Word: burnham
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...start of the movie, Lester Burnham (a brilliant Kevin Spacey), trapped and overly-insulated, leads a meaningless life with no sense of power or self-esteem; bogged down with particulars, he no longer knows how and when to express the proper emotions and can no longer communicate with his daughter or wife. Burnham eventually snaps this spell by developing a strong sexual fantasy for his daughter's 17-year-old friend, triggering an entirely hedonistic lifestyle in which he buys whatever he wants and smokes pot all day. This is a direct reaction to his prior condition of too much...
...power of Burnham's fantasy comes from a deep sexual frustration, which has been stimulated so greatly that it can no longer be satisfied by physical means; he wants to consume everything (Mendes also emphasizes the relationship between sexual frustration and violence throughout the film, having a character compare having an orgasm to shooting a gun, and another turn his suppressed sexual desire into violent action). When it comes time to perform his fantasy, however, Burnham realizes how undesirable it truly is, how misguided he has been. In the end, his solipsistic hedonism is just as unfulfilling as his prior...
...Burnham's wife (Annette Bening), on the other hand, has taken a career-centered path to happiness, hoping to gain power and meaning by climbing up the real-estate business ladder. She sacrifices everything for career and seems to resent her daughter and husband, whose existences have impeded her upward mobility. This, too, of course, leads not to happiness but only more frustration and more powerlessness...
...Then where, among the frustrations and disappointments of American life, can one find some kind of happiness? Mendes offers an answer in the character of Ricky (excellently played by Wes Bentley), Burnham's teenage neighbor. A strange outcast, Ricky videotapes everything "because it is beautiful." Beauty, for him, lies in stripping away any layer from a thing until it is totally naked. He uses his video camera to get to the essence of a subject. That is, he struggles to see things as they are, while his parents and neighbors distract themselves with various illusions. Right before his death, Burnham...
...bland banality of his successful life he is forced to pretend that his affliction is something completely different. Hence his addiction to group therapy sessions, where he can pretend that his unhappiness springs from testicular cancer or OCD rather than from the cookie-cutter pointlessness of his life. Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) in American Beauty faces the same dilemma: she's wealthy, she has a nice little nuclear family, she likes martinis...of course she should be happy. Just as the narrator in Fight Club spends the entire movie running from his problems (an escapism he admits...