Openings: Acknowledging Essential Moments in Human Communication

8. The Beauty of Being Open

153 —8— The Beauty of Being Open We are literally “moved toward” (Latin: emovere) beauty because it makes us metaphysical creatures feel good. It is an emotional experience. At the very least, the move is an evolutionary survival mechanism. Not wanting to experience the truth of beauty is to become something of Dickens’ fabled and haunted character Scrooge waiting and eventually praying for the light of day. Emotions assist consciousness in opening us to the world and evoking our interests in what is going on in our immediate environments. Scrooge had to be scared to death before he could be transformed from a closed-minded to an open-minded person who could now feel the joy of true beauty: for example, appreciating what the predicament of Tiny Tim truly entailed and then acting accordingly toward the boy, his family, and others who knew Scrooge to be a quite ugly man before he was transformed overnight and started doing wonderful and beautiful things for one and all. Beauty is an agent of openings that warrants acknowledgment. Keep in mind, however, that beauty is also associated with an “egregious example or instance.” For example: “That mistake was a beauty.” “That black eye of yours is a real beauty.” In such cases the brilliance of beauty still functions as an interruption of 154 • Openings the usual, gaining our attention because of its difference from the “normal.” But in these cases, we come to terms with the extraordinary nature of beauty by way of something being especially negative, unsettling, or injurious. Be it related to the good or the bad, the interruptive character of beauty functions as a call of conscience—a call that beckons us to make a judgment of the situation at hand and then act appropriately. American Beauty makes use of both types of beauty, although more bad than good happens throughout the film.1 The film tells the story of members of two exceptionally dysfunctional families, the Burnhams and the Fitts. The confessional nature of the film permeates its narrative, especially in the form of a voice-over spoken by a member of one of these families telling the story that we are witnessing on the screen. Typically characterized as being a drama and dark comedy, the film teaches us about beauty as the phenomenon deteriorates (in a display of closings) and then, to some extent, regenerates (opens itself) in the lives of some of the main characters. With the ending of the story, we are both opened and closed to beauty in a very emotional and revealing way. American Beauty is, for me, a work of art that brings to mind a teaching of Marcel Proust: The greatness . . . of true art . . . [is] to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves from by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our [own] life.2 I think of American Beauty as being a film version of the best postcards found on Frank Warren’s PostSecret website and in his books. Although a work of fiction, the film provides a wonderful and disturbing illustration of how our openness is structured rhetorically to disclose things great and small, joyful and terrifying , thought-provoking and educational. American Beauty offers both lovely and egregious examples of the phenomenon in question. We are about to enter a world where family life is in a crisis state, being no way as “perfect” as the reddish pink petals that form the logarithmic spiral of the film’s principle symbol: the The Beauty of Being Open • 155 American Beauty rose. With its geometric form, this rose is often taken as a symbol of natural symmetry, harmony, love, and fragility —qualities that are in much distress throughout the film. The film opens in a strange and disorienting way. We see a video of Jane Burnham, the sixteen-year-old attractive and distressed daughter of Lester and Carolyn Burnham. Jane is heard to say, “I need a father who’s a role model, not some horny geekboy who’s gonna spray his shorts whenever I bring a girlfriend home from school.” Jane then offers a ridiculing snort. “What a lame-o. Somebody really should...