Juan You - American Beauty (Personal Blog #3)

American Beauty is a 1999 film that I saw a long time ago. But I remember it even today because of it's attitude on life.
In the film, one of the most pivotal scenes occurs when Jane, the protagonist's daughter, meets Ricky, their neighbor, and he shows her “”the most beautiful thing [I’ve] ever filmed”. You would expect it to be birds on a branch, or flowers surrounded by water, or something to that extent. Instead, however, he shows her a clip of a plastic bag, moving with the wind on the street.
Ricky's justification for this scene he recorded was the fact that this flying bag symbolized that “there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there’s no reason to be afraid – ever.”
He believes in life in all things, and that “...sometimes there…so much…. beauty…in the world…. I feel like I can’t take it… and my heart… is just going to…. cave in.”
He feels this sacred and spiritual presence in everything around him, and this makes him appreciate everything. He essentially lives in a transcendental reality filled with beauty and transformation.
This experience actually happened in real-life to the script writer, Alan Ball. He explains his experience with this plastic bag as a “transcendental experience of God”. It was as if the bag was moving on it's own, with it's own purpose and life. Somewhat like his experience with the sacred, as if God was trying to tell him something, trying to communicate with him.
The main character of the film, Lester Burnham, Jane's father, is an ad salesman. He, like his daughter, eventually has a clash with the world of the divine, the sacred. They are touched by this world of beauty. At the beginning of the movie, he explains that his life is monotonous. He has a cubicle job that is boring, a lost marriage with a wife that has little to offer him, and he feels that “In a way, I’m dead already.” But when he sees his daughter's friend, Angela, cheer-leading at school, he sees beauty and starts to have sexual fantasies about her. She, in a sense, is sacred to him. Because of her, he changes, blackmails his boss and quits to work at a fast-food restaurant.
The beginning of the lives of Jane and Lester are shown with Lester happily married with his family. But along the lines of that, they lost their happy lives in the world of the profane. And it takes their vision of beauty from something or somewhere else to regain this happiness.
Lester is awakened, just like Ricky and Jane, to beauty. And not of sexual beauty, but rather of sacred beauty. Though Lester fantasizes about her, he realizes in the end that Angela is a child – she is inexperienced and does not understand sacred and transcendental beauty.
Perhaps it is looking at a certain person that encourages this transformation. In the film, when Jane and Ricky walk home, Ricky explains to her that he once saw a dead homeless woman, and when he gazed at her lifeless body, he says, “it’s like God is looking right back at you just for a second, and if you’re careful, you can look right back”. He sees a certain beauty in it, and it is of the transcendental kind.