American Beauty - what we have to say about this movie

This is what we have to say about the movie American Beauty. (You can find the script of the movie here.)

American Beauty „Images“

Having an image is a well-known topic in our society. People often show different sides of their characters in different situations. It makes a difference whether we are with our family, at school, at work, with our friends, with strangers, in public or alone. The movie “American Beauty” gives us a very good example for this. We chose three characters whose different images and behaviours we’d like to present you.
Our first character is Carolyn. From the outside she seems to be a happy and successful career woman. She always acts cheerfully and nicely when she’s in public. Carolyn is always dressed up. Her life seems perfect but we learn that this is all fake. Carolyn works as an estate-agent. She says about her job: “My business is selling an image and part of my job is to live that image”. This shows us how much Carolyn cares about appearances and how much she wants to show everyone how perfect her life is, although the opposite of that represents the way she’s really feeling. She has problems with her family, she is an insecure person who tries to act strong, she is unhappy and sometimes seems quite hysteric. In the film we see this in the scene where she fails to sell a house. She closes the curtains because she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s frustrated, has weaknesses and is insecure. We witness the moment when the facade crumbles. We see what she looks like on the inside. We see her in a moment of weakness, trying to calm down. But then she wipes off her tears, walks out of the room with a proud impression on her face as if nothing bad had happened. The facade is built up again. The cinemathographic language emphasizes this. The camera zooms in on Carolyn’s face while she cried desperately. Now she lets down her facade and we can see who she truly is. The spectator gains insight into her inmost and thus feels closer to her.
Our second person is Ricky’s father Frank. During the movie he comes off as a very authoritarian, severe and even brutal person. He believes in extreme discipline and beats Ricky when he makes a mistake or is insubordinate in any way. Frank appears to be quite homophobic. In one scene of the movie a gay couple comes to visit him because they’re his new neighbours. Afterwards we see him talking to Ricky in the car about these shameless “faggots”. Later in the movie he yells at Ricky and beats him because he thinks his son is gay as well. But in the end we find out that Frank himself is gay because he kisses Lester. So he just hated homosexuals so much because he was ashamed of being gay himself and he put that façade on so that no one would find out his secret. He also isn’t as strong as you might think at the beginning. From the moment Ricky leaves he’s almost constantly crying because he’s so disoriented and embarrassed. In the end he shoots Lester because he now found out his well-hidden secret and he’s probably scared that Lester could tell someone. He kills him to be able to keep up his image of a very “male” and disciplined person.
Angela Hayes is known as the popular girl who has a lot of self-confidence. She often tries to be the centre of attention by showing off how mature and desirable she is. During the movie you can often hear her say that she never wants to become ordinary. But it is clear that all of her actions and her emotions are not real. She wears a mask. All the time it’s just some kind of façade. In the movie you realise this only towards the end when Ricky tells her that he thinks that she isn’t special at all. In this scene she starts getting frustrated and yells at Ricky and Jane. After both are gone you can see her sitting on the stairs being depressed and crying. There’s no sign of the proud and self-regarding woman anymore.
The way this scene is shot emphasizes this. In this part of the movie she is being filmed from a distance. At first you can’t see her very well because she is a bit hidden behind the stair-rail. The director probably wanted her to seem very small, weak and insecure. This scene demonstrates how she’s really feeling. It makes us realise that not everything is what it seems to be. She really was wearing a mask to make sure that nobody finds out what she is truly thinking and how insecure she actually is.
Angela is a typical example of a teenager. Teenagers often struggle with inferiority complexes. Often students try to fake an image to get attention and become popular because this gives them the feeling of being accepted. This phenomenon is universal and you cannot only find it in America or in Basel. But there are also differences when it comes to having an image between what is shown in the movie and what we experience in Basel. Having an image is something that can be found all over the world. But the types of images change depending on their social and cultural environment. One example for this are neighbours. In “American Beauty” they are always overly friendly as seen when the gay couple goes over to Ricky’s family to hand over a welcome gift. In Basel no one would ever do that and people here aren’t always overly friendly to everyone at all times. People would rather show respect than excessive friendliness towards strangers. We think having an image is unavoidable in our society although this is sad. It’s also a shame because then you aren’t able to really get to know them which means that you miss a lot of great chances of making friends. (P.U., N.H., A.P.)

 

American Beauty -The aspect of beauty

When we first heard that we were going to have to discuss an aspect of American Beauty, we instantly thought about beauty. It`s in the name of the movie after all. There always have and always will be thousands of definitions of beauty and this movie is no different, each character has his or her own sense of beauty. The interesting thing is that these notions clash with one another and that they are so different for a group of people who interact with each other on a daily basis (more or less).
Let`s start with Lester, the main character. He`s sick of his boring, suburban, seemingly perfect life and finds beauty in the past, beauty in youth. That's probably why he choses to quit his job, smokes pot, starts to fantasise about the 16-year-old Angela (who sees herself as the perfect American beauty) and works out to his old rock music in order to impress her. His acts of “rebellion” towards his wife Carolyn also fit into this picture of beauty. 
Next is Carolyn, who sees wealth and perfection as beauty. She's totally focused on her job, her material wealth and projecting a picture of perfection onto her neighbours. Keeping up her rose garden is a symbol of her keeping up her charade of a wealthy, perfect life. 
Jane on the other hand, who's described as a “typical teenager” by her father, has another very different idea of beauty: confidence. For her, the thing she can't achieve herself is the most beautiful and that's also the reason she's attracted to Ricky, who is very confident and knows what he wants. She is very insecure and is trying to ignore the fact that She's only being used by her friend Angela so she can feel better about herself (said by Ricky in the movie). With Ricky by her side she finds her own sense of confidence and with that, beauty. We see this at the end of the movie, when Jane talks back to Angela when she's called a freak for wanting to join Ricky when he wants to leave for New York.
Ricky himself has the most interesting sense of beauty, at least according to us. He finds beauty in everything. It's a protection mechanism due to his family issues,  but it still is something that we remember best after watching this movie. Him filming a plastic bag for 15 minutes, describing it as “dancing with him” or staring fascinated at dead Lester, he truly does have a weird, but wonderful view on what he finds beautiful.
At the end of the movie, Lester changes his view of beauty to something more like Ricky's view: “ I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me… but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst…”  In his last narrative, Lester finally realizes beauty as a whole, a notion that we could only see with Ricky in the movie. This might be a realization, but we can also imagine it's him calming down before he dies.
Beauty is universal, so of course it's something we discuss here in Basel, too.  Beauty is subjective; everyone has his or her own definition of it here, too. We want to compare our beauty standards here in Basel to the ones we've seen in the movie, a portrayal of an American suburb. Youth has been a standard in the cosmetic industry for awhile now and the reason for that may not only be memories and good times attributed to the image of youth (as done so in American Beauty in Lester's case), it's also the physical aspects. Materialism is probably the main parallel we can see to this movie when we compare it to here.  People here do seem a little focused on it; some conversations are mainly about it. But does this mean that it's a beauty standard? Maybe it's not as a physical one, (although brand clothing is popular) but it definitely is a mental one around here. We think that it might even be influencing ourselves, even though we admit to it reluctantly. In conclusion, we think that the media heavily influences beauty standards and that most people here cannot make up their own minds about what beauty is since there are so many ways of seeing beauty and not enough time to actually think about it. This may be a little different from the movie, but we think that it's not that far away from what we've seen. /M.P./ M.A./ S.H./.

 

Identity:  Angela Hayes

While reflecting on the movie we saw that one subject, which was often referred to, was how we develop an identity. This is a question that Angela Hayes is dealing with in the movie. She is creating this image of herself as a very unordinary and confident young woman. She enjoys every bit of attention she gets and likes to talk to her schoolmates about her made-up affairs with older men. She doesn’t even mind being called a “slut” because that’s a part of the image she is trying to create. In the movie she tells Jane: “I don’t think that there’s anything worse than being ordinary.” We believe this is the reason why she is trying so hard to be different and special. She would rather be a “slut” than an ordinary suburban chick.
Later on in the movie we figured out that actually she hasn’t had any affairs and is still a virgin. At this point we realize that she isn’t as confident and perfect as she wants everyone to believe. She gets into a fight with Jane because she notices that Jane is a lot more unordinary than she is. Ricky’s words bring Angela back to reality because he clarifies that he was able to recognize her real identity. He says, “[…] you’re boring, and you’re totally ordinary and you know it. […] She’s [Jane] not your friend, she’s just someone you use to feel better about yourself.“ And we think he’s right. Angela uses Jane to gain more confidence about herself, knowing Jane is naive enough to believe everything she says and does. Jane admires Angela and wishes to be more like her.
The fact that Angela smokes shows us that there is a restlessness inside of her and that she has the need to prove herself to others. Angela, not knowing who she is supposed to be, wishes to be grown up already, unlike Lester who wishes to be young like her again.
In the first scene Angela appears, they are on the school basketball court. Lester is totally paralyzed by her beauty. The camera now focuses on Lester’s perspective. Suddenly it seems as if only he and Angela were in the room. She is in the center of the spotlight and her movements are shown in slow motion. In this first depiction, it seems as if we already know her role in the movie because her appearance in this scene shows us perfectly the image she is trying to create. We, as the spectators, assume that Angela is the “American Beauty”. This scene is the beginning of change for Lester. Because of her he begins the new chapter of his life. This makes her character a key role in the movie.
Now we want to compare Angela’s behavior with the one of other teenagers like us. In our view Angela’s actions are comprehensible for a girl her age. In this stage of life most people try to find their identity, try to figure out who they want to be and what they want to do in their future. For some this is easier and others like Angela have a harder time doing so. She has more difficulties finding an identity. That's why we consider her to be so ordinary. We all have to go through this stage and find our own personality. This process, no matter whether this happens in Basel or California, takes place the same way. In our time lots of people lack self-confidence and don't feel confortable with the person they are. So basically what they do is putting on a mask and acting as if they were different, they hide their real face, try to get the attention of the others they want to be like. Angela wants to be a model and in order to become one she thinks she has to create this specific image. We assume that in America the pressure of the media is higher than here in Basel, because it’s local. This has a direct influence on how people in the US want to appear in public. They feel obliged to maintain a certain image. We think that the desire to be perfect and to have no flaws is more common in the US.
So at the end of our analysis of Angela’s behavior we come to the conclusion that she is just like us, and in fact now we feel as if we knew her and understood her actions better. Trying to search for one’s own identity is normal, it’s perfectly human and everyone has to go through this stage in life. All we can hope for is to be surrounded by people who care about us. We wish the character of Angela could have had that.  (SG, MS, AP, JG) 
 

Being a teenager

To become an adult means passing a difficult time with yourself, your relatives, your friends, your body, your hormones. You go through many different experiences. Some of them are bad, others are great This way you try to find your own way of life, one that agrees with your personality.
To illustrate this we would like to discuss the main teenage characters from the movie „American Beauty“.
Jane, the daughter oft he main character, Ricky, a schoolmate, and Angela, the lascivious friend of Jane's.
Jane Burnham is a typical 15-year-old teenager going through puberty. She represents a timid shy girl who is a little bit depressed and anxious. Jane is also really insecure and is jealous of her mate Angela. But Angela is not caring about Jane always being less important than her. And like almost every teenager she is angry with her parents, mostly with her father because he never gives her a lot of attention. Jane represents a typical teenager, even though she dresses like a goth.
In the movie there are lot of different camera shots, but the most important shows her with her boyfriend at the beginning and end of the movie.
At the beginning she is always filmed from above, in order to make her look even more insecure.
But in the end this changes; she is filmed from below, because she is telling Angela that she doesn’t want to be in the background anymore.
Ricky Fitts not only has to deal with own issues, he must also deal with family problems. Sometimes he can find the silence to just observe irrelevant things, which gives him possibilities to explore simple wisdoms about life: “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.” He can’t handle the deep thoughts because he’s too young yet, but at the same time it helps him to overcome the discipline and structure, which is always demanded in his fathers presence. The way the camera focus on this irrerlevant plastic bag dancing in the wind shows the different directions a teenager could take in life and that there is no reason to hit the aim directly.
Ricky has to learn how to accept unpleasant or painful things. He begins to understand his mother and learns to accept her disease. He also learns to deal with his father's violence, even when the accusations are wrong. That puberty isn’t new for Ricky makes it possible for him to feel with Jane, better than her parents do and finally they can distract each other from the pressure of having to deal with many tough situations in life.
Another character of the movie named Angela Hayes has a strong influence on Jane. Angela’s pretty much a stereotypical all-American teenager. She’s blond, has blue eyes and most people find her attractive. All in all, the first impressions of her, the way she appears, might be really remarkable and she seems to be very self-confident, but at a closer look it becomes clear that she has some serious issues. For instance, she probably suffers form an Inferiority complex. In many scenes in the movie she explicitly pretends to have had sex many times with many guys, even tough she’s still a virgin. By doing this she wants to attract attention because she feels lonely. There’s only Jane, who’s on her side. At the end, even this friendship ends. We don’t know much about her personal background, for instance what her parents are like, or if she has experienced any events in her lifetime, which caused a psychological trauma and could explain her behaviour. In general, this character is very superficial and apart from her lascivious behaviour, not much is known about her in comparison to Jane and Ricky.
While we were watching the movie we were a little bit astonished because the characters were really exaggerated. But after watching the film we understood why they were like this. The characters were just showing what puberty is like and how it feels, but not only for them but for the people who were living with them. What we really liked about the scenes with the teenagers and their families was that we could see everything from the perspective of the adults. This was very spectacular because this was a whole knew experience for us.
It was also interesting for us to see that the characters were so typical, one was lonely, the other one was the beautiful and the third teenager was the thinker. This reminded us of our classifications of the people in the school and how silly this was.
There were some scenes which reminded us of our own puberty. One scene was the scene in the kitchen when they were disputing, this reminded us of our conversations with our parents and the long discussions about some unnecessary things. What we also realized was that all the teenagers wanted to break out of their conventional lives and have their own rules.
In the movie all this was easy to see and understand because things are exaggerated. But we hope that we weren't as extreme and exhausting as they.

 

Social pressure 

Norms influence our behaviour. Norms affect our lives because they help build up a social pressure on all of us. We adapt to the expectations of the environment because we are scared not to be accepted within the community. We accept not to be the persons we truly are just to be a part of society that’s based on norms someone else invented. For one of the main characters in the film “American Beauty”, named Lester Burnham, this phenomenon has the effect that for 20 years he lives a life he doesn’t want to live. We would like to discuss where the pressure influencing him comes from.
There are several persons in the film that have expectations about Lester. Right at the beginning his daughter says in a straightforward mannerthat her father is a “lame-o” and that “someone really should put him out of his misery.” This shows us already that Lester didn’t fulfil his role as a good family father. His wife Carolyn seems to be a very successful businesswoman. But things are not as they seem to be. She is not really good at her job and because of that she has to be really dominant at home in order to build up a better self-esteem and reach her own expectations of a good life. At home Lester is absolutely subordinate to his wife. That pulls him down and makes him think that he is absolutely ordinary and not successful. So he has a very low self-esteem. We can see this in the scene where Lester and Carolyn go to Carolyn’s business party together. In this scene we can clearly see that it is Carolyn who actually wants to go there and Lester is only a protagonist to level up the image of his wife. When Buddy King, a business partner of Carolyn’s doesn’t remember him Lester just says: “Oh, we met each other already actually at this Christmas thing. But it doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t remember me either.”
But who is to blame? Our society measures success by the the amount of money on a person’s bank account rather than by the happiness he or she feels and gives to other people.  Happiness in our society is measured by the things a person can afford. Something is wrong. Why does a person even work that hard in a job she/he does not like? The answer: the superficial expectations from families and people surrounding us. Our materialistic world ruled by smartphones destroys the true values of life and replaces them step by step. That´s why our most important duty at the moment is to keep the knowledge of the true happiness of live alive despite of all the pressure and the disapproval that we have to face.
If we compare this to our own lives, we can see a lot of parallels: It may not be as extreme in our case, but almost everyone puts social pressure on us. From our parents that “force” us to be successful, because otherwise they would be disappointed, to our so-called “colleagues” that want us to adapt to these norms to be accepted. Social pressure is daily business. We grew up with it and this pressure has become normal. But that’s our problem… Many people can’t handle this pressure – the result can be, but doesn’t have to, an exaggerated reaction, such as introverted personality, self-injuring or maybe even suicide.
In “American Beauty” we see a typical form of midlife-crisis. This is also a very common problem of the middle-aged adult men or women in our society.  It is very hard to define how many people suffer from this problem, but it is said that
about 5 percent of the males between 30 and 50 years have had a midlife-crisis. About 0.01 percent of the Swiss people commit suicide (2011). Even though this is a very low rate there are still 70’000 people in Switzerland that kill themselves during their lifetime. That is how far social pressure can go! This makes it a deadly problem that many people underestimate because we mostly notice when it’s too late. (JL, MM, NR, GZ)

 

This is my neighbourhood, this is my life 

The movie “American Beauty”, which was produced in 1999, plays in a typical American suburb. The film is about a family in a typical middle-class neighbourhood. It shows many conflicts that can occur in such an environment. Now we would like to discuss how this kind of suburb affects the different family issues that are addressed in the movie.
The district in which the Burnham’s and their neighbours live is called Anytown. Everything looks the same, and we think that already the name tells us that the story could take place in “any town” and that there are a lot of places like this one. The filmmakers didn’t want to present a unique town. Instead they wanted to show that the place they have chosen for the movie is inspired by the everyday lives of many American middle class families.

The cinematographic language underlines the feeling of a normal, everyday life. At the beginning of the movie they show the whole suburb and afterwards they zoom in until we only see the house of the Burnham’s. This technique is also applied at the end of the movie, but this time the other way around. When we have zoomed out so that we can see the whole suburb, we can also see the perfect tree lined streets. They underline the illusion of a perfect and traditional life.
Another relevant issue related to suburban life, which comes up in the movie, is privacy or rather the lack thereof. The big windows and the backyards with the tiny fences make it easier for the neighbours to observe each other. So the neighbours are already tempted to watch the families next door. A good example for this is the scene where Ricky films Jane while she is having a fight with her dad in the kitchen. Another example is the moment when Carolyn is working in the garden and gets a compliment from her neighbour for her beautiful roses.
In the movie the issue of having a perfect image appears a lot. In Carolyn’s words: “In order to be successful, one must project an image of success”. Or to rephrase what Carolyn said, it is important to keep the illusion of a perfect life in front of the others although the truth might be different.
In general we think that people in Basel and the surrounding suburbs appear to be more tolerant towards the problems of other people. It isn’t that important to have a perfect image. This might be because in our city there is a bigger diversity of cultures and lifestyles. For example there are a lot of immigrants, young people and older people as well. Therefore we don’t have such an imagination of a perfect family and a perfect life. Even though you aren’t perfect the Swiss society accepts you as you are.
Another aspect when it comes to comparing American and Swiss suburbs is that here the people are more anonymous, but not in a negative way. We assume that in Switzerland, and especially in Basel, neighbours are friends rather than rivals. We share joy and great experiences instead of being jealous of one another.
Families in Basel are also more focused on their individual lives and their well-being than on observing others. If our neighbours have guests, for example, we won’t be starring at them all the time or comparing their social life to ours.
But we also found some similarities in the way Swiss and American suburbs work: the majority of the suburban population consists of middle-class families and the relations with the neighbours is not inessential.

In conclusion we can say that life in Basel and its suburbs is more relaxed and that people focus more on their own lives. We think we have more privacy in Swiss than in American suburbs. (S.W. Z.K. V.B.)

Father-Son Relationship between Ricky and Frank Fitts

From the beginning Colonel Fitts seems to be a very secretive, organized and a dominant personality. He, his wife and Ricky move in next door to the Burnhams at the start of the movie. But although it seems pretty normal in the first scene, the father-son relationship in American Beauty is far from typical. It is littered with emotional and physical abuse. Colonel Fitts enforces his extreme discipline that was instilled in him by the army on his son. He also has a big fear of his son being a homosexual and even takes it as far as saying, “I’d rather you be dead than be a faggot”. He has an extreme overreaction when he thinks that Ricky could possibly be a homosexual. He kicks him out of the house and tells him he never wants to see him again. Physical abuse in form of beating is often used by the Colonel to show Ricky his boundaries. But really it seems like Frank is trying to hide his own problems and insecurities by portraying a tough army veteran. But it’s not only Frank’s fault. Ricky knows that his fathers’ psychological wounds of war are still fresh and abuses all the negative traits of his father for his own gain. Frank, although he obsessively tries to control Ricky, does it more out of love than just to harass Ricky.

The origin of the entire problem is like already mentioned most likely the mental problem that Colonel Fitts is facing since he retired from the military and the inner conflict of being a closeted homosexual. But in the movie Ricky mentioned that his father put him in a mental institute for possessing the drug marijuana. This and his hate against homosexual people lead to the assumption that Frank probably grew up under very conservative conditions or that he had some sort of a scaring event during his childhood or adolescence. Ricky’s father is also in deep denial about what Ricky does in his free time and where he gets his money from. He is so afraid of the idea that Ricky is involved with drugs again that he completely blocks out the fact that Ricky has way more money and camera equipment than any normal teenager could possibly afford. Ricky is very aware of the fact that his father believes whatever he wants to believe and uses it to his advantage. This becomes clear in a conversation where Ricky says to Jane: “My dad thinks I paid for all this with catering jobs. Never underestimate the power of denial.”

To summarise, the father-son relationship between Ricky and colonel Fitts is very confrontational. Even though Frank claims he only wants the best for his son and is imposing his strict form of discipline on him because he loves him, you get the impression he derives some sort of satisfaction out of doing things like regularly drug testing his son or even physically assaulting him. You never get the impression that they are on the same side. It always seems to be the same thing, Frank sets new boundaries and Ricky finds new ways around them. Ricky escapes this cycle when his relationship with his father completely breaks down, over suspicions from his extremely homophobic father, that he might be gay. He gets kicked out of the house and leaves for New York, most likely never to see his father again.

We think that this relationship in the movie demonstrates some very important issues. It shows that highly confrontational relationships between parents and children don’t work. If a parent cannot come to an understanding with their child and starts to impose strict rules upon them, the child will start to resent them and either find more ways to antagonize their parents or simply find any way possible around the rules. It also demonstrates how intolerant and unforgiving parents can be towards their own children. The intolerance of certain parents towards things such as drug use and homosexuality, the things mainly shown in the movie, are a very real thing. It happens all over the world, including here in Switzerland and it is sad to think that this could be happening very close to us at any time. Some think their children are sick if their children come to them with things such as these and they can be highly judgemental instead of supportive. Sadly many people have been kicked out of their homes or have been completely disowned by their parents for having different views than their parents. We thought this real life video seemed very relevant to some of the aspects of the movie: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1df_i26wh-w
This shows that these kind of issues really do exist and we think that the movie does a very good job of raising awareness for these kind of issues. (M.C, M.H, L.B, O.M)