Fantasy & Freedom In AMERICAN BEAUTY: A Rose By Another Name

Many of us find escape in our imagination. Fantasy allows our mind to slip away into worlds that differ in ways both big and small from the one in which we most commonly reside. In the 1999 film American Beauty, fantasy takes hold of many of the characters within the story and offers escape to those who lean into it.

While the mere illusion of escape in fantasy ignites forgotten passions in the characters, it is the release of such that sets them free.

Metamorphosis

At the start of American Beauty, we meet our main character, Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), in the throws of dispassion and boredom – confined in each frame to spaces far too small and distanced between characters who wish to be farther from him. He rests there in a prison of the pressures imposed on him and void of any semblance of self (much in the same vain of Edward Norton’s character exposition in Fight Club), however, he isn’t entirely alone. Each character within this story is in a prison of their own making and yearning to be set free. While Lester’s freedom comes in morally questionable Nabokovian form, his revival is illustrative to the way many of us experience change within ourselves.

Before Lester’s transformation through self-discovery, he inhabits his world weighted by emptiness and the feeling that he’s, “dead already.” He has internalized the negative messages of weakness and insignificance given to him by his wife and daughter, and fully succumbed to the idea that the passion he once felt is no longer attainable. In this film, we follow him and the people around him as he discovers a part of himself he thought was once lost.

His reawakening begins when he first sees his teenage daughter’s friend, Angela, dancing at a high school basketball game. It is then that he escapes into his mind where his obsessive fantasy takes root. She is the epitome of beauty and youth – exactly what Lester feels is missing from his life. She is the catalyst for his freedom and representative of a life he used to live.

Rosebud and Longing For Youth

Longing after the past is a theme seen in literature and in films such as Citizen Kane in which Rosebud represents the single attachment to a lonely man’s childhood. The intentionality of American Beauty’s use of rose imagery is unclear, however its affiliation with fantasy and connecting with adolescent excitement correlates with the Orson Welles’ nostalgic rosebud. Both Charles Foster Kane and Lester Burnham most profound desire is to grasp onto their ‘inner child.’ The joy and thrill of such presents itself differently in each film, but Lester connects to it through Angela.

Angela is Rosebud. Rather, the fantasy of Angela is such, as the reality of her is profoundly human and flawed. In that way, she is also the Hitchc*ckian MacGuffin: She matters the most and doesn’t matter at all. Both Kane and Burnham’s stories begin with the knowledge of their imminent death, and we come to interpret that it is the release of their childhood attachment that brings them peace in their death. Much in the way Kane grasps onto Rosebud until his final days, Lester’s life is almost entirely sustained by the nearly tangible prospect of being with Angela.

There are other ‘Rosebuds’ in American Beauty. Angela, herself, lives in a fantasy world. She tries to project the image that she is far more experienced and important than she is to feel better about herself. She places high value on projecting a more adult image onto herself.

Carolyn, Lester’s wife, grasps tightly onto the mere image of success (her matching shears and gardening gloves, as Lester said, is no accident). The mere act of projecting an image of power and success is what sustains the characters. All the characters are selling an image, and Carolyn being a real estate agent is symbolic of that. Throughout the film, the characters often look at their reflection; fascinated and entranced with how they appear to the world.

Freedom

At the start of Lester’s final day, he is deep in the throes of his illusionary escape . We see him running in the street, free from any restraints imposed on him at the beginning of the film. Nothing has happened between him and Angela, yet he has found freedom in his imagination. When confronted with the reality that Angela is not ready to have the sexual experience he had been longing for, he finally sees her for the young girl that she is and not for the young woman he desired her to be.

They pause there, completely connected to their vulnerability and removed from the fantasies they had in its place. He is disenchanted, but not disappointed by this reality, because he realizes that what has sustained him all along was the mere idea that within himself was that young man he thought was forever gone. The idea of Angela brought him back to life, and in the end, he is overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude. When the façade has been lifted off all the characters in American Beauty, we expose the fantastic beauty in the flaws beneath.

What role does fantasy play in other films you have seen?