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UrbanSprawl wrote:

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American Beauty is a masterpiece. The plastic bag scene begs the question: what is beauty? what is society's sense of aesthetics? are the two in accord or discord? why and how does this affect our society?

It becomes a very obvious knock on consolidation and homogenization of art (as seen in suburbia) and an ownership of art which has been taken away from the Thoreau-esque individual and given to monied interested (as seen in corporatism). So this movie is taking a very obvious stab at suburbia, commercial culture, and a society distracted and misled by the larger powers around us.

I'm sure every person got that from this movie, but let's look further at how the plastic bag scene serves as a serious comment on the movie. The neighbor views something as beautiful and tapes it in a meta-cinematic moment. Furthermore, the movie takes both the neighbor's sense of aesthetics and the neighbor's movies extremely seriously (to a point where many scoffed at the scene outright). We have a movie of a movie of an event with a shared sense of aesthetic values. So we're talking about a microcosm here, the neighbor's movie is a smaller but complete universe which can be expanded into the entirety of American Beauty. Thus, the inside joke: we're watching white trash being pulled, picked-up and carried around by larger forces surrounding it, a summation of the white trash family being pulled, picked-up and carried around by the larger forces surrounding it.

The videotape of the bag brings a whole new meta-narrative spin to the movie. Because you're essentially giving the entirety of the movie to two characters during the middle act. It would be akin to giving Hamlet an entire play of Hamlet in the third act (which is what many had interpreted as happening). So the videotape quickly becomes a source of enlightenment. The two characters become deeply aware of where they fit in the scheme of things. The daughter is just white trash being pushed and pulled by the forces around her. She's just an actor in a play; so she should just come to peace with her surroundings, recognize it and herself as beautiful, and just get up and leave the play altogether to further her process of development. And this is exactly what she does.

Making American Beauty, the artists were in a difficult position. They wanted to make a trashy, melodramatic movie that could also be appreciated as high art. They wanted to make an incredibly stagey, artificial production that was also a serious comment on us at our most natural, unadorned and unguarded. The plastic bag scene is the realization that both seeming impossibilities are entirely possible. If you saw some beauty in the bag scene, you have to admit that the most natural and most artificial can dance among themselves to create something beautiful. And you have to admit that even the trashiest, disposable things in our society can be vaulted to high art.