So 90's It Hurts: American Beauty (part 2)

attack of the anachronistic fashionsIn re-watching American Beauty for the first time in several years, two things struck me. First, that Alan Ball is not a subtle writer, and second, the memory of just how much of an endless retrospective so much of the 90's really was. Especially in the latter half of the decade, a lot of pop culture concerned itself with what came before. Or rather, condensed versions of what came before. With the baby boomers officially taking the top seat in society, a great deal of the stories aimed at their demographic seemed designed to pat them on their backs and assure them that they weren't like their parents. American Beauty, as the ultimate boomer crisis film, is as much an indictment of the 1950's as it is a promotion of thoroughly 90's ideals.

Consider the chunk of the film's first act that introduces us to the home lives of the Burnham and Fitz families, as well as the school attended by Jane, Angela and Ricky. The Burnhams have the most uncomfortable dinners imaginable to the tune of Lawrence Welk's greatest hits while Lester mechanically asks Jane about school. At the Fitz residence, military John Wayne wannabe Frank sits on his vintage couch with his eerily disconnected wife watching Mickey Rooney movies on an antique set. And at the school, Jane and Angela find themselves accosted by two peers who look like they just stepped out of a production of Grease. The film hammers this point home over and over again: The cultural hallmarks of America in the 1950's are all horrible and soul-crushing.

But there's another side to American Beauty's nostalgia. While it actively rebels against the 50's, it also actively idealizes the late 60's and much of the 70's. One of today's filmmakers (maybe even Sam Mendes ten years older) would take steps to make Lester seem ridiculous for his quest to recapture his teenage years, but in the film as it stands he's clearly supposed to be some kind of hero.

Compare and contrast the two "driving while singing" scenes in the movie. The first finds Lester rolling down the highway smoking a joint and rocking along to "American Woman". Sure, he's silly in this scene, but he's also transforming into a happier person. The other finds Carolyn echoing "Rain On My Parade", only to be deflated by the sight of her husband's new muscle car sitting in the driveway.

The ironic part about American Beauty, the part that I don't think Ball and Mendes intended, is that the film is never as good, never as true, as its denouement. That dark, rainy night of lust and honesty is the only part of this shamelessly preachy movie that actually says something that makes sense outside the context of its own time. If American Beauty was just about the way our materialism and obligations imprison our actual desires, it would be a film for the ages, and for a solid 15 minutes it is. For the rest of its run, including those shocking final moments, American Beauty is rah-rah late 90's self-fulfillment in its ideology.

Pop culture in the 90's was about 80% a shrine to the Love Generation and 20% actual progress. Even when ostensibly new things like the rave scene came around, people were quick to attach them to hippie love-ins and acid tests. Excluding its timelessly surreal moments, American Beauty is a paean to a very condensed memory of a prominent time in US history. By being all about how much the 50's were awful and the 60's were great, it's actually as 90's as possible.