Must say, I ALWAYS thought this film and its plastic bag poetics amounted to a “the Emperor is Nude, actually” moment. Also, Natasha Vargas-Cooper is the ex-organizer-cum-culture-critic I’d’ve wanted to’ve been if I hadn’t failed so lugubriously at this thing socialists call la vie.
Here’s my new GQ piece:
At first blush, American Beauty seemed grand, dark, and subversive (especially to the angst-riddled mind of a high school sophomore not old enough to buy tickets for R-rated movies). The raciness of the opening scene—a found-footage camcorder clip of Jane (a pallid Thora Birch), reclining on a bed in post-sex flush, telling the camera that she wished her dad wasn’t a “horny geek boy” and “doesn’t deserve to live”—was enough to hook right into a swirling teenage psyche. The movie’s themes pander directly to the narcissism of the young—libidinous individualism, the triumph of youth over cynicism, the beauty of ordinary things (i.e. dead birds, plastic bags) over empty materialism. We responded naively and passionately—the desired effect. But we were just kids! What is so confounding now about American Beauty is how adults endorsed such juvenilia.
AMERICAN BEAUTY IS THE WORST MOVIE I LOVED
