I had not seen American Beauty until I was required to do so in one my classes last semester. I knew it was highly acclaimed, but when the film came out, the only thing about it that interested me was the belly button on its poster. My professor had told us it was a modern-day-esque version of Lolita, the book we were reading in class. I remember being slightly frightened by the notion thinking that if I saw Humbert on screen, he's certainly be even more terrifying than he was in my imagination.Per usual, my expectations were completely wrong about the film. Director Sam Mendes created a masterpiece from Alan Ball's script. The story itself is brilliant and inspiring as its follows Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) from his mundance existence to his mid-life crisis and, ultimately, to his death. The characters are developed and explored, the plot is constantly and unpredictably changing, and situations go from hilarious to ironic to melancholy in a matter of minutes. The cinematography is strikingly beautiful as they adroitly capture the reality of Lester's life and the desperation of his dreams.
But this isn't a movie review. Nor is it an account of all the things I love about the movie.
Rather, what I found most striking about the film was the character of Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley). Ricky, a young and allegedly unusual boy who goes to school with Lester's daughter Jane (Thora Birch), spends most of his time behind a video camera. Ricky's view of the world remains in his room, tapes spanning the lengths of shelves along his walls. Jane and her friend Angela (Mena Suvari, in roses above) discover that Ricky's new object of film is, in fact, Jane herself. Ricky explains to them that he isn't obessed with Jane, "I'm just curious." Jane, for her part, believes him. She comes to understand that when Ricky says he films a dead bird because it is beautiful, that is exactly what he means.
In his critical work "The Establishment of Physical Existence," Siegfried Kracauer asserts that the physical existence on camera is always portrayed through recording functions; that is, movement, the chase, dancing, nascent motion and inanimate objects all played an active role of demonstrating an object's/person's existence as a physical entity in film. Kracauer also says that, in addition to the omnipresent recording function, there exists on occasion the revealing function, a function that allows the viewer to discover something about the film, often revealing things typically unseen or unnoticed. He classifies these findings as discoveries of phenomena overwhelming consciousness, special modes of reality, and things normally unseen. Among those things normally unseen exist those "phenomena which figure among the blind spots of the mind; habit and prejudice prevent us from noticing them."
An example of said phenomena is the refuse. Kracauer says that "many objects remain unnoticed simply because it never occurs to us to look their way." Waste, trash, or dirt, those social undesirables are ignored because society has taught us to believe that they are neither beautiful nor worthy of any spectacle. Such is the case for the white plastic trash bag--ubiquitous, bland, stowed in your kitchen closet or littering the street.
But to Ricky Fitts, the white plastic trash bag is much more than just litter. The moment in American Beauty, famous for it's originality, begins with Ricky asking Jane, "You want to see the most beautiful thing I've ever filmed?"
This scene, perhaps one of the most beautiful and eloquent scenes in all of film history, is one that was inspired by small, white plastic bag that someone accidentally forgot to throw away. It'd be easy to believe that everyone else on the street had passed by the bag that day, save Ricky. It is likely, in that fact, that should any of us have stumbled upon such a scene, we would have done what everyone else did and left. Cinema, on the contrary, has the ability to change this. "Films make us undergo similar experiences a thousand times. They alienate our environment by exposing it," says Kracauer. We see things in film that we see often in real life, "and yet it is as if they were virgin impressions emerging from the abyss of traveling nearness." These quotidian artifacts become new, exciting, and beautiful in a single frame. It is not only a tribute to the director, cinematographer, and scriptwriter but film itself as an entity. We could talk about these things in life, pass a plastic bag around or set it free in the park on an overcast, windy afternoon. We could put our heads in it or carry it with our arms and still, the physical presence and beauty of the bag are not enough. As Kracauer tells us and Ricky shows us, only film has the ability to make truly aware and awed by the beauty of such things.
