American Beauty and the Life Behind Things

I have no explanation for my resistance, but for some inexplicable reason a curious apathy kept me from watching this movie, even though it had won an Academy Award for “Best Picture” in 1999 and all the reviews I read supported that honor without fail. What is more puzzling is that I wanted to watch it, but repeatedly found myself backing off. Why?

Well, in an oddly prophetic way, I had an intuition the time wasn’t right. I have come to learn that for certain movies I seem to take an excessively patient route. Apparently, some psychological barrier, completely unconscious to me, must be navigated before I am ready. For instance, if I read that a movie is overly emotional, or contains some unnerving violence, I will feel a hesitation. “Schindler’s List” had that effect on me, and I still have not watched “Pulp Fiction” for the same reason. But at some point, some psychological alignment falls into place……then I’m ready.

Having said that, it was while having dinner recently with my nephew before a concert and talking about aesthetics in a general way that he asked if I had ever seen “American Beauty” and mentioned a scene from it that reminded him of me. I was surprised and curious at his suggestion, and after admitting that I had not seen it, he bought the movie and had it shipped to my house, being the friend that he is. Yet it still sat unwatched for several weeks…. that is until last night.

My first impression of the movie was every bit as poignant as he suggested, just as the scene that he alluded to did indeed mirror how I tend to experience the world. But before I jump into all of that, let me first explain this is not intended to be a review of the film in any way, where I attempt to explain the plot dynamics, or the narrative arch that may bend one way or another. No, what stunned me and what I want to convey here involves the surprising depth of one the main characters, Ricky, played by Wes Bentley, which hits the bullseye for my intentions here. But to understand what I mean by that will require something of a digression.

The film is actually an impressive exposition into the psychology of storytelling, and by that I mean the stories we tell ourselves…. about ourselves. We are highly social creatures after all, who evolved to be excessively individualistic, with egos whose job it is to assert or protect that individual. And in light of that, we also tend to be neurotic…and that is where storytelling comes into the fray. We talk to ourselves, incessantly, crafting storylines about the people we come in contract with, or the memorable moments we experience, all in order to properly frame our story with purpose and meaning, and since every story needs a compelling hero, we naturally insert ourselves at the center of the drama, whether we realize it or not.

I believe this psychological bug in our software is the core theme of the movie, as I see it, as each of the main characters are shown, unconsciously to themselves, living out their own fictional hero versions, projecting a version of themselves they want others to see and marvel at. In fact, the main storyline of the movie shows Lester (Kevin Spacey) completely flipping his life upside down in order to become his own hero. Each main character desperately wants to be identified with their own make-believe version of themselves. The movie ends with us witnessing the collapse of each of their individual facades as they are each forced to face the uncomfortable truth about themselves, which ultimately is where true maturity begins.

I mentioned “maturity” there with clear intent, because there were two characters who appeared to be immune to the immaturity displayed by the “grownups” all around them, and seemed to be in relatively full possession of themselves, the above mentioned ‘Ricky’, and Jane, the teenage daughter of Lester. It is their unique characters and their growing affection for one another that I believe anchored the film to something solid. Their personalities were grounded, suggesting a type of gravity that worked as a counterweight to the disfunction all around them.

To begin, Jane, who is played by Thora Birch, is a vaguely attractive, unassuming girl going through the typical anxieties of adolescents while also dealing with the disfunction of watching her parent’s marriage implode before her eyes. Thrown into that mix is a new family moving in next door, which included the intense, yet soulful “Ricky”, who we quickly discover enjoys filming people; while they are in their home, while talking in their yard, or whether they even know they are being filmed at all. He seems to be completely captivated by what is hidden below the surface of things, the stories lurking beneath the masks worn by of everyone he encountered, their projections of self. It is due to that particular focus that he realized early on that Jane was different, and was spellbound by what he saw.

In one unique scene that stood out early on occurred when Ricky was filming a dead bird lying on the ground at their high school, when Jane and Angela (Jane’s best friend) suddenly walked up. To no ones surprise at that point in the film, it was the highly sarcastic Angela who asked what he was doing. After telling them both the obvious, that he was filming the dead bird, Angela was aghast and indignantly demanded to know “why?” He then pulls his camera up to film her, and simply answers, “because it’s beautiful.” 

Angela, standing in for how most everyone  would view such a morbid notion, is appalled, and begins hurling insults at him, but he was immune to her kind. His only interest was Jane, so as Angela continued her rant, he simply turned his camera away from her to isolate Jane, whose quiet nature was eyeing him with a look that could best be described as puzzled tenderness. I could sense that even though she didn’t quite know what to make of him, that she did understand, at some intuitive level, that he represented an answer. The question to which would come later.

Yet as poignant as the scene was to their budding relationship, the aesthetic power of it was due to a visual technique employed by the filmmaker, which presented the scene from Ricky’s hand-held camera, and by doing so gave the us a completely different vantage point to contemplate what was actually happening. The cognitive effect was stunning, because the audience was able to see it all unfold from his camera, which by extension was through his eyes and what held his interest. There we see the scene play out purely from his point of view. For instance, as he steers his camera away from Angela’s snarling rebuke, her voice simply fades away as he turns the camera toward the only thing that did interest him. Once he has Jane in frame, her inner depth was immediately apparent as we see her contemplating what she just heard him say. But unlike Angela, there was no rebuke in her eyes, no condemnation, and no judgment; there was only a thoughtful curiosity, which underscored the emotional maturity that Ricky suspected. The dichotomy between the two girls during that camera change could not have been more strikingly different.

In another prominent scene, Jane had invited Angela over for a sleepover, and while sitting in her room late at night, talking about typical teenage girl stuff, Angela heard something at the window and looked out to see that someone, Ricky, had spelled Jane’s name in the driveway below using candles. She immediately suspected that Ricky was filming them from his room next door and decided to tease him by dancing very suggestively in the window. But Ricky, who was indeed filming them, had no interest in her. Through his camera’s eye, he could see Jane’s face being reflected in a mirror from the back of the room and zoomed in to capture her, totally ignoring the peep show Angela was offering. He was completely spellbound by Jane’s repose.

I need to pause here to clearly frame what Ricky’s character is giving us, because it is no small feature of the film. Far from being a mere curiosity, I believe it is precisely what writer Alan Ball is attempting to convey, to define a new paradigm for our notion of beauty.

To emphasize my point there, let’s move to the scene that my nephew had mentioned at dinner. It was at this point in the story that Ricky felt comfortable enough to expose Jane to a deeper side of himself and asked if she wanted to see “the most beautiful thing that he had ever filmed.” He then takes her to his living room and plays a film clip of a plastic bag that was caught in a swirling wind, and this is how he described it to her.

“It was one of those days…. when it’s a minute away from snowing….and there’s this…. electricity in the air. You can almost feel it, and this bag……was just dancing with me, like a little kid begging me to play with it. That’s the day I realized that there is this……entire life behind things……. film is a poor excuse I know, but it helps me remember. I need to remember. Sometimes there is so much beauty in the world…. I feel like I can’t take it….and my heart ………feels like it’s going to cave in.”

Of course, I have no way to accurately describe the mental pyrotechnic show that unleashed itself in my mind. Time sat down for a breather while I was left watching……or rather feeling the scene pouring into me, down to the marrow. The headspace my nephew had suggested months earlier had played out right before my eyes as Ricky described the moment with the key line, “…that is the day I realized there is this entire life behind things.” 

Allow me to color that in a bit since it may not be obvious. Years ago I recall a pictorial exposition of Japanese flowers in “National Geographic” with a caption that stated, “the Japanese have a word, “AWARE” for the feelings that arise from the beauty of an ephemeral thing”, which for my money carries the same definition of beauty as Ricky’s “…the life behind things,” meaning to see beyond our immediate perceptions, to see the world not as a collection of mere objects, but to bring our full intuitions on line so we can become ‘aware’ of a different language being spoken, to see the poetry of the thing, just as Ricky was able to captured a plastic bag “dancing with him.” For me there is a deep mystery at play here and I believe the key is to lean into that mystery and recalibrate our assumptions. The eyes can only report what they see, so it is up to us to enlarge the canvas, so to speak, to capture the wonder on display.

Another poignant example of this line of thinking comes from the pen of Walt Whitman from “Leaves of Grass” who wrote, “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.” There Whitman poignantly described his awareness of “the life behind” a simple blade of grass. Nietzsche was also well acquainted with this aesthetic ideal, as noted when he wrote:

“I want to see as beautiful what is essential in things, then I shall become one who makes things beautiful”.

Again, this is precisely where Ricky’s aestheticism comes into clear view as he was able to see, and become aware of, what was “essential” to the dead bird or the kinetic energy surrounding a plastic bag caught in the wind. And it was precisely this ability to see beyond the surface of things that allowed him to see the unique, unspoiled repose in Jane, who is the real beauty in the film.

Before seeing the movie and being introduced to Ricky’s character, I didn’t have an effective way to define what it is that I do; this lifelong, never-ending crusade of searching, thinking, and writing about all the things that….for lack of a better phrase, turns me on. But I believe I have a firmer place to plant my feet now. I am a “beauty hunter”, or as I was once described, a “passion junkie”.

But before I move on to close out this note, I need to mention another line from Ricky’s plastic bag scene that I did not include in the earlier quote. I intentionally separated this idea because it’s an important consideration on its own merit, so please stay with me.

At the end of Ricky’s digression to Jane, he explains, “…..film is a poor excuse, I know, but it helps me remember, I need to remember.” Now I can’t be sure, but I feel pretty confident that no one else paid much attention to that line, and why would they? What did it mean to the film? Nothing. It did not advance the story in any way, nor redefine Ricky’s character in any important direction. It appeared to be an afterthought, a throwaway line.

So why did he “need to remember”?

Well for me, that idea exposed a critical undercurrent that I noticed in his character. Let me explain, children see the world through their imaginations, adults see the world through their concerns, and in that asymmetry, most adults fail to see so much of the beauty and wonder the world is freely offering. All of the key adults in the movie, like our own to a large degree, had lost that ability and could no longer see with eyes full of wonder. THAT, I believe, is the reason for Ricky’s need to “remember,” which is precisely the role my journal plays. To that point, it is the fear that if I am unable to remember all the beauty that I’ve seen, felt, read, and thought, that I’ll eventually misplace and outgrow the best part of me……that I’ll mature (in the pejorative sense) and become someone else as a result, someone with other concerns and other interests, and will begin to see the world with dull eyes. 

My love for all things artistic is consuming purely due to the inner landscapes they expose, so I’ve spent most of my adult life in a sort of anxious, almost manic desire to capture all the beauty that I come across in the belief that if I don’t, an important part of me will be lost and never recovered. Expressing it all in this journal has been precisely that attempt, much as Ricky’s video collection. This is my way of staying young.

At the close of the movie, Kevin Spacey’s character is killed, in typical Hollywood form, when he then narrates the following lines from his afterlife. The fact that his character narrates these lines is just a plot convenience due to his death, because these are really the views of Ricky, not Lester, or more accurately, to their real author, Alan Ball.

“….I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to be mad when there is so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, and my heart feels like a balloon that is about to burst. Then I remember to relax, and to stop trying to hold on to it…..then it flows through me, like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single second of my stupid little life.”

“Relax, and to stop trying to hold on to it, then it flows through me.”  That line struck me like a thunderbolt and has ricocheted around in my head non-stop, because it suggests an idea I that have considered for several years that I call “showing through”. It’s the idea that this lifetime of mine spent as a passion junkie should reveal something about me at a fundamental level. The thought is that at some point all of this must add up to something, that all the beauty that has stunned me to silence, or words that have put me on my knees, all of it, must show through somehow in the way I carry myself and therefore be evident in some intuited way. I cannot shake the idea that everything that I have poured into my heart and mind for all these years should somehow be visible to those who know me. I mean if I’m living authentically, then it should just seep out into my life, which is precisely what the line above refers to, “relax…..and let it flow through me.” 

I have quite a long way to go, I know, and have little idea how to reach the intended destination, but now that my son is grown, and the responsibilities on my time have eased, I can clearly see myself spending the rest of my life learning to be that conduit.