MOVIE CHOSEN: American Beauty
American Beauty, a movie directed by Sam Mendes is a movie about taking a break from our ordinary day to day lives and becoming aware of the beauty around us while redefining what ‘beauty’ means to different people. It presents a satirical critique on the images of ‘beauty’ and ‘success’ portrayed by media and society which we internalize and strive to achieve leading to feelings of insecurity and confusion. By following a postmodernist approach, the director portrays the lives of characters who feel misunderstood or misplaced in their lives and are striving for that feeling of happiness and closure, which often gets lost in the modern fast paced lives and in trying to match up to the standards and categories …show more content…
Postmodern artists such as Duchamp, with his installation of signed pot (Fountain) caused chaos and confusion in the artistic circles as they blatantly challenged the notions of painting and aesthetics. He talks of how we cant ascribe a fixed meaning to what beauty means and this keeps changing with time, in diferent social settings creating different individual meanings of what beauty means. His idea of postmodernism offers an incredulity toward metanarratives that represent a nature of reality and the concept of a …show more content…
Mike Featherston aptly describes how in our daily lives, we are constantly bombarded by various images and symbols at such a fast pace that is difficult to chain these signifiers into a meaningful narrative and thus we end up enjoying only sensations of the surface of the images. The superficial ideas of beauty and reality presented by these images are very different from our real lives, leading us to forget our individuality to achieve the image presented by such mediums of consumer society. One apt example of this is fairness cream advertisements which show us that women can only be happy and successful in life if they are fair and beautiful like the ‘bleached’ models they present, which leads many women to internalize this notion and feeling ashamed of their natural skin complexion and thus fall prey to the facades of the market. Postmodernism talks of how it is wrong to just rely on the knowledge and the symbolization presented to us, instead we need to interpret the world to create our own individual meanings and
American Beauty, a movie directed by Sam Mendes is a movie about taking a break from our ordinary day to day lives and becoming aware of the beauty around us while redefining what ‘beauty’ means to different people. It presents a satirical critique on the images of ‘beauty’ and ‘success’ portrayed by media and society which we internalize and strive to achieve leading to feelings of insecurity and confusion. By following a postmodernist approach, the director portrays the lives of characters who feel misunderstood or misplaced in their lives and are striving for that feeling of happiness and closure, which often gets lost in the modern fast paced lives and in trying to match up to the standards and categories …show more content…
Postmodern artists such as Duchamp, with his installation of signed pot (Fountain) caused chaos and confusion in the artistic circles as they blatantly challenged the notions of painting and aesthetics. He talks of how we cant ascribe a fixed meaning to what beauty means and this keeps changing with time, in diferent social settings creating different individual meanings of what beauty means. His idea of postmodernism offers an incredulity toward metanarratives that represent a nature of reality and the concept of a …show more content…
Mike Featherston aptly describes how in our daily lives, we are constantly bombarded by various images and symbols at such a fast pace that is difficult to chain these signifiers into a meaningful narrative and thus we end up enjoying only sensations of the surface of the images. The superficial ideas of beauty and reality presented by these images are very different from our real lives, leading us to forget our individuality to achieve the image presented by such mediums of consumer society. One apt example of this is fairness cream advertisements which show us that women can only be happy and successful in life if they are fair and beautiful like the ‘bleached’ models they present, which leads many women to internalize this notion and feeling ashamed of their natural skin complexion and thus fall prey to the facades of the market. Postmodernism talks of how it is wrong to just rely on the knowledge and the symbolization presented to us, instead we need to interpret the world to create our own individual meanings and