American Beauty

There is no variation in this film, and it is all one giant philosophical mistake. 

 

The superficial, real-estate wife, who decides that murder is the answer. The closet-military-nazi, who decides that murder is the answer. The teenage daughter who jokes about murder being the answer. The pretend lolita who thinks beauty and sex are the answers. They’re all exactly the same. 

 

That leaves us with two characters: Kevin Spacey and Rick. 

 

Spacey’s position is a reaction to numbness. He begins substituting rose petals, old pictures and nostalgia for beauty. He is not free, he is nihilistic. Instead of assuming responsibility, he wants as little as he can e.g. working at Smiley’s. He doesn’t think through his actions with regard to others because he has “nothing to lose.” The nihilistic predicament is the situation in which we know that our most cherished values are untenable, and yet we seem incapable of giving them up. We are forced––condemned––to believe in something we know can’t be true. 

 

What to do with Rick: he’s a voyeur; he’s fascinated by death; he sentimentalizes death, maybe. But he, too, does whatever he wants: in response to the structure and discipline of his father’s rules, he becomes a drug dealer, an occupation that has consequences that are never addressed. He defines voyeurism in his own terms: its more a curiosity than an obsession to him, though others might strongly disagree. He sees beauty in a floating plastic bag, entirely untethered, but he imagines there’s its expressing a communion with him. He, too, is a sentimentalist, given how he sees himself as a God smiling at death, betraying his ultimate implied fear of it. 

 

Rick is also ironic and sarcastic and knows how to be himself without subverting himself to the rules of others. But that irony, I think, becomes corrupted; at least, in this film, it’s used mostly as a self-defense mechanism. Notice how he begins to see the world through the video camera and not with his own eyes––he beings to see ironically, at a distance, through a manufactured view-point. 

 

Rick is the only character that has the chance to be free, though the movie attempts to bludgeon even that small hope. 

 

But the film did win best picture because it appeared to most as a motivational speech. Yuck. C- 

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