The winner of the 1999 Academy Award for Best Picture, American Beauty, brilliantly illustrates Tocqueville's point. Many of the characters manifest that sadness Tocqueville observed more than a hundred years ago, despite the incredible material and technological gains that have been made in the time since Tocqueville visited these shores. Many of the characters yield to those "aspects of our character" that "isolate Americans one from another." And none of those characters are free.

On the surface, American Beauty is a story about an American everyman, Lester Burnham, a schlump who does not even have loveability going for him. The love in his marriage has seemingly faded, estrangement exists between him and his daughter, and his work is a passionless means to an end. During the course of the film, Lester adopts responsibility for his present. Throughout, Lester's wife, Carolyn, sees herself as a martyr for her career and family, deserving far more from her life. She finds solace in the arms of the Real Estate King, her business competitor, and is introduced to the power that only firing a gun can excite. Their daughter Jane is locked in a power struggle with her friend Angela, who entertains out loud notions of having sex with Lester. Ricky Fitts, Jane's neighbor and eventual companion, is caught himself, between Colonel Fitts, his angry father, and a mother who virtually sleepwalks through life.

American Beauty opens with an aerial view of the neighborhood where Lester Burnham lives. His voice soars over the trees as he tells us that in less than a year he will be dead, and in some ways he is dead already. When we first see Lester, he moves from the rectangle of his bed to the box of a shower stall; he is framed behind a window, then uncomfortably curled up in the back seat of his wife's SUV; a sign in his office cubicle reads 'Look Closer'; then we see him confronted by a newly-hired efficiency expert who tells him he must justify why he is valuable to the company. Lester is a prisoner of his house, his job, and his life, and in many ways, himself.

His life has all the trappings of the American dream. Only problem is, the material benefits of his life are all he has and he knows it. "Never before has the Nation (and the world)," writes Cornel West, "been so seduced by markets and so hungry for spirituality."³ And like Lester, most of the other characters are isolated, "one from another."

In many ways the film is about reaching out, one to another, and reestablishing lost connections—though in many cases it is seemingly too late to do so. Lester reaches out to Carolyn to ask her what has happened to their marriage; Carolyn reaches out to their daughter, Jane, attempting to explain that Carolyn's drive for material success is motivated by her desire to give Jane a better life than she had; Lester reaches out to Jane, as well, hoping to find out what is happening in her life; Ricky reaches out to Jane offering her friendship and more; Lester reaches out to Angela once he realizes what he was about to do in making love with her; Colonel Fitts reaches out to Ricky, standing in the doorway one evening, but is unable to muster the courage to talk with his son; Lester reaches out to Colonel Fitts when it becomes obvious that the Colonel thought he would reciprocate the Colonel's homosexual feelings. In the spiritual journey—"a quest for transcendence"⁴—expressed by American Beauty, one is awakened to the qualities of empathy, compassion, love, idealism, and dignity.

Clearly, Lester's spiritual awakening is not of the "what would Jesus do" variety. Lester's spiritual journey is only a spiritual journey retroactively; only at the end of the film can one account for the bizarre journey Lester undertakes. The beginning of the journey occurs when his gaze falls on his daughter Jane's friend, Angela, while the two perform a cheerleading routine. He is immediately captivated by Angela's beauty. Her beauty is a catalyst for a series of dream sequences that, although might on the surface be read as elaborate pornographic fantasies involving Angela, take on a more mystical quality with the continual appearance of red rose petals. Angela is thus a catalyst for Lester's awakening to the possibility of beauty in his life. He fantasizes about Angela covered in petals of roses; petals of roses that are, significantly, Carolyn's roses, grown with "Miracle Gro and coffee grounds."

In her book On Beauty and Being Fair, Elaine Scarry suggests that truth and beauty are allied because beauty "ignites the desire for truth."⁵ "The beautiful person or thing incites in us the longing for truth because it provides . . . an introduction . . . to the state of certainty yet does not itself satiate our desire for certainty since beauty, sooner or later, brings us into contact with our own capacity for making errors."⁶ Lester's journey is about his discovery of his own capacity for making errors about beauty, about truth, and about freedom and of a longing for certainty that is, in fact, satiated at the end of the film.

The path Lester is on seems profanely secular; his further advancement occurs when Ricky offers him some hydroponically-grown marijuana—the joint of destiny. While he increases his muscle mass—prompted to do so after hearing Angela tell Jane that he'd look hot with more muscles—he expands his mind and releases his spirit, making some radical decisions in the process. Faced with dismissal from his job, he turns the tables on his employer and successfully blackmails a year's free salary and benefits to send him on his way. When he trades his Toyota Camry for a 1970 Pontiac Firebird, we glimpse the phoenix rising out of the ashes of his old life. He takes a job with the "least possible amount of responsibility" at Mr. Smiley, a fast-food hamburger restaurant. Lester has taken the power of his life into his own hands, but does not yet know what to do with that power—as attested by the moment when, frustrated with his family, he throws a plate of food across the dinner table and onto the wall.

Through the film we see Lester growing increasingly distant from and dissatisfied by the material realm that his wife fully embraces. He wanders into the confusing interplay of spiritual and material desire. He is a piece of modern America, the same place where magazine stands offer Parabola and Sports Illustrated, the Monthly Aspectarian is only a shelf away from Better Homes and Gardens, and the queen of talk shows, Oprah Winfrey, crusades to raise spiritual consciousness through TV. The desire to "have it all"—house, SUV, health club membership, instant access to anybody and anything thanks to pagers, cell phones, and palm pilots—and that sense of "dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path that may lead to it" compete with the nagging feeling that we really should be doing something more, living for something more. There is a hunger for something more. And while that might be true of all of the characters of American Beauty, a series of events makes the object of Lester's quest obvious to him.

It is only when Lester meets Angela that he is able to break free of the constraints his monotone life. While leaving his job and embracing exercise and marijuana constitute further attempts to liberate himself, these serve as false freedoms that do not lead him toward enduring truths. They are expressions of freedom and of being unconstrained, but they are not yet freedom itself.

Lester achieves freedom only at the end of the film, by coming to see what Ricky already sees. Beauty is everywhere. One of the first images Ricky records in the film is Jane, not Angela. Ricky has managed to look beyond what asserts itself as beautiful to find what is truly beautiful. Elaine Scarry called "our very aspiration for truth," beauty's "legacy."⁷ "It creates, without itself fulfilling, the aspiration for enduring certitude."⁸

When Lester discovers that who he thought Angela was is a fiction (deploying, as she did, a sexually experienced persona), that she is a young, confused, lonely girl—mere appearances, much like his marriage to Carolyn now—he snaps out of the series of dream sequences threaded throughout the film. This resolution comes on a day that begins with an aerial shot bringing us right up to the Burnham's bright red front door. Lester is making his breakfast in the kitchen while whistling to the tune of "The Seeker," which contains the lyrics, "I won't get to get what I'm after 'til the day I die." The experience that makes us aware of truth, Elaine Scarry argues, is when we err in our judgments of beauty—particularly when something we no longer thought of, or never recognized, as beautiful suddenly strikes us as beautiful. That overpowering feeling of having been wrong about what constitutes beauty, Scarry suggests, leads us to believe that there must, in turn, be something truly, enduringly, transcendently beautiful. For Lester it is the sudden realization that Carolyn and his family are beautiful, a fact that he and Carolyn had failed for so long to recognize.

It is perhaps the most powerful lesson of American Beauty that beauty is allied with truth, which can lead to transcendent freedom. For Lester, the alliance of truth and beauty rests in Carolyn, signified by the ever-present rose petals, though he does not recognize it until the very end. Lester's realization of truth, his truth, completes his transformation. He has transcended the trappings of his material life and faced head-on the truth of his identity as a man, a husband, and a father. And as if to punctuate his internal assertion of "I know!" a bullet to the head ends his life.

The final aerial scene features a voice-over of Lester reviewing highlights of his life. He lets us know that his life did not flash before his eyes in a second, but rather stretched forever like an ocean of time. He recalled being at boy scout camp watching stars; yellow maple leaves on his street; his grandmother's hands, with their skin fragile like paper; the first time he saw his cousin Tony's brand new Firebird; his daughter, Jane, and Carolyn. He speaks of his murder and his life, saying:

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me. But it's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once—and it's too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst, and then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold on to it. And then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry. You will some day.

Ricky's perception of beauty is key to understanding Lester's spiritual evolution and ultimate transformation. Toward the middle of the film, after a walk home from school with Jane, Ricky explains to her, "I realized that there's this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid—ever . . . It helps me to remember. I need to remember. Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it—and my heart is just going to cave in." Beauty, often elusive, often false, nevertheless induces a longing for wholeness and for truth.

Triolet (top)
Sravana Reddy


Clear skies sing to me, the music of my heart
Tries to echo their beauty—destroy fear,
Find yourself. You need to live, make a start,
Clear skies sing to me. The music of my heart
Fails me, filled with mortal limits, I part
With my dreams. No truth-light anywhere near.
Clear skies sing to me, the music of my heart
Tries to echo their beauty—destroy fear.

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