American Beauty and Country Husband
Americans Break Hearts and Guitars
"American ________! Stay away from ___!" Fill in the blanks. Go ahead, I dare you to. I know, this is an academic paper, but that doesn't have to stop us from a friendly bout of Mad Libs. So what did you pencil in? "Diabetics" and "excessive sugars"? No. Odds are, you filled in "woman" and "me", respectively. Even if you had never before heard "American Woman" by the Guess Who, after watching Lester Burnham, the protagonist of American Beauty, calmly, cooly, and somewhat arrogantly croon the verse while driving, you'll probably never forget those words, and it's not by accident or simply due of the talent of the Guess Who. It's one of the scenes in American Beauty that, through song, serves as both validation and nostalgia (for Lester) and (for the viewer) as a metaphor or even a vessel to better transmit and actualize Lester from the flat screen we watch him on. In John Cheever's short story "The Country Husband", Frances Weed, Lester's literary doppelganger, does not have the modern advantage of having songs of symbolic power as a backdrop to his own dramatic alienation. One must wonder, then, if the songs American Beauty director Sam Mendes have picked to use for Burnham would also be applicable towards, say immortalizing Frances Weed onto celluloid, or is his life's soundtrack would differ from Lester's? The first song to cling to ol' Les is Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." The song is played while Lester is doing bench presses and smoking pot (a somewhat unrealistic and naive mixture, to the fault of the film's writer Alan Ball) in his garage. By this time in the story, Lester is beginning to reject his supposed suburban fate to be no less vanilla than the siding on the neighborhood houses (not homes) and is subversively lashing out, Dylan-style. There are a few related events that instigate this sudden crisis of this: his infatuation with his daughter, Jane's, cheer partner, the realization of the
"American ________! Stay away from ___!" Fill in the blanks. Go ahead, I dare you to. I know, this is an academic paper, but that doesn't have to stop us from a friendly bout of Mad Libs. So what did you pencil in? "Diabetics" and "excessive sugars"? No. Odds are, you filled in "woman" and "me", respectively. Even if you had never before heard "American Woman" by the Guess Who, after watching Lester Burnham, the protagonist of American Beauty, calmly, cooly, and somewhat arrogantly croon the verse while driving, you'll probably never forget those words, and it's not by accident or simply due of the talent of the Guess Who. It's one of the scenes in American Beauty that, through song, serves as both validation and nostalgia (for Lester) and (for the viewer) as a metaphor or even a vessel to better transmit and actualize Lester from the flat screen we watch him on. In John Cheever's short story "The Country Husband", Frances Weed, Lester's literary doppelganger, does not have the modern advantage of having songs of symbolic power as a backdrop to his own dramatic alienation. One must wonder, then, if the songs American Beauty director Sam Mendes have picked to use for Burnham would also be applicable towards, say immortalizing Frances Weed onto celluloid, or is his life's soundtrack would differ from Lester's? The first song to cling to ol' Les is Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower." The song is played while Lester is doing bench presses and smoking pot (a somewhat unrealistic and naive mixture, to the fault of the film's writer Alan Ball) in his garage. By this time in the story, Lester is beginning to reject his supposed suburban fate to be no less vanilla than the siding on the neighborhood houses (not homes) and is subversively lashing out, Dylan-style. There are a few related events that instigate this sudden crisis of this: his infatuation with his daughter, Jane's, cheer partner, the realization of the