Look Closer
What Lester Burnham Really Wanted
When American Beauty came out in 1999, I was twenty-three. Lester Burnham was forty-two, and forty-two sounded old. Now I’m older than Lester ever got to be. When I watched the movie again, I noticed something I’d completely missed.
It’s become quite fashionable to dismiss American Beauty. Kevin Spacey became a monster. Some people argue the film hasn’t aged well, and that it is pretentious. Even the logline on IMDB says, “A sexually frustrated suburban father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter’s best friend.”
That may all be true. But I still think one part of the movie has been misunderstood from the very beginning. So let’s put all that aside and do as the film’s tagline says and “look closer.”
To say that Spacey’s Lester Burnham is having a simple “mid-life crisis” is not doing the character justice. Because a mid-life crisis and an awakening can look surprisingly similar from the outside. Both might involve quitting a job, buying a sports car, thinking inappropriate thoughts about a younger girl, or just making reckless decisions in general.
The difference is why they happen. One is driven by panic over what’s been lost. The other is driven by a realization that something essential has been missing all along.
Lester points out one of the differences in the very first scene when he states in his opening monologue that he is only 42 years-old. While that is certainly mid-life crisis territory, age itself never seems to bother him. It’s the life he’s built for himself that no longer fits.
I think the scene that illustrates this point best is when Lester asks his teenage neighbor Ricky if he can buy weed from him, and Ricky invites him into his room. Lester sees all the high-end technology that selling drugs can buy, and he tells Ricky that when he was his age, he flipped burgers all summer just to afford a stereo. When Ricky replies that that sucks, Lester responds with one of the more compelling lines in the whole movie: “Actually it was great. All I did was party and get laid.”
I don’t see it as a mid-life crisis because Lester doesn’t seem interested in respect and power as much as simplicity. He wants the simple freedom of being a teenager again. So much so that after he quits his job as an advertising executive, he goes to the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant and asks for an application. When he is told that they aren’t hiring managers, only counter workers, he replies, as serious as anyone possibly could: “Good. I’m looking for the least possible amount of responsibility.”
This is not someone who is trying to prove anything to anyone. He’s simply trying to recover a period of his life when his job wasn’t his identity. When his job was just a way to pay for the rest of his life. And maybe buy a stereo.
The movie frames it as a joke, as even in his interview he points out to the geeky restaurant manager that he has “fast food experience.” But I don’t interpret that as him wanting to be young again. I think he’s just trying to remember what it felt like to enjoy being alive. .
He’s beginning to find it. He is working out, enjoying his new job, and doesn’t have a care in the world. When he discovers that his wife is cheating on him when he sees her and her paramour canoodling at his drive-thru window, he declares himself free of the obligation to his marriage. She is shocked that he isn’t even mad, and that he wants her to be happy. When she tells him to stop pretending, he says, slowly and with conviction: “You don’t get to tell me what to do... ever again.”
Just as Lester’s awakening appears about to bring him the object of his desire, his daughter’s beautiful friend, Angela, he learns another truth: all her bravado about her sexual experience is just that—bravado. She actually is a virgin. Even though she says she still wants to, this gives him pause. Because he only thinks she is the answer to his unhappiness. She represented youth, freedom, spontaneity—the carefree life he remembered before his career, marriage, and responsibilities swallowed him whole.
He really wanted the idea of her.
But once she is revealed as just another insecure seventeen year-old, he realizes that she was not what he was searching for. It becomes clear that, throughout the movie, Lester didn’t really see Angela. He only saw this fantastical image of a goddess surrounded by rose petals. The moment she becomes a real person instead of a fantasy, he stops.
After covering her up and making her something to eat, he asks her if his daughter is happy. When she tells him, “Yes,” he realizes what is really important in life. It’s not the shiny, red car he bought, or the muscles he put on. He looks at a family vacation picture from long ago and realizes just how lucky he really is.
And then he is shot in the head.
After hearing the gunshot, Ricky and Lester’s daughter come running, and Ricky sees Lester slumped down on the table, dead. But when he saw that Lester was smiling, the weird kid who filmed dead birds and plastic bags understands, just like I do at fifty, that this wasn’t just some old guy going through a mid-life crisis. This was someone who couldn’t appreciate what he had until he finally woke up.
People can interpret films in different ways. Some may not be able to separate Kevin Spacey from the characters he played. Some may think that American Beauty is overblown Oscar-bait (It won five) that doesn’t hold up 27 years later. Fair enough.
But American Beauty asked us to “Look closer,” and twenty-seven years later, I finally did.