Looking closer at beauty in American Beauty.

1. Looking closer at beauty in American Beauty.

2. Britney Spears, erotic, manufactured image. • 9/11 Firefighters Suffering, sacrifice, patriotism. Beauty has the power to move the viewer more than just a ‘posture of the nerves.’ Britney Spears and suffering. Not mutually exclusive.

3. What the film says about beauty • Beauty is in the life behind things. • The American Dream hinges on the myth that image is • everything. Market driven thinking and advertising informs that myth. • Carolyn’s mantra is that in order to be successful one must project • an image of success at all times. • Ironic that real estate, is not real but image, cf Willie Loman. • As with Willie Loman, Carolyn’s belief in and aspiration to the American • Dream destroys her. • Lester’s realization, through the ‘Angelic’ Angela that truth is beautiful, is what saves him. “I’m great.”

5. 1. Beauty is truth Aesthetically and thematically. 2. Perpetual ecstasy of anticipation Jump cuts and repetition. Stillness in a visual loop. 3. Form and text within text

6. As well as a statement of Lester’s final realization, so opposite to Carolyn’s ‘image of success’ mantra, this has some interesting aesthetic implications. There is symmetry in the form of the film, as there is in the form of the urn, and the poem. The symmetry of the lines cf the symmetry of the mise en scene. The symmetry of the structure of a sequence.

7. The repetition here achieves a kind of stasis in perpetual anticipation. The same effect is achieved in the jump cuts in Lester’s dream sequence, and again in his seduction of Angela.

8. The beauty of the frieze on the urn in the poem. The beauty of the suburb in Ricky’s video in the film.

9. Intertextuality

10. The Sick Rose - Blake Carolyn’s roses are beautiful but sick. The rose’s truth has been distorted to become part of Carolyn’s need to portray an ‘image of success at all times.’ They are pruned and trained to within an inch of their lives – ‘eggshells and Miracle Grow’ O, Rose thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed Of crimson joy, And his dark, secret love Does thy life destroy. Student’s comments – the rose is “something beautiful that has been decimated by its love for the ‘worm’ which has made it sick.” - “the rose has been broken and distorted because of a lust for something that ultimately will lead to its own downfall.”

11. I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves--and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! Only--but this is rare--When a beloved hand is laid in ours,When, jaded with the rush and glareOf the interminable hours,Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. Lester is sedated, ‘dead’, buried. An ‘unspeakable desire’ is set alight in him by Angela. A ‘lost pulse of feeling stirs again.’ He sees beauty, his ‘heart lies plain’ and he means what he says – ‘I’m great’ The Buried Life But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us--to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.

12. “That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” Human kind cannot bear very much reality - T.S.Eliot Four Quartets Ricky – Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it…and my heart is going to cave in. Lester – 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… and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain. Connections to the end of the film – there is no tragedy in Lester’s death, rather freedom If we see the beauty behind things and understand the truth, if we start to hear ‘the grass grow’ the intensity of life grows too. Is this why Ricky is one step removed behind his camera – it’s a little safer Middlemarch George Eliot

13. Mise-en-scene framing, composition and barriers • the beauty in the image • meaning in the visual image

14. Motif roses, the red door

15. Motif/Symbol Focus on not what the symbol is but how it is used The red door – not simple We can’t say ‘the red door is a symbol for (one simplistic word) In order to write intelligently students need to reach their own understanding What lies behind the door – truth, understanding, connection realness, but all of these things are scary

16. Thank you. nigel.mitchell@hvhs.school.nz rebecca.feerick@hvhs.school.nz