왜 비닐봉지 장면은 반복되는가?

Why is the Floating Plastic Bag Scene Repeated?: American Beauty, or the Landscape of the Beatitude

This paper aims to examine why the floating plastic bag scene in Ricky's video camera is repeated in Lester's monologue and how such a repetition embodies the core of beauty and, furthermore the landscape of the beatitude in American Beauty (1999). Ricky, a teen-age boy with deep psychological wounds has the artistic capacity to videotape the instance of beauty through his Zen-like insight into an "entire life behind things": the free and natural movement of the ordinary plastic bag "being blown about as the wind carries it." This image exerts an incredible aesthetic power through the invention of the new mode of joyful assemblage, which could liberate us from the shackles of the conventional American beauty represented by Angela's seemingly spectacular but, in fact, vain beauty. Of importance here is that in spite of his profound enlightenment and creativity, Ricky's aesthetic vision has a limitation in the sense that he cannot be free from his obsessive desire to capture and possess all beauty within his camera frame from the exceptional position like an absolute being. In contrast, Lester, as a ghost-like figure who is speaking at the mystic interspace of life and death in the last scene, lets go of the desire for "holding onto" and possessing "so much beauty in the world." By doing so, the free floating plastic bag in Lester's dialogue finally becomes elevated to the image of the beatitude (great blessings occurring in and beyond the beauty), which could create the ontological joy in the sacred communication with the Other and the virtual realm of a life that has never been trodden. This event of the beatitude is touchingly and beautifully expressed as the image of the cheerful dance of a father and his kid in an assemblage of love in life. Such a joyous play is what Ricky is so desperately dreaming of realizing in his harsh reality, but he cannot do so because he cannot communicate with his violent and perverted father. It is no wonder that for Ricky, the plastic bag manifests itself as a kid begging him to play. In this sense, the repeated image in Lester's touching monologue can be considered the completion of the beatitude that Ricky attempts to embody in his profound aesthetic vision.