Analytical Essay On American Beauty

American Beauty Analysis
The film American Beauty focuses on a man named Lester Burnham and how his midlife crisis is affecting him, as well as the people involved in his life. Lester is in a horribly strained marriage with his wife, Carolyn, and has lost total connection with his daughter, Jane. His boss views him as completely useless in the workplace, and wants Lester to quit. Indignant by his wretched life, Lester decides to create changes in him. The viewer will watch Lester’s mundane personality transform into an electrifying aura, and the shocking troubles that come along with his new found outlook on life.
Lester is a forty two year old man who lives in a suburban neighborhood with his family. From the outside, he looks like has a very happy life. He seems to make a good amount of money, lives in a nice home, and has a happy family. Behind closed doors, Lester is terribly unhappy and bored with his life. Every day is quite distinctive in Lester’s life, but still fairly similar. He goes to work and comes home to have dinner with Carolyn and Jane who detest him the most. Each dinner ends the same, with harsh attacks towards Lester, which make him feel even worse
about himself. Lester knows he is going to wake up the next day just to follow the same routine, and that is what hurts him the most. As things seem to intensify in his life, it becomes evident that Lester has reached his mid-life crisis. Lester Burnham would be a good candidate for taking Speech 1318, because he would learn how to balance his self-concept, better his self-monitoring skills, and how to encode a conversation.
Lester’s self-concept about himself changes throughout American Beauty. Self-concept is defined as an idea of the self, constructed from the beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. He feels unworthy in the beginning because of the way the people in his life treat him. This changes when he starts to focus on himself, and his self-concept which turns into a self-obsession. While it is important to care about your self-interest, it is also important to have a balance. In one scene of the film, Lester is eavesdropping on Jane and Angela by carefully pressing his ear on Jane’s bedroom door. Angela claims to hear a noise and Lester automatically assumes it is him, and frantically darts down the stairs. In reality, the noise was from a neighbor named Ricky, throwing sticks at Jane’s window. Since Lester is solely focused on his relationship with Angela, he does not consider that there may have been another noise Angela heard. I would teach Lester how to balance his self-concept and concept of others, so he could better his cognitive complexity. If Lester had stopped and considered there may have been another noise that distracted Angela, he could have stopped Ricky from convincing Jane to run away to New York with him.
Most of the many awkward moments in American Beauty, had to do with Lester’s not so great ability of self-monitoring.
Self-monitoring is a personality trait that refers to an ability to regulate behavior to accommodate to social situations. In one particular scene, Angela flirts with Lester by gently brushing her hand against his arm while grabbing a root beer from the fridge. This simple touch triggers Lester to have a fantasy of intimately kissing Angela, while he is sipping on his soda. Jane and Carolyn then appear in the kitchen, where Jane asks if Angela could spend the night. Since Lester is having a sexual fantasy at an inappropriate time, this catches Lester completely off guard and he spits out his soda. Carolyn, Jane, and Angela stare at him and his reaction creates an awkward
atmosphere. If Lester took Speech 1318, I would teach him the importance of low and high self-monitoring. It is important to find a medium in between both high and low to fit in comfortably in social settings. Applying this skill could even benefit his relationship with his Jane, because her negative feelings towards her father grew once she found out his deep attraction towards Angela. Jane’s additional negative feeling towards her father could have been avoided if Lester simply heightened his self-monitoring.
Towards the end of the film, Lester has a confrontation outside of his garage with his fairly new neighbor, Colonel Carl. Carl believes that Lester is secretly having a gay relationship with his son, Ricky and stares deeply at Lester without saying much. Carl has portrayed himself as a closed minded father who seems utterly distraught at this false accusation, so the viewer thinks he is going to violently kill Lester. Instead it takes a twist; Carl turns out to be a closet homosexual, and tries to kiss Lester. Lester is completely bewildered and tells him he misunderstands, and Carl somberly walks back into the rain.
Too much was unsaid in this scene, and in this situation, both men could actually benefit from learning the communication model in Speech 1318. The communication model is used to explain the human communication process, by encoding and decoding messages. I would teach Lester how to properly encode a message so that others would not misinterpret what he is trying to say. If Lester and Carl both understood how the communication model worked, this scene would have been entirely different. Lester could have been more upfront with Carl, and let him know that Ricky was his drug dealer. Even though that still not good news, that important detail would have cleared up this confusing moment. Carl would have realized his accusation was wrong, and they possibly could have talked more about what was actually going on.
Even though I chose to focus on Lester, It is quite apparent that all of the characters in American Beauty could learn something beneficial in Speech 1318. None of the characters really knew how to approach each other and blew up on each other with too much information. One important lesson from the film is to never conform, and to stand up for yourself. If you do not like how you are being treated, speak up and let the other individual know how you feel. The other major lesson I learned from American Beauty, was to avoid getting stuck in one place. In the film Lester says, “Life can only become a mundane prison if you let it.”. You are in charge of your own life, and if you feel spiritless, change something. Variety is essential in life, because that is how people grow and learn more about themselves. Who knows? Maybe if Lester stood up for himself, and left his comfort zone sooner life, his blood would not have been splattered on the wall.