Symbolism In American Beauty

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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” as they say, and in the film “American Beauty” the director this idea pretty clear. Each character is striving for something they believe will give them happiness, due to them finding it beautiful, and some realize as the journey goes on that perhaps the stuff they want won’t give them true happiness, but rather that everyone can find beauty, even in the most ugly things in life. The symbols and ideas around this, such as the color red and it’s significance, appear constantly throughout the film. Starting with the Burnham family, rose petals are a motif throughout their general storyline as well as the color red. Lester’s infatuation with Angela always comes with the rose petals, Carolyn’s materialistic ways are shown multiple times throughout the movie and first seen when she’s …show more content…
Ricky says that he can “find the beauty in everything” while showing Jane the video of the plastic bag floating in the wind. The video is devoid of any striking colors (like red) and is in essence, nothing. Everyone else in the movie wants something physical and changes themselves to achieve what they want, but ricky just does what he normally does and he ends up with Jane. Back to Lester, it seems obvious that the person he becomes later in the film isn’t who he is, but neither is the person he was earlier in the film. It’s not until his final moments, with Angela asking him how he’s doing rather than the other way around, and looking at a seemingly normal picture of his family devoid of color, that he realizes who the person he wants to be is. With every action Lester took, he further separated himself from the people who actually love and care about him to get closer to things that he thought would create his reawakening, when they didn’t. Moreover, Lester repeats what Ricky said earlier in the film, that “Everything is

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