New York Times Can’t Explain American Beauty’s Eclipse

A dread certainty overtook me while I read Sarah Bahr’s thoughts on American Beauty in The New York Times. She linked to a list of the best movies of the 1990s and noted that American Beauty wasn’t there. History’s verdict, she figured. Back in 1999, when American Beauty came out, the nation was riding high. “The economy was thriving,” she wrote. “Employment was plentiful.” But since then we’ve learned a few things. America soon took some hard knocks, and a film about middle-class alienation came to seem trifling, not penetrating. “It’s much easier to indulge a fantasy of quitting your job when you have a job to quit,” Bahr aphorized.

This is when the certainty took me. That list she mentioned, the one without American Beauty—wherever it was, whoever drew it up, it would have Fight Club. And there at number 19 on Rolling Stone’s “The 100 Greatest Movies of the 1990s” we have the story of a white-collar joe who destroys his tastefully-furnished home and well-paid career so he can live in a dump and hit people. It’s a movie about the “rootlessness of middle-class Gen-Xers” and “end-of-the-century alienation,” Rolling Stone tells us, and there it is, still loved and applauded.

The RS item figures that 1999’s Fight Club has its echoes in today’s various rampaging-id movements. Maybe if Lester Burnham in American Beauty had turned to some sort of rebellious, guy-centered, norms-shattering way of life, his story might still apply to the present day. But he did turn to such a life. He quit his job, blackmailed his boss, pumped iron, smoked dope, chased that high school girl. We can’t all get embroiled in a psychotic underground movement to destabilize society; what Lester did on his own matches well enough with today’s tear-it-down bullshit.

The guys in Fight Club were angry that life, even when you’re making a living, isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. So was Lester. American Beauty’s a fantasy about trashing your regular life and going apeshit until you feel like a man again. So is Fight Club. The Times article tells us that not having a job makes you appreciate having one. True, but having a job and living a well-ordered, socially compliant life make you appreciate visions of wrecking everything so you can feel like you belong to yourself. You need to work for a living and observe the rules that make life better for everyone. But doing so can leave you wondering what your life is for and why everyone else seems to have dibs on it before you. I think what we have here is a pair of truths. Either may duck out of sight for a while, but neither vanishes for good.

You might think this article is a defense of American Beauty. Wrong, it’s an attack on the Times article. Bahr’s piece pretends to explain why Beauty’s now disregarded, but it explains nothing. Instead, it indulges the comfortable feeling that we know better now than those people back then. Sometimes we do know better, though few of us have earned that knowledge for ourselves. (I know I didn’t figure out racism was bad; teachers told me and they were right.) In this case I don’t think we do.