Question about American Beauty

i've watched this movie over about 13 times. can anyone tell me what is wrong or wats the deal with Ricky Fitts mother? Why is she forgetting that bacon isnt what Ricky Fitts eats and why is she hearing things when no one is speaking? why is the house so drab?

Because of her husband.

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I wondered the same thing....Is it that she is scared of her husband or he messed her up (mentally/ physically)?

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She's been emotionally abused, and possibly physically, but it seems to be mostly emotional.

That makes sense...much thanks Kong

I have only seen it once, so maybe I need to see it again as I don't remember thinking it was the husbands fault.

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The thing with the mother forgetting about the bacon is to symbolize that even though he is her son and they are supposed to be very close, she don't even know him well enough to remember what food he likes. Or she is so distracted because of her own living hell that she simply forgets. The film is about dysfuctional families, what leads to it and what it results in. The mother is obviously so weak that she doesn't even have enough energy to love her own son and support him and protect him from his dad. We can only speculate on why she is like that but her husband, his army mentality, and his suppressed homosexuality most certainly has something to do with it.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

The truth is that she's actually a man, but Ricky doesn't know this. The mom was forced by Ricky's dad to take hormones, and it messed her up psychologically. You notice how the dad, Chris Cooper, always made Ricky take a drug test? Well, with the mom, he made her take hormones every week, to make her more feminine. It's in an early draft of the script, I swear.

Now Sexy Celeb, we all know that you are talking about yourself, it is called projection.