Noticing lxxxiii - American Beauty end monologue

Last night we rewatched the Sam Mendes movie American Beauty (1999), starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Chris Cooper, Allison Janney, Peter Gallagher (to name the actors I recognized), and others. It's a strange movie, unsettling, very sad in the way the adult characters have all lost their way, lost sight of happiness. Of meaning. But it's oddly heartfelt and beautiful too, as, after hitting solid walls of misery, they—some of them, anyway—seem to begin to pick up the threads of their lives and, possibly, head in new directions. It's all very tentative, like feeling your way in a strange house in the dark. Except for the daughter and her boyfriend: they may be the wise ones in the crowd.

I recently saw a thread on FB where people were discussing #metoo, and someone mentioned that they can't watch Kevin Spacey anymore because of the allegations against him (all from men). I honestly don't know how to think about successful public personas versus private, in Spacey's case, fuck-ups. One encounters it over and over: the anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edgar Degas; Flaubert, who paid for sex with boys; the misogynist Picasso. The examples could go on and on. Murderers, philanderers, thieves, extortionists: just because you're creative doesn't mean you're a straight-up good guy. Nor do your foibles necessarily mean you're straight-up evil.

So I will not be boycotting Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects is one of my desert island films, along with Adaptation, which I mentioned the other day). But I have to say, watching the movie last night did make me squirm a bit, because of the allegations. Who is Kevin Spacey as a human being? Is he a good guy? Is he a rotten slimeball? His film roles sure don't tell us.

In any event, what I wanted to share here is the ending monologue of American Beauty. I wrote a summation before watching it again. Here's what I wrote:

It's beautiful, evocative, yearning . . . and may describe any of us who has ever taken a wrong turn, and then found our way back onto the path. Or any of us, more simply, who have doubted our path, in whatever way. Life isn't black and white. But I hope we can all end our days with some sense of gratitude and contentment. And, hopefully, love.

Though now that I've rewatched it, I realize I'd forgotten the violence that leads into the monologue. Lester Burnham's death is foretold at the very beginning of the film, so it's not a surprise to us viewers (though who does the killing may be). It's the emotion of the monologue that may be the surprise: in the last few moments of the film, Lester refinds his way. The pith comes in the last minute or so of this clip, which is the final scene of the film.