Once he has quit his job, Lester wears jeans when
he is relaxing and next to nothing when he is work-
ing out with weights in his garage. His goal is to
“look good naked,” as he tells the gay couple who
lives next door. These men, by the way, meet Car-
olyn Burnham’s standards: “I loveyour tie... that
color,” she tells one of them. Both men are success-
ful professionals, yet they upset Colonel Fitts when
they present him with a welcome basket and tell
him that they are “partners,” which, at first, he
understands to mean business partners.
Frank Fitts wears white T-shirts and pressed
khakis, an outfit as close as he can get to a uniform
without actually wearing one. The serious, confi-
dent Ricky—who probably makes more money,
from dealing drugs, than anyone else in the
movie—looks decidedly different from his fellow
high-school students, wearing a white shirt, tie,
dark pants, dark sweater, and dark ski cap. Jane
looks down-to-earth, like the rest of the students,
wearing simple T-shirts, pants, and sweaters. She
usually wears a strand of beads, has on a little lip-
stick, and pulls her hair back in a ponytail. Angela,
who has delusions about her attractiveness and
potential as a model, appears somewhat more
sophisticated than Jane and the other young
women at school, wearing heavy makeup, sporting
a shoulder bag, wearing her blonde hair long, and
smoking cigarettes. She thinks Ricky is a weirdo
and asks Jane, “Why does he dress like a Bible
salesman?”
American Beautyis an open film, one in which
the characters have free will, even though it usually
results in behavior that is out of control. The metic-
ulous framing and consistently moving camera are
two very important elements in establishing the
mise-en-scène. To begin with, the film is shot in
widescreen format, meaning that the frame is a
rectangle, the perfect shape for revealing the
design and furnishings of an entire room. Director
Mendes and Conrad Hall—one of Hollywood’s
greatest cinematographers—invariably place two
or more characters in the middle of this format,
thereby emphasizing relationships, or use the zoom
lens to highlight the characters in the frame. Char-
acters frequently walk in and out of the frame,
reminding us of the offscreen space. The framing
most frequently adopts an omniscient POV, but this
perspective is punctuated by subjective-POV fram-
ing that implicates us in voyeuristic moments, such
as Lester’s first vision of Angela during a cheer-
leading routine or the many scenes in which Ricky
uses his video camera.
Voyeurism is clearly a theme of American Beauty;
in fact, it is the source of the bond that forms
between Ricky and Jane: their friendship begins
when Ricky photographs Jane from his window,
first secretly, then openly, and finally with her
complete cooperation. At one point, she even uses
the camera herself. Ricky is on the left side of the
screen, but his image is being fed by the video cam-
era to a monitor on the right side (see image [4] on
the next page). Thus, we not only have his movies
within the larger movie, but both of these movies
use screens within screens—wall mirrors in the
houses, rearview mirrors in cars, and windows—to
reflect what they are shooting.
The acting in American Beautyis as notably con-
sistent as the design; all the characters are edgy
and strung out, some of them more than others.
The only sure thing in these lives, the only “Ameri-
can beauty,” is death, and Ricky, who finds beauty
in photographing dead birds, smiles knowingly
after looking into the dead Lester’s eyes. What he
sees there, however, is left for us to decide. Perhaps
that red door is a warning—that, to paraphrase
Dante, we should abandon any hope when entering
this particular vision of suburban hell.LOOKING AT MISE-EN-SCÈNE 219