Is American Beauty anti-military or pro-homosexuality?

I thought it was a commentary on how suburbia life isn't as it seems? All of this sounds right, though.

Telling people to seize life and be true to themselves and all that isn't "Hallmark" at all? I mean, that doesn't make the movie inherently bad, but those are all pretty trite, common thoughts.

yeah, i know. i've seen all five seasons of SFU. it's one of my favorite TV shows to this day.

i don't see how having a gay character in a TV show is overexposure, though. it wasn't like David Fisher's being gay was the main theme of the show or even remotely so. yeah, he was gay, and yeah, when the series starts, he's in the closet so we watch him as he deals with telling his family and gradually overcomes this kind of thing.

i think when you look at SFU on the whole, it does have similar themes as American Beauty, though. in hindsight, the Fishers could have been the Burnhams (the Fishers being far more complex characters, of course). both are about a family that has a hard time with communicating and prefers to keep to themselves, deals with isolation, loneliness, and self-absorption. this may be why Alan Ball chose to have another main character be gay - because it went with the theme.

i haven't seen True Blood. i didn't want to watch it because it didn't look like something i'd like, but lately i've been toying with the idea of giving it a chance.

i'm not sure if you'd like Six Feet Under. i don't know how much of it you've already seen, but i do think there are a lot of similarities between it and American Beauty, which you obviously do like.


yeah, i don't need the movie explained to me or anything - i get it. just because i don't like it doesn't mean i "didn't understand" or "it went over my head". it just means i thought it was poorly executed, and it was.

yeah, they are. it depends on how it's said rather than that it's said at all that would make it more meaningful.

Considering that Lester ended up with a bullet in his head, I'd say no, it wasn't a sugarcoated hallmark sort of movie.

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Lester was happy in life and had reached a peak that wouldn't ever be touched again. He was content in death. His dead body was smiling for goodness sake. You don't think that is Hallmark? Dark, yes. But most certainly Hallmark.

That's a tad different than what I was saying. I'm not saying the entire movie is Hallmark, but its message certainly is. It's basically a string of everyday truisms. Bunch of hippies!

I happen to think it's a pretty good movie, but I think it's good in spite of that.

Well, if you're arguing that it somehow makes the movie "trite" to deal with those subjects at all, then I suppose you're right, in the sense that the subjects seem to annoy you for some reason. But I don't personally see it that way.

Obviously, it's a message movie. I'm pretty sure there's no law against those.

I think the suburban life drama they've got going on in American Beauty is rather hollow and unreal and fake, to be honest. The movie never really feels authentic and that's probably what irks a lot of people. It is rather detached from the real world. The situations don't feel right. The stuff that happens might happen somewhere, but it's all very much contained in the land of American Beauty World. Like a display you could go and look at. A large problem with this is the narrative of Lester Burnham. I also think Alan Ball's gays in the neighborhood fantasy is a bit silly.

If I wasn't gay and I didn't see American Beauty at a pivotal time of my life when I was starting to come out of the closet, I don't know what I would think of this movie. A gay friend recommended this to me at the time I first saw it and he thought it was so real and honest. I liked it a lot, too, and I responded more towards the whole Ricky/Jane dynamic, I think, but I really did love all of the characters. Now I'm wanting to watch it again to really get another feel for it... perhaps there will be a review in my review thread soon, I've never officially reviewed it, yet. It was at one point - when I first joined this site years ago, in fact - my favorite movie.

You know you wanna own this.

Really good thread...

To me, American Beauty is the typical liberal Hollywood movie. "Anti-military" or "pro-gay" aren't the first two words that come to mind when I think about it, but I could certainly accept those descriptions even if I'd rather go for just "liberal", plain and simple. As Yoda says, more than anything else it's probably anti-surburbia - or anti-conformist, if you will.

I agree with most of what Sexy has to say about it - brilliantly put, btw. I disagree about the Frank Fitts character, though. There's two reasons to why we don't get to see Frank Fitts fantasize about gay sex. Firstly, that would ruin the plot, and secondly, and more importantly, I don't think Frank Fitts thinks about gay sex at all. His strictly military way of living his life has enabled him to suppress his sexuality to a point that he's almost unaware of any homosexual "tendencies". My guess is that he's an asexual being.

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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.

It would have been ludicrous to parallel Lester's fantasies with Frank's gay fantasies - I agree. I like the mystery of not knowing what's going on in Frank's head -- I hope if there's anything at all that it's a lot more X-rated than Lester's fantasies, because seriously... Mena Suvari on the ceiling covered in rose petals? Mena taking a bath? That's more like the sexual imagination of Queen Latifah, not Kevin Spacey. Not a man. I certainly don't look up at my ceiling and imagine Jake Gyllenhaal looking down at me -- I can't see a thing in my sexual fantasies because something is usually blocking my view. My sexual fantasies are more like Stevie Wonder's - something's blinding me!

I wouldn't bother accusing the movie of it if it merely dealt with them at all. I'm saying it because I think the film deals with them a lot; more than such pedestrian ideas really warrants. Surely it isn't perplexing that this would annoy some people. Sappy, common messages in movies annoy people all the time. American Beauty is, at many points, fairly well-written and even thoughtful, so it's jarring to see that thoughtfulness juxtaposed with highly familiar messages about being true to yourself, or what have you.

But no, no law against message movies. Nor against being kinda tired of them, or feeling that this particular one could have been better. Though, amusingly, it looks a lot better if you think of it as a smarter-than-expected cheesy drama rather than a more-trite-than-expected profound drama. Naturally, given its praise and awards, I thought of it more as the latter.

doesn't he boink Kevin Spacey's daughter, though? i thought he just lied about being gay because he wanted his father to let him go, and he knew he'd be totally disowned if he said he liked men.

oh, my bad. wrong character.

We'll just have to agree to disagree. I thought it earned its sentiment. I didn't see it as especially sappy or drama, either. More of a dark comedy, overall.

It seems more and more to me that people do not like "message" movies. Why the hell is this? Can't anybody be told anything anymore or get a life lesson? People keep acting like everything deserves to be trash. It saddens me.

Enough with the preaching, sexy!!!

i don't mind message movies, but i do prefer it if it's subtle and not beating me over the head with said message. i'm not saying American Beauty does that perse, but i'm just speculating as to why some people may dislike message movies.