A Rose a Day No.9

Poster for ‘Amerian Beauty’ (1999)

In the Oscar-winning film American Beauty (1999) red roses are everywhere, and are especially important as a symbol.

Cut roses, rose bushes in gardens, rose patterns on clothes, and most memorably, roses in fantasy sequences in which the lead character, played by Kevin Spacey, who is lusting after the schoolfriend of his own daughter, sees rose petals cascading down on her naked body, and floating out as she opens her shirt. 

But all these roses, the movie implies, are false. They are facile and banal symbols of beauty, desire, and truth because they have become so over-familiar and lacking in originality. The rose is an empty surrogate for beauty, whose function it is to mimic the real thing in ways that are wholly conformist and manageable. By being conditioned to identify with such a commonly recognized and commodified image, people are actually prevented from any possibility of experiencing real beauty, which is not fabricated or easy, and is available to everyone, free of charge.

 In the movie, the few individuals who have self-motivated and spontaneous experiences of beauty – with a plastic bag wafting in the air, for example (but never with roses) – are self-confessed ‘freaks’. American Beauty reminds us that authentic symbols comes from active, open, and original engagements with the world, and always involve something new and spontaneously experienced. If everyone wasn’t  so conditioned by the sterile values of society they too would see that a plastic bag floating in the breeze, a bit of ugly garbage of no apparent worth, can be where beauty is found. In modern American society, and by implication, Western society as a whole, or so the movie suggests, genuine experiences, the movements of the heart with which beauty is associated, have become increasingly impossible. The suburban rose-bush and the vases of cut roses are the real ‘garbage’, because they conceal the capacity to truly express from the heart. 

There actually is a rose called ‘American Beauty’ – a red Hybrid Perpetual. It was a French creation from 1885, whose breeder, Lédéchux, named it “Madame Ferdinand Jamin’. But it was astutely re-Christened for the American market.  ‘American Beauty’ has a strong, sweet scent, and repeat blooms a little. The Encyclopedia of  Roses observes: ‘It was a popular cut-flower rose in the late 19th-century…..Unfortunately, it is susceptible to all the fungal diseases that affect roses: blackspot, mildew, and rust.’ (p.30) Another association no doubt triggered by the title of the movie is Frank Sinatra’s shmaltzy song ‘American Beauty Rose’. In fact, for a time, the ‘American Beauty’ rose was the most famous rose in America. As Douglas Brenner and Stephen Scanniello write in A Rose by Any Name. The Little-Known Lore and Deep-Rooted History of Rose Names (2009) write: ‘The lasting fame of ‘American Beauty’ made it the fail-safe cut flower for generations of nervous hostesses, bashful beaux, and penitent spouses – and an easy target for satire.’ (p. 8)

But the roses seen in the movie  are not the ‘American Beauty’ rose. See for yourself. This is ‘American Beauty’:

xxx