Sociology Paper III: Family in the Media

American Beauty may be an odd choice of a movie to talk about sociology and

the family; the movie doesn't portray any of the families as cogent wholes, but instead

as individuals caught in the confines of this foreign entity, 'family', and that wish to

escape, but have no means of doing so. This is exactly what a study of a family should

be though – when we speak of the 'products' of interactions between people, we need

to remember to consider those people qua people if we're to be true to the analysis. Its'

within this realm of analysis that the movie is able to accurately explore the idea of the

'modern family', a creature that is torn, bleeding, and always at the edge of some sort of

collapse. The family, as American Beauty portrays it, is just a false name we give to a

group that is too close to its own members and spends its days simply try not to annoy

each other, or do anything that would cross the boundaries of 'tolerance'. Interestingly

though, the movie also shows what happens when the members of a family become

'intolerant', it shows what happens when the boat starts rocking, and the slow sinking

that follows.

Why choose this film and not another to talk about the modern family though?

The answer's simple, if banal: I like the movie. That's always a large reason behind the

things we pick to write about in exposition. The chosen piece has to effect us on some

personal level – whether it fires us up, or simple makes us ask the big questions, that

personal connection is what allows writing, (hopefully) of any worth, to begin.

The movie centers around the hapless Lester Burnham and his family as their

tightly woven image of suburban 'togetherness' begins to unravel from the force of their

separate, exclusive Existential crises. Lester is a member of the living dead, hollowed
out from his unfulfilling job and family that thinks he's a 'loser'. As he puts it though, he

has 'lost' something: he can't “remember always feeling so sedated”, calm in the face of

Absurdity and meaninglessness. His wife Carolyn is in no better of a position: she works

in a job that always has returns that are less than what she put in, if any returns at all

(she's a real-estate agent); she's the main voice of authority in the family, a managerial

position that wear out the soul; and she is the ring-leader, so to speak, because she is

the master of putting up the facade of living a quaint suburban life, a lie for others to

believe. And finally, there is Janey, their daughter. She's a “typical teenager”, unsure of

herself, fraught with body-image problems (her opening scene in the movie shows her

looking up breast augmentation surgery online), single, lonely, depressed, and utterly

horrified at the idea of having to spend time with her family.

This is the image of the Burnhams. This collage of individual 'types' hangs

together loosely to form some sort of idea of a 'family'. Their existence is a parallax; it's

horrid and shallow, void of any higher purpose. They are just people, alone in a crowd,

clinging to each other in the face of the vastness and uncertainty of being. And in doing

this, they are imprisoned; their freedom comes from breaking away from this 'facade'

and asserting themselves as individuals, in the face of others that compose the 'family'.

And it all begins in fantasy and desire.

In the crucial turning point of the movie, as Lester sat in the stands of a

basketball game, supporting his daughter as she cheers, a Lolita-esque fantasy

sequence begins between him and a girl on the cheer team. This fantasy is the origin of

a change in Lester. He begins to work out more in the (seemingly) hopeless hope that

he could attract this girl; he becomes an antagonistic counterpoint to his wife, pointing
out all the flaws in their listless, fading marriage (and exacerbating them); he starts

smoking weed and acts like the prototypical college frat-boy. These actions all being in

fantasy and desire. It's not just Lester though: his wife fantasizes about another real-

estate agent that she ends up having an affair with, and his daughter has desire for the

next-door neighbor-boy that spies on her through their windows. They all engage their

desires and fantasies, and in doing so, their structure as a family begins to break down.

This seems to be the given lesson on the modern family: family is where fantasy

is supressed in order to keep structure and form. This view coincides with the claims of

various feminist sociologists and conflict theorists – that the family, as a patriarchal

entity, restricts the woman from actualizing herself as a full person, or that the family

regulates the body, and keeps one from experiencing any sort of class-consciousness.

This is the juncture point between sociology and American Beauty: the movie, in this

interpretation, wouldn't sit well with the Functionalists that see the family as a necessary

unit preserving society as is, but is instead more under the wing of those sociological

subgroups that are willing/wanting to critique the family and its 'necessity'.

These subgroups also don't see the family as a coherent unit, like the horrors of

the Brady Bunch, but as a group of individuals restricted from fulfilling their goals by

being a part of that group. And likewise, this is the lesson of American Beauty. Instead

of simply saying that this suburban hell is the 'what-is' though, the movie shows a

means of escape: the actualization of desire/fantasy. As present-day philosopher Slavoj

Žižek has said, “Cinema doesn't show you what you desire, but it tells you what to

desire” and American Beauty show us that, in a family, what we desire is simply a

means toward desire itself.