American Beauty - Essay

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American Beauty – The American Dream or Nightmare? What does the life of a typical American suburb family look like today? Allan Ball gives us his opinion in the movie American Beauty. A movie, which contains many connecting themes and plots. Allan Ball leaves it completely up to the audience how they want to interpret it, but he also makes sure that once you have seen it, you will not be able to forget it. The movie provokes you to think about your own life and forces you to ask yourself, if you are truly happy with what you do. One of the more apparent themes in this movie is about the American Dream and its promises of happiness connected to materialistic wealth. However, the movie also draws attention to other themes, such as appearance versus reality, denial and repression, control versus chaos, loneliness versus feeling connected and beauty (subjective and objective). Each character in the movie represents one or more of these themes, which will become apparent below. This movie starts with two intros. The first one is Ricky filming Jane, while they talk about her father. He offers her to kill him to which she answers, “Would you?” After this somewhat bizarre and creepy beginning, we move on to the ‘real’ introduction. A narrator introduces himself as Lester Burnham and ends the introduction by stating he will be dead within less than a year, but does not know it yet. This indicates that he is in fact dead already and that we are currently watching the end of the movie. The movie then goes back into the past, with the sound of a clock waking up Lester. During this first day, the late Lester introduces us to almost every other character in the movie. Throughout the movie, we follow two families. The Burnham’s, which is the family given the most attention and the Fitts’, who moves in next door at the beginning of the film. In the Burnham family, we meet the

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