Americans Break Hearts and Guitars
"American ________! Stay away from ___!" Fill in the blanks. Go ahead, I dare you to. I know, this is an academic paper, but that doesn't have to stop us from a friendly bout of Mad Libs. So what did you pencil in? "Diabetics" and "excessive sugars"? No. Odds are, you filled in "woman" and "me", respectively. Even if you had never before heard "American Woman" by the Guess Who, after watching Lester Burnham, the protagonist of American Beauty, calmly, cooly, and somewhat arrogantly croon the verse while driving, you'll probably never forget those words, and it's not by accident or simply due of the talent of the Guess Who. It's one of the scenes in American Beauty that, through song, serves as both validation and nostalgia (for Lester) and (for the viewer) as a metaphor or even a vessel to better transmit and actualize Lester from the flat screen we watch him on. In John Cheever's short story "The Country Husband", Frances Weed, Lester's......
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Approximate Word Count: 1825
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |