A Few Queer Things About American Beauty

I was thinking about American Beauty and how it pertained to our class discussions and readings and I couldn't come up with just one topic I wanted to talk about so here are several:

Queer Voice:
Several movies have narrators, however most of these narrators are not dead when the movie begins. Using a main character as the narrator causes issues of embodiment. Not only does this voice belong to the body you see on screen, but it transcends the body and becomes a disembodied voice that generally acts as a semi god like figure (seeing and knowing more than his embodied character on screen. It is especially queer when this voice not only transcends it's body but also transcends a mortal existence, coming to us from the grave. This transcendence makes it queer.

Queer Time:
American Beauty also makes us of queer time, both in the way Halberstam means it and also in another way. In the way Halberstam refers to queer time, Lester regression to his younger self is sort of a prolonged adolescence. Lester's return to his teenage ways also seems a bit melancholic, like he never really let go of the past and instead kept it inside of him until he couldn't suppress it any longer and he starts to act out because of it. Lester seems very nostalgic in his regression, buying his dream car from when he was younger and returning to his past job of burger flipping. It was like he could never really accept the lost love object of his youthful self and he became melancholic because of it. The other way time is queer in this film is that time is not linear. First of all, their is a voice from the future narrating the entire story. Also, more of what I want to get into, there are Lester's fantasies. Lester's fantasies seem to freeze time yet time still progresses both during the fantasy and in the real world while he is fantasizing. The music slows down and changes, all other people are removed from the space, his fantasies act like a pocket in time, a loop adjacent to the main time line. Time seems to pass during his fantasies but how much or how fast time goes by is uncertain. In this way I would like to say American Beauty deals with Queer time.

Queer Desires:
American Beauty is full of queer desires. Angela and Lester have a somewhat incestuous and pedaphilic desire for each other. Col. Fits is suppressing his homosexual desires. There is the openly gay couple. Carolyn's obsessive desire to be normal is queer as well. Ricky also has a queer desire to be a voyeur. All of these desires are not normal in some way and the film focus' on them.    


I will add more later as I think of more.