essay on american beauty

“American Beauty” Film Critique and Scene Analysis Essay

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Gradesaver (1) talks about the themes in American Beauty, which include happiness, identity, American culture, love, freedom, family, and sexuality. Happiness is something elusive for most of the characters except Ricky and Lester, at the end of the movie. The lack of identity in the film led to most people’s troubles. The movie also shows how values inherent in American culture, such as consumerism, youthful innocence, and homophobia can be elusive. American beauty stresses the importance of finding love and embracing freedom, even though these values must be balanced. It questions the notion of unconditional love for one’s family and challenges sexual stereotypes.

Deschler (1) also discusses the main themes of the movie, which include materialism, appearance versus reality, denial, control, loneliness, change, and American beauty. The theme of materialism is best stressed by Carolyn who cannot allow herself to maintain an intimate relationship with her family. Conversely, American beauty, as a theme is evident through the search for beauty by Lester and appreciation of the same by Ricky. Other people who fit into the conventions of beauty, such as Angela, may have ugly characters. The author also has suggestions on how to improve the film. She suggested the removal of Ricky’s camera as well as the need to be grateful regardless of the circumstances as most people’s situations were not so great.

The first scene chosen for analysis is the last one, which runs for approximately five minutes and ends the movie. It starts with Lester and Angela, who have terminated what would have been a sexual encounter after Lester realizes that Angela is a virgin. Lester asks about Jane, and Angela gives him a positive report. Thereafter, she leaves for the bathroom. Lester walks to the counter and picks up a picture of his wife, child, and himself. He seems overcome by a feeling of satisfaction when he looks at them. An unidentified person walks in and points a gun at Lester’s head. One then hears a gunshot and sees blood over the wall. Jane and Ricky find Lester dead although his eyes look happy. Carolyn falls in the closet and cries bitterly while the Colonel is seen with an incriminating shirt and missing gun. This scene ends with a voiceover and flashbacks of Lester’s life.

The ending of the movie is an ideal illustration of what a director can accomplish with the right kind of cinematography. When Lester dies, the audience does not see him getting shot, the camera moves away from him and focuses on a wall, which gets splattered by blood. It was necessary to use such a technique probably because the author wanted to spare the audience from too much violence, but still, show that Lester was dead. Additionally, the film revisits Lester’s death through a myriad of perspectives. This technique is essential in showing how the different characters of the film were affected by it. In one instance, Colonel Fitts is seen with a missing gun in his cabinet. In another, one sees Carolyn then Lester’s thoughts before his death. His perspective was given the greatest level of attention because it would carry the film’s themes.

The scene is packed with information, characters, and plot twists. The scriptwriter found a way of effortlessly bringing all these elements together. As Lester thinks about his life, one can see a fallen bird as well as a paper bag rubbing against some leaves in Ricky’s video. These are seemingly simple things, but Lester finds pleasure and beauty in them. Deschler (14) explains that the film teaches people to appreciate everyday miracles. An item may appear ugly initially but there is something beautiful about it if one takes the time to find it. Lester has finally taken responsibility for his happiness and realized that there is beauty in everything; even a dead bird or a paper bag. Additionally, the scene does not extend Lester’s death to the family’s encounter with the police. It ends with Lester’s voice-over about his life. The director did not want to turn it into a murder mystery; he was merely interested in furthering the new-found freedom and identity in the protagonist. Some critics claim that the movie ended tragically, but this is not completely true. The last scene reiterates the importance of living life fully. Lester’s moment of death was a much better situation than the dispassionate and sedated life he lived before. He was trapped in a life that lacked meaning and passion. However, when he finally awoke to his reality, he took responsibility for his happiness. The realization took place a few minutes before his death but it made all the difference. The last scene was quite powerful because it captured this message in a satisfactory and unassuming way.

The second scene chosen for analysis is the opening scene. It takes place at the beginning of the movie and Jane, Lester’s daughter is the point of focus. She is being filmed by an unidentified male while talking about her relationship with her father. One then hears the voice of the male videographer when he promises to terminate Lester’s life.

The cinematic technique is slightly different from the rest of the film, but brilliant nonetheless. The film-within-a-film creates an organic and relatable quality in the motion picture. It makes audiences relate to Jane because she looks right into the camera when she speaks her mind. Furthermore, the scene still interweaves her assertions with those of her unidentified cameramen.

The director accomplished plenty of things through this scene. First, he was able to foreshadow Lester’s death through Jane’s words. It also created suspense as one would want to know who the person behind the camera was. This suspense was carried through to the last scene of the movie when Lester was shot. One wonders whether it was the person behind the camera who killed him or if it was someone else. The producer thwarts the audiences’ expectations by using a very different person to kill Lester. It can be argued that one of the most powerful strategies employed by this director is to build the audience’s expectations and then frustrate them at the last minute.

This scene also shows how the stories of some of the characters in the narrative are interconnected. For instance, one learns that Jane’s father fancies her best friend, and she resents him for it. Additionally, one also realizes that Lester, Lester’s wife, and Jane have a dysfunctional relationship because Lester lusts after a teenager, while Carolyn’s obsessive nature contributed to this. Jane is dissatisfied with her family and wants to get away from them. The scene underscores the importance of family as Jane’s unhappiness stems from its dysfunctional nature (Gradesaver 7). It also sets the pace for the intrigue that follows in the rest of the narrative.

Deschler, Brittany. Critical Analysis of American Beauty. 2002. Web.

Gradesaver. American Beauty Themes 1999 . Web.

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Essay; American Beauty (Circa 1955)

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By Richard Ford

• April 9, 2000

As ''Revolutionary Road'' approaches its 40th year in print, it seems odd to imagine readers opening it for the first time. So primary and forceful have been this novel's appeal and effects upon two generations of us that to not already know Richard Yates's great book seems incongruous, and handing it over cold feels clumsy, a bit like introducing a sage old friend to a precocious new friend: we almost would rather not, for all the crucial things that cannot be thought and said again. And yet of course we must, since great books, like great friends, are to be shared.

Suffice it to say that among readers of American fiction since the beginning of the 1960's, ''Revolutionary Road,'' published to acclaim in 1961, has become a kind of cultish standard. And this is especially true among writers, who have kept its reputation burnished by praising it, teaching it, sometimes unwittingly emulating its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings -- about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals. We marvel at its consummate writerliness, its almost simple durability as a purely made thing of words that defeats all attempts at classification. Realism, naturalism, social satire -- the standard critical bracketry -- all go begging before this splendid book. ''Revolutionary Road'' is simply ''Revolutionary Road,'' and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1926, and died in 1992 in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Birmingham, Ala. He did not attend college after high school; served in the Army during World War II; was twice divorced and was the father of three daughters. For a time after the war he worked as a publicity writer for the Remington Rand Corporation, and for a brief period in the late 60's served as a speechwriter for Senator Robert Kennedy. But for the most part Yates was solely a writer, only occasionally supplementing his income by teaching and by writing for the movies. During his writing life he wrote seven novels (including ''Revolutionary Road'') and two books of short stories, many of which have been anthologized and are richly admired by readers as models of the form.

Yates -- who was both famously decorous and famously plain-spoken -- once remarked to an interviewer that he felt he had written too little in his life, and that his was the misfortune to have written his best book first. And although over his 30 years of public life as a writer Yates's reputation rose, then fell, then rose again, ultimately distinguishing him as that ambiguous thing, a ''writer's writer,'' one who does not make it (as did his contemporaries Cheever, Updike, Walker Percy) into the permanent, big-money main arena of American literary fashion, it is also true that nothing he wrote came near the achievement and acclaim of ''Revolutionary Road,'' which ''lost'' the 1961 National Book Award to Walker Percy's novel ''The Moviegoer.''

The story line of ''Revolutionary Road'' can be summarized succinctly:

In the spring and summer of 1955, in the western Connecticut bedroom community of Revolutionary Hill Estates, the lives of the young Wheeler family -- April, Frank and two minor children -- become essentially and violently unglued, never ever to be as they were.

To a casual passer-by, the Wheelers' lives might not seem so different from their neighbors' -- the pleasures and anxieties being the available, expectable ones: participation in the community theater group, tipsy, twilight dinners with other like-minded home-owners, easy shots to and from the commuter line, the comfort of being indistinguishably in the culture while staying solidly in command of life's fundamental choices; and -- less cheerily -- a wan inability to keep the frustrations of youth's passage precisely at bay, the fatigue of the workplace grind, the puzzlement of keeping life interesting and vigorous while maintaining the nuclear unit intact.

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An American Beauty

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An American Beauty: A Novel of the Gilded Age Inspired by the True Story of Arabella Huntington Who Became the Richest Woman in the Country

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Examine the importance of the setting of New York in the book, given its historical context . How does the place and time influence the narrative , and how does Abé use it to enhance her storytelling?

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Compare and contrast Catherine, Belle, and Elizabeth with respect to their choices and capabilities as mothers. What are their relationships with their respective children like? What events and factors influence these relationships?

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A narrative approach to Sam Mendes' American Beauty: what bodies have to tell.

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‘American Beauty’ Redux

Originally released in 1993, Dave Hickey’s “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty” posed a radical idea to the art world: lose a bit of the self-congratulatory political posturing, pretty please, and get back to the business of sensuous beauty. Hickey did this, in part, by using his razor-sharp prose to extol the virtues of images that are not for the faint of heart. (See the notorious Mapplethorpe photograph of a man and a fist — and use your imagination.) The art world responded as it typically does when it’s told to drop the attitude. It reveled in being offended —while simultaneously making the slim tome (the original’s only 64 pages) the de facto cocktail talk of gallery openings and dinner parties.

Despite protest from puritan critics, the book quickly — and ironically — became an out-of-print, black market beauty in its own right. Almost 15 years later, Hickey has re-released “The Invisible Dragon” (The University of Chicago Press) in a revised and expanded format, including a new essay titled “American Beauty.” Below, Hickey sounds off on his love of boredom, the Octo-Mom, and being the thorn in the art world’s side once again.

Out-of-print, “The Invisible Dragon” was selling for upwards of $500. By reissuing it, are you denying its existence as an obscure object of desire?

To be honest, the book is not worth $500, and the people who like it don’t have $500, and it was all beginning to feel a bit prissy. I did not become a writer not to publish, and I liked the last essay, “American Beauty.” So, I decided to get over myself. Last time, I was blamed for messing up the “non-commercial art” scam. This time, no doubt, I will be blamed for the market excess that I deplore.

In your essay “Nothing Like the Son,” you describe Mapplethorpe as cultivating a type of tawdry beauty. Is our culture ripe again for the refined beauties to go away and for the Mapplethorpe-esque gutter flowers to emerge again? Tawdry beauty is not beautiful. It is always an undeniable and subversive candidate for the job. Two old favorites, “Flaming Creatures” and “Scorpio Rising” are, indeed, back on the scene. My friend Jeff Burton, the photographer (not the stock car driver), does pretty good tawdry beauty.

Do you like Andy Warhol’s theory of beautiful monotony?

I am, I admit, a devotee of boring. I like Barry Lyndon, Anthony Trollope, Barnett Newman and The Weather Channel. I do not like bores, however, so there goes Chelsea. This distinction between boring and bores comes courtesy of Auden. It is a good one.

You’re writing a book called “Pagan America.” Does this mean you’re suggesting an idea of pagan beauty?

I posit that the United States is a pagan republic — insofar as we endow objects and people with power by social consensus, from Prada and Obama to the work of Richard Tuttle. We pagans sacrifice to gain the power of their incarnate representation. The history of beauty is the history of our residual and never vanquished paganism.

So do we care about ideas of “inner beauty” anymore?

I don’t have an inner life beyond a few wispy fantasies about Catherine Deneuve.

According to Adorno’s theories of beauty, natural beauty was eclipsed by “art beauty.”

Artificial beauty signifies a social agenda. It seeks to change the world — to take it by surprise. Trees don’t disappear if we don’t find them beautiful. Art does, or did, until very recently.

In many ways, the cruelty of beauty has eclipsed all humanity. Plastic surgery, for example.

Plastic surgery is really about the triumph of interiority. It is driven by the engine of bourgeois social change: Match the external facts with internal aspiration. I look like a frog but inside I’m a prince, so maybe a tuck and just a little lift. It’s easier to get it together and sell the whole frog-prince thing. It worked for Henry Kissinger.

Who is more beautiful: Damien Hirst or the Octo-mom?

I can think of eight human creatures who are predisposed to love Octo-Mom. Hirst, I don’t know.

Are you OK with being “the beauty guy” again, for a little while? Seems like there are worse things to be.

Why not? For a while, I was simultaneously the ‘Mapplethorpe guy” and the “Norman Rockwell guy.” I asked myself. “Who would still be a famous artist if the art world disappeared?” I came up with Robert and Rockwell. Whatever is a little off kilter, I’m your guy.

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American Beauties: Drawings from the Golden Age of Illustration Essay

The Marketing of the American Beauty

Edward Penfield (1866–1925). Young woman sitting beside table holding umbrella, 1910-1925 . Watercolor, gouache, and ink over graphite on paper. Advertisement for Hart, Schaffner, & Marx clothes. Prints & Photographs Division (17)

The unprecedented success of the “Gibson Girl” in the 1890s unleashed a visual barrage of American beauties which lasted throughout the Golden Age of American Illustration and continues to this very day. The different types of women presented in this exhibition demonstrate not only a nationally evolving ideal of beauty, but also a concentrated effort on the part of publishers, advertisers, and the artists themselves to develop an easily identifiable, aesthetically pleasing product. It is no wonder the marketers increasingly turned to the allure of the American female; in the early part of the twentieth century women were thought to control 80 percent or more of the consumer dollars expended in the United States. Accordingly, advertisers turned to images of feminine mystique to which consumers could aspire (and hopefully emulate) through the purchase of goods and services. Men were also charmed by these images, however, and magazine publishers used the attraction of pretty faces on their covers to boost impulse buying for their all-important newsstand sales.

But the ideal of beauty that was being sold in the ads and on these covers was quite narrowly focused. It is not by coincidence that most of the works in this exhibition, from the Gibson Girl to Fabry's Cinema Arts cover of Katherine Hepburn portray women of the upper or upper-middle class. Women of color or of the working classes did not have the disposable income to be targeted, and so are rarely, if ever, seen in these illustrations. Advertisers instead used various tableaux of wealth and modernity, which the middle-class consumer could then enter through purchase of a given product. Visual repetition also played a part in these scenarios: the trappings of the “Holeproof Hosiery Girl“ (whom Coles Phillips helped to create) and the aloof style of McClelland Barclay's “Fisher Body Girl“ could be recognized at a single glance. In the advertisement shown on the previous page (lower), the consumer is invited to share the risqué modernity of Edward Penfield's beauty, shown wearing a man's overcoat at what appears to be the breakfast table, with the familiar Hart, Schaffner, & Marx emblem on the wall behind her.

John Held, Jr. (1889–1958). The Girl Who Gave Him the Cold Shoulder , ca. 1925. Gouache on illustration board. Cover of Life . Prints & Photographs Division (16)

Magazine publishers were also quick to see how the American beauty could enhance their packaging. But beyond the aesthetic attraction of the pretty faces, art editors used these images to establish an instantly recognizable product that would attract a particular demographic to a given magazine. The sophisticated dress and elongated lines of the women portrayed on Vanity Fair covers directly appealed to the modern taste of that magazine's urban, upper-class patrons, while the exotic appeal of the “Benda Girl” proved a better fit with the middle-class masses who read Hearst's International . Repetition served its purpose in covers as it did in ads—in what became the predecessor to today's “Cosmo girl,” William Randolph Hearst used Harrison Fisher's drawings on virtually every cover of his Cosmopolitan magazine from 1912 until the artist's death in 1934. Likewise, a mere glance at a John Held flapper alerted the readers of the 1920s that they were probably looking at an issue of either Life or Judge magazine. As advertisers and art editors turned to various styles of female imagery to define their look, the “Pretty Girl” artists themselves also carved out stylistic niches that would guarantee them a steady stream of commissions and royalties. Following the remarkable success of Charles Dana Gibson's stylishly rendered “Gibson Girl,” marketed in magazines, books, prints, wallpaper, and even silverware, a number of illustrators began to turn their talents to the portrayal of American beauty. Each of these artists developed a highly recognizable style suitable for a variety of merchandise. Fisher created his colorfully drawn upper-class women to be used on not only a myriad of magazine covers, but art prints and postcards as well. Wladyslaw Benda's almond-eyed “Benda Girl,” with her soft gauzy look of layered charcoal, watercolor and pastels, was seen in covers, advertisements, and story illustrations. John Held disseminated his flappers more widely any model since the Gibson Girl; they were printed in books, magazines, and ads, and used on cocktail glasses, card games, puzzles and more.

All of these illustrators (and many more) became famous by creating a recognizable brand that served them well for many years. But fashion is nothing if not fickle; the concept of beauty soon evolved, and these images became outdated. Thus we see the pen-and-ink drawings of the confident Gibson Girl being replaced by Fisher's brightly colored “American Girls” or Phillips's fadeaways. These in turn give way to Held's stick-figure flappers, which then fall out of favor by the 1930s. But although the ideal of beauty has proven fleeting, the allure of a pretty face is timeless, and marketers will continue to sell feminine beauty as long as the American public is buying.

Richard Kelly, founder of the Kelly Collection of American Illustration, has worked extensively with the collections of graphic art in the Library's Prints and Photographs Division.

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American Beauty

American beauty as melodrama anonymous.

Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999) is a good example of melodrama’s presence within the modern American film industry. Its moments of comedy and tragedy are a result of its essential melodramatic intentions. However, it differs from classical melodrama in the sense that the idea of maintaining a nuclear family is not an important theme.

The film starts off in a style that can be considered “film noir-esque”, similar to that of Billy Wilder’s 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard in which we hear the voice of our protagonist Lester Burnham in a voice over. “I’ll be dead in a year,” he says. “In a way, I’m dead already.” This solemn introduction by Lester Burnham parallels the introduction of Sunset Boulevard when we hear the voice over of William Holden narrating the story from the dead protagonist’s perspective. Similarly, both American Beauty and Sunset Boulevard are told in a flashback sequence of events all taking place in the recent past.

Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, the protagonist who is fed up with the lack of respect from his wife Carolyn and daughter Jane. As the film progresses, we learn more and more about Lester, while following him on a journey to achieve happiness. In one of the first sequences of the film, Lester...

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Body Image — American Beauty Standards

American Beauty Standards

• Categories: American Culture Body Image Gender Discrimination

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Words: 555 |

Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 555 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

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The evolution of american beauty standards, the impact of american beauty standards, promoting a more inclusive definition of beauty.

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