In life, everyone must make choices. Choices give an individual the freedom to decide the path which they will follow. In the movie American Beauty, each of the characters has a choice he or she needs to make. The main character, Lester Burnham, is faced with many choices that could either lead to his ultimate happiness or draw him further into his despair. Carolyn Burnham, Lester's wife, is faced with a loveless marriage that exists only because she does not possess the willingness to break the cycle. This cycle involves protecting their daughter by staying married. In reality, children of a marriage such as this are often the biggest victims of this sham. Jane Burnham is Lester and Carolyn's daughter. She is caught between the two of them, and her decision is to tune her parents out. Ricky Fitts, the boy next door, makes his choice of knowing when to cooperate with his father. Ricky's dad, Colonel Fitts, makes his choice of finally admitting of his sexual preference. Angela Hayes, Jane's friend, makes her choice of losing her virginity to Lester. Each character has to learn how to deal with his or her own problems.
Lester Burnham is in a state of despair. Lester's dull and monotonous voice introduces the audience to his daily routine of life. At the age of 42 he has become sympathetic to everything. He realizes that his family life is the "pits" as he becomes aware that both his wife and daughter consider him a gigantic loser. He feels they are right about this. He believes he has lost something and that he did not always feel this sedated. Lester's disheartenment is symbolic in the car scene. Lester sits slouched down in the back seat with a look of emptiness while his daughter sits up front next to his wife, who is driving the car. Carolyn drives the car just as she drives the family, especially, Lester. She has evolved into the decision-maker and leader of the Burnham family. Sitting in the backseat, Lester avoids further conflict with his wife, leading him to become an even unhappier and more desperate person.
Lester's life at work is no better than his life at home. After fourteen years at a job, that is viewed by Lester as nothing more than being a corporate slave at a media marketing magazine, Lester is asked by an efficiency expert at work to write a memo justifying his position. In Lester's viewpoint, his job of fourteen years is now letting him know how replaceable he is. This makes him feel worthless, which decreases his self-confidence. He is now faced with making the first of several choices that will ultimately affect his future happiness. Should he justify his job and continue to provide for his family or choose freedom and a new life. Lester decides that he can not justify his job because his job has no meaning to him. After leaving his job, he seeks a new job with less responsibility. He is hired at Mr. Smiley's, a local fast food restaurant. Making the choice to quit his job and work in a fast food restaurant finally brings Lester his chance to embrace happiness. Going for his old job to his new job symbolizes his transition from a life in which Lester was locked up to a new life in which Lester is now free to control his future.
Dreaming of a life which is out of our grasps is a common thing. Everyone at some point in his orher own life wishes that he or she were someone else or that he or she could in some way be greater than he or she already is. Lester feels this more than anyone else in the movie. The moment Lester lays eyes on Angela Hayes, Jane's best friend whom Lester considers the "beauty," he falls into a spell of intense infatuation. This is Lester's second snap. He is instantly obsessed with her, and Lester repeatedly dreams about making love to this girl, who is not even half his age. This is having an effect on his daughter. This becomes a reality when both he and Angela make sexual advances towards each other. At the last minute, Lester's conscious gets the best of him when Angela makes the announcement that she is a virgin. Angela symbolizes his dream of a perfect life, a life where everything is simple and everyone is beautiful.
Lester thinks back to his past and how happy he was just partying and how he had his whole life ahead of him. He remembers the feeling of no responsibilities and not being nervous concerning the fact that Lester has no stability in his life. He now discovers that he no longer feels fulfilled in his job or his personal life and attempts to make a critical shift in a career and his lifestyle: He is having a mid-life crisis. Facing this mid-life crisis, Lester looks at his life and decides to live it the way he wants to. He no longer can live life like a prisoner. His job in the fast food restaurant offers him no responsibility. He starts smoking pot and starts working out to impress Angela. As he becomes more fit, he becomes more confident. He trades in his Mercedes for a 1970 cherry-red Trans Am sports car, the car he always wanted.
Carolyn Burnham places such value on status that she has turned into a "bloodless, money-grubbing freak"(American Beauty, movie), who has no time for any form of intimacy. Her creed in life is: "You cannot count on anyone except yourself"(American Beauty, movie). Lester and Carolyn Burnham are, on the outside, a perfect husband and wife, in a perfect house, in a perfect neighborhood. They live all together behind a mask for society to view them as normal. They want to be part of high society but really, they are not. I felt this is brought out in the scene of the family dinner. Carolyn plays Mantovanian music that mocks every mouthful of their dinner; the music is lush and reassuring, and the family is angry and silent. Lester and Carolyn may have been in love at one time, but now they've grown distant. Frustrated by her lack of a relationship with her husband, Carolyn makes a choice to have an affair with her real estate business rival Buddy Kanes. The affair doesn't amount to much; it lessens Carolyn's tolerance for what she s as laziness on Lester's part.


Jane Burnham is a sulky teenager caught between two parents who are carrying very heavy emotional baggage. Jane has come to hate her father. There is barely any communication between them, and when there is, Lester does not take into account his daughter's feelings. So Jane's decision is to shut them out. She speculates about what it would be like to have her father killed. Jane also has to deal with Angela's growing fascination with the possibility of sleeping with Lester, a consideration that disgusts her. Due to the lack of communication in her family life, Jane develops a relationship with Ricky Fitts, the boy next door. He views life through a video camera. At first Jane is unsure of him, but after awhile she feels flattered. Jane also has a run-in with Carolyn, when she slaps Jane for failing to appreciate the wealth that's been accumulated for her.
Ricky Fitts, Jane's boyfriend next door, is cool headed and clear sighted, although he has his own problems. He is responsible for bringing about the change in Lester, and he is a comfort to Jane. His mother is virtually withdrawn from life, and his father is an ex-Marine neo-Nazi, who submits his son's urine for drug testing every six months. Besides this, Colonel Fitts spies on Ricky, fearful that he is on dope again, and he beats Ricky to instill structure and discipline. Colonel Fitts is a survivor of abuse at the hands of his father. He knows how to cooperate with his father by answering, "Sir, yes sir." This is a form of protection for Ricky because it is a means of buying the freedom to pursue marijuana, videos, and Jane. The irony here is that Ricky is running a sophisticated dope business under his father's nose. Ricky's choice to make is when he will have to decide how much longer he will tolerate his father's abuse. Ricky also influences Lester by turning him onto marijuana. He provides an example for Lester on how to approach life. He shows Lester that talking with him is more important than a paying job when Ricky unemotionally tells his catering boss he quits.
Ricky is the one who explains the ultimate meaning of the film's title when he talks about a homeless woman, frozen to death, whom he captured on video. "When you see something like that, it's just like God is looking right at you, just for a second. And if you're careful, you can look right back" (American Beauty, movie). Having faced a number of horrors in his home life, Ricky has learned to look deeper, to find beauty amidst the pain of everyday life. He shows Jane "the most beautiful thing I ever filmed," a plastic bag blowing in the wind among leaves (American Beauty). Ricky recalls, "That's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid. Ever" (American Beauty movie).
Sometimes children of dysfunctional families are saner and more mature than their parents. At the end of the picture, Jane and Ricky are set to run off together to New York, to live off of Ricky's drug dealing, not what one would consider a promising life plan. What the film makers wants to show here is the purity of their love. Another reason Jane wants to run off to New York is that Lester never pays attention to her; instead, he focuses on her friend. All Jane wants is attention from her dad, but Lester is preoccupied with being irresponsible and chasing after Angela.
Marine Corps Colonel Fitts and his wife, Barbara, are the Burnhams' new neighbors. He is very emotionally remote, subject to violent rages. The colonel is even more sexually frustrated than Lester. His rigidity and abusiveness, which is aimed primarily at his son, are the results of a repressed homosexual, a closeted gay marine. The military had saved him because it gave him structure and discipline. Now he is retired and has moved into a new neighborhood, and it is very scary for him, especially when he meets his two gay neighbors. This gay couple seem to be the happiest and most normal couple in the film.
The colonel is faced with the choice of admitting his homosexuality and coming out of the closet and also coming to terms with his worst nightmare, that his son may have inherited his homosexual tendencies
The last character to look at is Angela Hayes. The title of the movie stems from the perfectly manicured roses blooming along the Burnhams' white picket fence. It also refers to Jane's best friend, Angela, a supermodel in training. American Beauty tells the story of one man's search for happiness. Lester is seeking that happiness, and he believes that happiness lies in Angela Hayes, his daughter Jane's friend. He is excited by the thought that a teenage girls thinks he is hot. She fuels Lester's sexual fantasies, and he decides to get in shape. Angela is a tease who enjoys leading Lester on. Angela's choice is to change herself from someone who is ordinary, in this case a virgin, to someone special who could make an old man's fantasies come true. Angela makes her choice and offers herself to Lester and reveals that she is still a virgin. This causes Lester's conscience to get the best of him, and he refuses Angela's offer of her body. He realizes he cannot have sex with a teenager; this ends his fantasy, returning him to adulthood.
Angela symbolizes Lester's dream of a perfect life, a life where everything is simple and everyone is beautiful. The thought of sleeping with Angela would bring him these things is found to be a false promise, and he realizes that true happiness comes from the moral decisions that a person makes in his or her life, not the pleasures that he or she indulges, in to relieve his or her daily problems. The balance here is that Angela is chasing empty images of adulthood at the same time Lester is chasing equally empty fantasies about youth.
What would lead a man like Lester to have a mid-life crisis? According to endocrinologist Adrian Dobs of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, the drop in the hormone testosterone is just part of a midlife change but not the whole story. Other hormones change as well, including pituitary and growth hormones and another one called DHEA. There are also psychosocial changes which are, new family dynamics of grown children. There also seems to be a link between low testosterone and depression. Sexual potency also drops with testosterone level; this is where fast cars and affairs can come in. Low testosterone can be tied to a growing sense of figurative and literal impotence and, therefore, tied to doing things to compensate (Fischman, 47). Men have extramarital affairs because of their dissatisfaction with the marital relationship, emotional emptiness, need for sexual variety, inability to resist new sexual opportunity. The loss of the high level of passion and desire that existed in the beginning of the relationship may result in boredom or develop into a feeling of indifference towards the partner. Combined with all of the other stresses and complexities of long term relationships, such as financial problems, raising children, job changes, the loss of passion may lead to a desire to rediscover passion in the start of a new relationship. Research indicates that extramarital affairs based solely on desire for new sexual partners is a very small percentage of the total number of affairs. Of 3,800 respondents to a questionnaire on this, over 90% it reported that the affair was based on emotional needs not being met within the marital relationship and not sexually motivated reasons. The desire for a new sexual experience is not the initial motive for looking outside the marriage but comes after the breakdown of the emotional relationship (Layton-Throll, 54-55).
Statistics on Men's Marital Infidelity.
Age at which the average married man is most likely to have an affair: 34
Average age of his lover: 29
How long the affair lasts: 9 months
Number of men who say it's okay to cheat if the marriage stinks, but divorce will be too hard on the kids, or the wallet: 1 in 3
The average guy's typical lover: Co-Worker. Second option: Stranger
Percentage of married men who'd cheat with a supermodel if they knew they wouldn't get caught: 43. Supermodel they'd pick: Tyra Banks (Victoria Secrets Model)
Percentage of cheating men who get caught: 80 Most common way he slips up: Cell phone bill
Hush gift the average guy gives his lover: Jewelry
Gift he gives his wife after getting busted: Flowers
Cost of a divorce after 5 years of alimony: $60,000
Percentage of women who'd forgive their cheating spouses if they confessed: 78
Number of guys who take off their wedding rings when they go out: 1 in 3
If he gets divorced and doesn't remarry, percentage chance that the average guy will live to see age 65: 60. Percentage chance if he sticks it out with his wife: 90 (Men's Health, 124).
On a Meta Analysis Study reported in the American Journal of Public Health, in June 29, 2001, contained information on whether or not there is a greater risk of psychiatric disorders among homosexuals. The studies were conducted from 1990 through 1992. The studies found the following psychiatric disorders to be diagnosed in homosexual men:
mood disorders such as major depression and dysthymia,
anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, simple phobia, social phobia, agoraphobia, and posttraumatic stress disorder.
alcohol and drug abuse and dependence.
The findings noted an elevated risk of some psychiatric disorders and of suicidal symptoms among homosexually active people compared with exclusively heterosexually active people. Additionally, men with same-sex sexual partners had a higher risk of depression and panic than men with opposite-sex partners. These results were also consistent with results of a recent population-based study from the Netherlands in which elevated rates of mood and anxiety disorders were observed among men with same-sex partners. Future studies with larger samples of homosexually active individuals may be able to clarify the importance of both persistence of disorders and HIV status in influencing mental health morbidity in this population.
Stresses due to stigmatization and exposure to discriminatory behavior lead to higher rates of mental disorders. This hypothesis is consistent with the finding that gay men experience discrimination in multiple areas of life and that such discrimination is related to elevated levels of psychologic distress. Another viewpoint is that the higher risk of mental disorders among gay men might be related to the occurrence of victimization and abuse, especially during adolescence.
An alternative explanation was offered in this report; it was that homosexual men lead riskier lives, including a higher consumption of alcohol and drugs and higher rates of changing sexual partners which may be consistent with the development of some psychiatric disorders, particularly abnormal substance use (Risk of Psychiatric Disorders Among Individuals Reporting Same-sex Sexual Partners In The National Comorbidity Survey, 16-20).
Researchers have found that THC, a chemical in marijuana, changes the way in which sensory information gets into and is processed by the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a component of the brain's limbic system that is crucial for learning, memory, and the integration of sensory experiences with emotions and motivations. Investigations have shown that neurons in the information processing system of the hippocampus and the activity of the nerve fibers in this region are suppressed by THC. In addition, researchers have discovered that learned behaviors,
which depend on the hippocampus, also deteriorate with this drug (Marijuana, Online). The use of marijuana gives Lester a reason to act the way he does.
In order to overcome family dysfunction, communication and trust need to be worked upon in the family. Spending more time with family members, talking a lot and being open, are some ways of communication that can be dealt with at home. Family counseling is another way to learn how to reestablish these lines of communication and trust. This does not happen overnight. It takes time and patience.
Many of us are so busy living our lives that we take for granted that our loved ones will always be there. We do not take time to appreciate them for who they are and how they make our lives complete. Unfortunately for Lester, he did not realize all the beauty that was part of his life until it was too late, only moments before his death.

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