American Beauty

I watched American Beauty at an age when adulthood still seemed to be a destination rather than a condition. From far away, the route looked conventional enough: finish school, find work, earn money, build a home, perhaps raise a family, and eventually arrive at that stable country called being grown up.

The film was useful because almost everyone in it has arrived.

And almost no one knows what to do there.

Lester Burnham has the furniture, the job, the wife, the daughter, the lawn and the practiced routines of a respectable life. None of those things is false. The problem is that together they have become a kind of stage set. He has learned to perform the role without remembering why he wanted it.

I first saw the film at a friend’s apartment after a long afternoon spent helping him assemble a bookcase. We had argued over the instructions, lost one screw, found it beneath the sofa, and finally stood back to admire a piece of furniture neither of us particularly cared about. Then we ordered food and watched the movie. Somewhere during Lester’s rebellion, I looked at that bookcase and thought how much effort adults spend arranging objects around themselves as evidence that life is proceeding correctly.

That may be why Carolyn interested me more than I expected. She does not merely want success; she wants success to be visible. The house must present itself correctly. The smile must appear on schedule. A professional setback is not only a practical problem but a crack in the image. Her tragedy is not vanity alone. It is the exhausting belief that if the surface can be kept under control, perhaps the interior will eventually follow.

Lester rebels against this performance, but the film is too intelligent to make rebellion automatically admirable. His attempts to recover youth are liberating in one moment and embarrassingly adolescent in the next. Dissatisfaction may be truthful, yet truth does not excuse every response to it. Other people live inside the life he wants to escape.

This is one of the film’s crueller observations: we can be genuinely unhappy inside a life that still contains things worth loving.

Ricky’s plastic bag has become the obvious symbol of the film, and on first viewing I found the scene almost ridiculous. A piece of trash moves in the wind and someone treats it like revelation. Years later, I understand the scene more generously. The bag is not beautiful because plastic has secretly become sublime. The point is attention. Ricky looks long enough at something ordinary for the ordinary thing to stop being invisible.

That idea has aged better for me than some of the film’s provocations.

Most of a life is made from material too small to announce itself as important: light entering a room in the late afternoon, a familiar voice from another part of the house, a photograph we stop noticing because it has been on the same shelf for years. We are trained to wait for large events and can miss the accumulation of small ones that actually make a life recognizable.

The film’s ending returns Lester to those ordinary things. After spending so much of the story fantasizing about another life, he looks back toward the one he had. The photographs matter. Memory matters. The family he found difficult to live with is still the family whose faces summon tenderness.

When the credits ended that evening, my friend asked whether I liked the film. I said yes, although I could not yet explain why.

Before leaving, I looked again at the newly assembled bookcase.

It was crooked by perhaps two millimeters.

We left it that way.