“Beautiful Necessities”: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom
http://www.unomaha.edu/jrf/am.beauty.htm
Journal of Religion and Film
“Beautiful Necessities”: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom by David L. Smith
Vol. 6 No. 2 October 2002 “Beautiful Necessities”: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom by David L. Smith
Abstract
[1] A central theme of American Beauty is the disjunction between the quests for liberation undertaken by its characters and the discoveries at which a few of them arrive. The world of the film is carefully structured as a culturally deterministic system. Nevertheless, a kind of freedom—epitomized by the experience of beauty—becomes possible for some of the characters even in the grip of fatal necessities. The Buddhist concept of mushotoku (non-attainment) and Emerson’s idea of Beautiful Necessity are used to explicate the film’s complex exploration of freedom and fate.
Article
[2] The mystery of American Beauty is the way it takes some of the most familiar themes in modern American popular culture—the attempt to change one’s life, to achieve liberation from constraining circumstances, to become oneself—and gives them fresh and surprising life. What saves the film from cliché, I will argue, is its fine sense for the paradoxical nature of the quests for freedom it depicts. Paradox arises because the world of American Beauty is a closed, culturally deterministic system. Its characters are perfect creatures of their social locations. They may hope for something “more,” but their very conception of this “more” derives from the culture that confines and defines their desires. Their stories are correspondingly bleak and self-defeating. And yet, American Beauty is not a bleak or pessimistic film. Possibilities of meaning and freedom emerge from its deterministic world that have little to do with its characters’ conscious intentions. The film, we might say, is a meditation on the disconnect between the narrative quests of its characters and the meaning that, in a few cases, happens to
Journal of Religion and Film
“Beautiful Necessities”: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom by David L. Smith
Vol. 6 No. 2 October 2002 “Beautiful Necessities”: American Beauty and the Idea of Freedom by David L. Smith
Abstract
[1] A central theme of American Beauty is the disjunction between the quests for liberation undertaken by its characters and the discoveries at which a few of them arrive. The world of the film is carefully structured as a culturally deterministic system. Nevertheless, a kind of freedom—epitomized by the experience of beauty—becomes possible for some of the characters even in the grip of fatal necessities. The Buddhist concept of mushotoku (non-attainment) and Emerson’s idea of Beautiful Necessity are used to explicate the film’s complex exploration of freedom and fate.
Article
[2] The mystery of American Beauty is the way it takes some of the most familiar themes in modern American popular culture—the attempt to change one’s life, to achieve liberation from constraining circumstances, to become oneself—and gives them fresh and surprising life. What saves the film from cliché, I will argue, is its fine sense for the paradoxical nature of the quests for freedom it depicts. Paradox arises because the world of American Beauty is a closed, culturally deterministic system. Its characters are perfect creatures of their social locations. They may hope for something “more,” but their very conception of this “more” derives from the culture that confines and defines their desires. Their stories are correspondingly bleak and self-defeating. And yet, American Beauty is not a bleak or pessimistic film. Possibilities of meaning and freedom emerge from its deterministic world that have little to do with its characters’ conscious intentions. The film, we might say, is a meditation on the disconnect between the narrative quests of its characters and the meaning that, in a few cases, happens to