American Beauty

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American Beauty

It’s Just a Couch!!!!!!
Americans are caught up in the belief that what we are is what we own. There is a superficial nature to our society. We are nothing more than peacocks walking around strutting our feathers marked with price tags and brand names. The suburbs are a nesting ground for all of this fictitiousness. When Lester Byrnham introduces himself to his audience, he finds himself amidst the cradle of this fakeness. The movie American Beauty starts by accompanying Lester Byrnham through one day of his boring and mundane life. Lester is trapped amongst fake and superficial people. He sees the trouble with his family, and yet he avoids it because he does not believe in disturbing the perfect image his family represents. The Byrnhams are a living façade. On the outside, the Byrnhams fit the mold of the typical middle class family: A nice house, with roses in front and a Mercedes SUV, but on the inside they are far from it. The Byrnhams attempt to portray the image of the successful family. They want be the Cleavers of the new millennium; however, they fail miserably. Lester Byrnham is surrounded by artificiality, which ironically produces the impulse for his breakthrough changes in life. Despite the darkness of the film, American Beauty’s message is ultimately hopeful because Lester Byrnham learns from his younger counterpart next door that true beauty comes from within.
In the movie, it is the King of real estate who makes the clichéd but sadly truthful statement that “To be successful one must portray an image of success at all times.” How true that statement is. If success is portrayed from the inside out, rather than the outside in, then the statement holds truth. However, in the case of the neighborhood that American Beauty takes place in, people wear success like a badge or a medal. Lester is trapped in a world of people that want to prove to everyone else that they are successful.
To discover the ideology of the external portrayal of successfulness, one need not look further than within the walls of the Byrnham household. Carolyn is the best example of peripheral fakeness; she is the worst offender of this superficial nature. Her real estate job is more important then her family, her marriage, and even her life, because her business is her life. She takes on the identity of the houses that she tries to sell. In the movie, the one house that the audience sees is nice on the outside but very ugly on the inside. When people come to...

The complete article is about 2089 words and 8.36 pages long.

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