--or, rather, the lack thereof. From the ruminations on action figure mortality in Toy Story 2 to the promise of immortality in Being John Malkovich to the loss of self of Fight Club, a number of films this year have main characters who die--or rather, die and then don't die. While Princess Mononoke features surprisingly violent cartoon massacres and explores nature's spiritual ability to restore or deny life, another animated film, The Iron Giant, conveyed rebirth more mechanically, allowing its title character to literally reassemble himself. Perhaps this resurrection is a sign that even a dominant medium like film can descend to superhero conventions--after all, it's hard to have any sympathy for Magneto, when's he's just been skinned and basted for the fifth time. Or maybe it's a sign of a modern cynicism and the clichéd concept of 'ironic distance,' which forces us to see the characters as mere fictional devices that can be killed, brought back to life, and killed again, rather than just empathized with. Either way, it makes one respect a movie like Boys Don't Cry, whose ending, a permanent bullet lodged inside a few of the main characters, left me unable to talk for half an hour after the theater let out.

8. As Mixed Media

In American Beauty, Comedy and Tragedy go together as well as orange juice and formaldehyde.

9. As the Triumph of TV

Near the end of American Beauty, Lester Burnham calls his marriage "a commercial." The same could be said of the movie as a whole. Attempting to distend sitcom characters into expressions of America, Beauty feels like some modern art gag where parodies of the cast from Full House have been kidnapped and dropped into an Ang Lee film. Near the end of the script, Beauty says "we can hear a sitcom's CANNED LAUGHTER." But we can hear it silently throughout the entire movie.

10. As a Brawl of the Mouth

Confucius would not be pleased. "There are few who have developed themselves filially and fraternally who enjoy offending their superiors," the sage writes in Analects 1:2, quoting Yu Tzu. "Those who do not enjoy offending superiors are never troublemakers... Are not filial piety and obedience to elders fundamental to the enactment of jen (benevolence)?" A movie obviously about a 'dysfunctional family,' or, as the hip Confucian slang would have it, the loss of filial piety, American Beauty would disagree. What's remarkable about American Beauty is how overt the dysfunction is, how the dialogue never attempts to be delicate, and swerves always to the most unrestrained expression of every emotion ("If you don't watch out, you're going to turn into a real bitch, just like your mother"). Is American Beauty representatively "American" because of its brusqueness, its lack of deference? Well maybe--maybe that's why Arts editor and hip-hop-head Michael Rochmes has called macho anti-suburban slug-fest Fight Club "American Beauty with fighting." Of the two, though, American Beauty is the more violent.

11. As Secular New Age Movement

The original screenplay of American Beauty was markedly different--Carolyn got together with the Real Estate King, Ricky Fitts was sentenced for first degree murder, and Angela Hayes got a spot on a Melrose Place TV clone. In other words, the ambiguity created by the final movie--like who become responsible for Lester's murder or if Ricky and Jane ran away after all--gave all of the characters a sense of redemption, an possible escape from the stereotypes in which they'd been encased.

In perhaps the best indicator of popular opinion, Amazon's ratings board, American Beauty received a perfect score--half a star higher than the Old Testament. One poster scribbled enthusiastically: American Beauty's "realization is perhaps the most powerful one that can happen to a person. The revelation is that everywhere -- all around us every minute of every day -- there is beauty... American beauty is about finding those moments in life that might otherwise go unnoticed and living them. Once we realize just how much beauty there is in the world we can realize that we too are beautiful." American Beauty is that rare movie--one that tries to have a message. Unfortunately, it's the Celestine Prophecy's message, and Beauty ends up as a New Age pamphlet turned film. Lester, the allegorical American dad, ends the movie aphoristically, noting how much 'beauty' there is in the world. Taking on the tone of a half-rate movie angel, as he 'soars out of sight' (as the screenplay, which originally had him visibly flying, puts it), Lester says "You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure... but don't worry... You will someday." Lester's messianic ravings try to make the film a wannabe revelation, one that can convince American audiences that a floating piece of trash, the perennial symbol for ugliness, can be beautiful. It sounds like a great argument--except for that it makes no sense at all.

12. As an Homage to Buddha

This has been a great year for Buddhism in film. Gone are the literal representations of Asia, like Brad Pitt and Richard Gere, in Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. Instead--we've got, well, Brad Pitt and Ed Norton, in Fight Club, a film that manages to be violent and oddly Buddhist at the same time. It's all about the loss of self, on a number of levels. And, although many people have said The Matrix plagiarized from Alien, Hong Kong kung-fu flicks, and their comic books, the oxymoronic philosophical Keanu Reeves movie stole the most from Descartes and Buddhism. What better symbol for American culture or Hollywood than a movie about how all is illusion? How much more Buddhist could it be? As for old American Beauty, once the initial stereotypes have been lifted, the illusion removed, then the audience gains access to the zen-like koan (beautiful ugliness) and sees the interconnections of all things, from a floating plastic bag to a dying man. 

13. With your eyes closed.

A NOTE OF EXPLANATION: The form of this essay mimics Wallace Stevens's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Clearly, I haven't done that much with this format, but apparently some don't think so.

Elsewhere on Kenchen.org:

Pick-a-Flick: The Movie Recommendation Machine Reviews of Dancer in the Dark, Centre Stage, Unbreakable, Top Ten, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima Mon Amour.

The New Hipocracy Are reviews of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon racist?

Man of Letters An interview with Andy Crewdson, the creator of “Lines & Splines,” the hippest blog on typography.|||