Wednesday, January 18, 2012

American Beauty, a film, 1999

[spoiler alert: do not read if you have not seen the film!]

American Beauty 1999
Director: Sam Mendes
This is a disturbing film for an American audience, a ten-years-later evocation of the kind of confrontation with unease and the possibility of psychopathological manifestations that viewers might have remembered from Steven Sonderbergh’s  Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989),  and feeling disturbed was exactly my reaction to reading its partial plot summary. I’m thankful that after more than ten years I finally rented and actually saw the film.  It is a superb film about film, about cinema as art and theater, and the satiric darkness framed by the protagonist’s voiceover actually reaches tragedy.  These are just my immediate and uninformed impressions, but I hope to convince others to re-visit it.
We are told early on, by the disembodied voice of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey),  that within some near time of the narrative he will be dead.  We are positioned as audience much like the audience of Greek tragedy: we sense that we may know this story but it has a strange effect, our hearing this: are humans or the gods of fate in control? We know this place as well: American suburbia and its nuclear families, each one, it turns out, a House of Atreus ( or Laius, more likely).
Excellent camera work, with the scenes of the tense non-marriage of Lester and his wife (with his daughter at meals filmed from a distance), frames the dining room of the perfected McMansion, and reveals the selves that they perform over and over again. Brilliantly, Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) is overtly wearing her mask as drama queen- in this case a perfect phrase- and continues to insert near-comic parodies of the toxic American blend of a thirst for success and self-improvement with deep insecurity. The prescience of the film is somewhat uncanny in that it was made before either 9/11 or the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of nearly ten years later. But the ingredients are all there: greed and a materialism that has no idea what the actual world might convey if one stopped and looked. American beauty here is a projected mask.
Lester’s adolescent self and the constructed identities of the ex-Marine neighbor who abuses his own son- all of these unconscious enactments are arranged to play out as unrecognized theater. Only the abused boy next door, Ricky, and the naïve but wide-eyed Jane, Lester’s  daughter, start to see the possibility of framing life as art- not to escape, but better to understand  the pathologies of their parents and friends and, most importantly, of themselves.
Mendes uses windows and mirrors in a brilliant way. They are framed paintings. They reveal and conceal crucial information that brings down the world of fantasy on the head of Lester, quite literally. Ricky’s video camera focuses on Jane in a circle of her mirrored image through the bedroom window, moving past and ignoring the dominant image of her friend; it is a focus that is reminiscent of paintings by Petrus Christus or van Eyck. Mendes’s circles enclose so many social themes of American pathology, familiar from Dr. Strangelove (the covertly gay military homophobe) and from the many real manifestations of manic hedonism: drugs, guns, child abuse and a ghastly satire of self –help and business management coaching. Don’t be a victim: get a gun!  Have an affair with the Real Estate King. Of course wife Carolyn is a real estate salesperson and Lester is in advertising. The latter blurs the lines between cinema and desire, and our hero’s  life comes to depend on the ability to separate them so that real beauty can be revealed.
Ricky becomes a boyfriend of Jane and he is revealed to be a video maker, and one who finally sees the unseen side of objects, the beauty he can capture in cinema, the falling and swirling leaves with a plastic bag:
Ricky Fitts: It was one of those days when it's a minute away from
snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. Right?
And this bag was just dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it.
For fifteen minutes. That's the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things,
and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know
there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember...
I need to remember... 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.

 Lester’s daughter Jane sees her fantasies of hatred and revenge on video and can in fact see that she does not really want to enact them. “You know I’m kidding, right?” is how she takes off quickly the mask of contract murder.
Tragically, her newly, or perhaps always, adolescent father moves, as many a tragic hero, closer to his fate, but just as he does,  we do in fact pity him and see someone  else behind the irresponsible and cynical jerk. That he allows ex-Marine Fitts to hug him, accepting his humanity and need for comfort even though he does not know until seconds later the reason for his distress, marks him as having a source of that same ability, like Ricky’s,  to perceive something as it really is. His reaction to the kiss is not even one of anger but of gentle correction.
The crisis, the critical scene of enacting his sexual fantasy of making love at last to the teenage girl and friend of his daughter’s, is surely what sealed Spacey’s Oscar: we finally see the scared little girl behind the masked, pretend siren that the audience – but not Lester- has been rolling its eyes at, perhaps, in amused disgust. His recognition, classically his true  anagnorisis, is to move from projection at last to perception, to see her as she really is: a little girl like his own daughter, needing protection and not exploitation.  But the Fates have wound the threads already tightly around his life, and the other revelation by the self-hating Fitts will not be redemptive but instead an engine of death.  His voiceover even repeats  a truth about our not knowing who is fortunate until after death, an ancient Greek maxim repeated in Herodotus, Histories, Book I, 32.(Loeb, Godley, 1975 p. 39).
Lester recalls at death, at the seconds of his murder, his own real perceptions of childhood before adolescence itself became his mask. He also could see the unseen side of things, and this is what Mendes seems to me to suggest cinematic art can reveal if we can see it through a film like this, a series of still photographs, not unlike the one that seems to radiate for the first time an unseen joy in the seconds before he is shot. And this brings us inevitably to the other tale of nymphet obsession and reductive objectification, Nabokov’s Lolita. She is back, but this time, fiction is not the danger. It is rather the means to revelation of what was false. Lester sees the photograph and, too late, his real situation in an adult life. Too late, he finds it not only true, but beautiful.