American Beauty

American Beauty does have a strong verisimilitude that is created in primarily in the establishment of the setting. The home looks like it came straight from a Martha Stewart Magazine. It is the typical bi-level with an open floor plan, the exterior paint is a crisp clean grey trim with white siding, nice white picket fence that matches the whole neighborhood, indicating it is an upper scale suburban neighborhood with covenants, and this is embodies the American dream. Also, the family structure helps the verisimilitude of the film, with a working wife, a husband with a good, cubicle-based job, and a daughter, however each role is taken to an extreme level. Instead of the “working mom”, we’re presented with the “workaholic”. We see the “mid-life” crisis manifest itself in expected ways, making jejune decisions like a man chasing a much younger woman, and feeding his ego by purchasing his “dream car”. We also see the teenage girl, taking typical insecurity to the extremity of saving money for a breast augmentation operation, and taking the typical “hate my parents” teenage attitude to the an extreme of actually hiring her boyfriend to do the job. For the most part, this family seems like a perfect example of the proverbial Joneses, until we dig deeper and see that each character takes a trait from their character and pushes it to severe point.
         The film does have some pieces of anti realism. We can easily infer the red roses symbolize passion, and often when the roses are present throughout the movie, it is in a dreamlike state. This is obviously so when Lester is fantasizing about his daughter’s friend, but I think it is also interesting that we see his wife with roses in the beginning. This also has a dreamlike quality, but in an opposite way of the other incidents of the roses. Her activity in this scene was chosen very intentionally. She is pruning the roses, and one could easily argue he feels she’s pruned her passion in order to make room for her work. Had she been watering them, potting them, or sprinkling them with Miracle Grow, the symbolism would have been much different and not supported the main tone of lifelessness and dysfunction. In the case of his daughter’s friend, she is always featured in unnaturally dark light, or on a dark background, obviously alluding to his dark desires, and maybe even to how he is hiding his affair-of-the-mind. We can tell the shots are fantasies, not part of his real world, and we know this by the way the camera focuses on his eyes and his facial expressions, how the rest of his surroundings fades out, and the music indicates a fantastical world.

         All in all, these elements combine to disassemble the American dream, and take almost a cynical view of what could happen with the pursuit thereof. Also, these elements basically tell the story of “no one knows what happens behind closed doors”, and the film itself critiques the supposed perfection of suburban life by showing so many characters unhappy, or dysfunctional. Not one of the homes in the neighborhood for which we know the residents is “normal”, as dictated by the American dream idea for suburbia. In 1990’s American, the gay couple next door was not normal, this takes care of the external idea of normal. Both of the families who appear externally as “normal”, we see are actually full of abnormalities and dysfunction.