"But there is just absolutely no getting around the snotty and apparently completely blind way that Caroline is made into a farcical villain while Lester is a tragicomic anti-hero. It’s at its most unavoidable in a scene so monumentally imbalanced that it argues all by itself that Ball should never be allowed to write without a partner: Lester has just purchased a car. Caroline is aghast. He claims that he wanted it, it makes him feel good, and dammit, why shouldn’t he be allowed to feel good. She drops it, they canoodle, and for the first time in ages look like they might be about to have sex, when- she worries that he’ll spill beer on her sofa. Her $4000 sofa. Instantly, he launches into a speech about defining yourself by the things you own, that she is a defective person because she likes expensive, lifeless things, and it’s absolutely obvious that we’re getting a Moral Lesson - when American Beauty makes its Moral Lessons obvious, they are obvious. There has not been so much as a time-lapse dissolve between Lester crowing about his car and ridiculing Caroline’s fetishistic love for furniture, and the only thing worse than the possibility that the filmmakers didn’t notice this fundamental imbalance in the film’s depiction of the “Right Kind” of materialism (masculine, cars, power, fast) and the “Wrong Kind” (feminine, domestic, decorative, fussy), is that they noticed and they did not care."
Antagony & Ecstasy’s essay on American Beauty (which was brought to my attention by burbanked!) and accurately sums up my thoughts on a movie I often think about but can’t bring myself to re-watch because my 16-year-old self is going to feel like a moron for loving it. (via synecdoche)
(via pigeonowlpeacockpenguin)
