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"Too Close for Comfort": American Beauty and the Incest Motif
- Cinema Journal
- University of Texas Press
- 44, Number 1, Fall 2004
- pp. 69-93
- 10.1353/cj.2004.0048
- Article
- Additional Information
Through a reading of the film American Beauty, this article explains how the structure of father-daughter incest, working through displacement, has provided a narrative that links a series of recent cultural developments: the sexualization of ever-younger girls, cinema's erasure of mothers and of career women as sympathetic figures, and efforts to remasculinize the middle-aged white male.