American Beauty Analysis

“Beauty” by Tony Hoagland was written in 1998. In this poem, Hoagland expresses his feelings on how women care too much about physical appearances. Throughout his poem he tells the story through the eyes of a brother of a girl who learns to love herself for who she is. Hoagland’s poem stresses the importance that beauty goes deeper than the surface. Throughout his poem, Tony Hoagland uses many literary devices to perfect his poem. These devices include the message, tone, imagery, figures of speech, and personification.

The short documentary Crooked Beauty, directed by Ken Paul Rosenthal, narrates Jacks Ashley McNamara’s experience in a psychiatric ward and how her time in the facility shapes her new appreciation for her mental illness. One controversial issue has been trying to identify the true cause of mental illness. On the one hand, most people may think mental illness is simply a biological disorder that can be cured with a combination of medication and doctors demanding appropriate behavior until it sticks in the patient’s mind. On the other, McNamara contends that mental illness is a misconception with a patient’s oversensitivity, where it is harder for the patient to ignore certain events than “normal” people, and their doctor’s textbook knowledge. In McNamara’s mental institution, the psychiatrists simply trap her in a padded room and prescribe many different pills to suppress her mental illness instead of embracing her differences or showing her how to use those differences to her advantage. In attempt to prevent those who are mentally ill from feeling the same anger and frustration she felt, she demands a change in the line psychiatric treatment when she says:

In Alice Walker's "Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”, her view of beauty changes through different stages of her life. In her childhood Walker has a misunderstanding of beauty. She is concerned with superficial signs of beauty and fails to appreciate her inner beauty. A tragic mishap as a young child leaves her right eye blind and deformed. She enters a period of depression her life, living her life in shame and disappointment because she believes her beauty to be lost. Even getting surgery as an adult doesn’t help defeat her demons. She continues to struggle until she finds her inner beauty through her daughter’s love. As a child, Alice Walker got her definition of beauty from her family, in her teens she turned to her peers to define beauty, her perception finally changed again in adulthood when she discovered an inner beauty.

Although happiness is a more evident theme in American Beauty, the idea of liberty is substantial; specifically, because free will is difficult to find, not to mention, exceedingly rare. One of the uniting personality traits in the movie is that so many of the characters appear trapped: trapped by their fears, their existences, and their occupations. Several characters such as Colonel Fitts and his wife, Barbara Fitts conclude the film just as entombed as they were when the movie began. Additionally, character’s such as Carolyn Burnham, merely begin to free themselves from the events that bind them in the substantial moments just before the film

American Beauty is a movie that sets in suburban America. The story is about Lester, whom is a middle-aged writer working in a magazine company. He was having a midlife crisis where he felt lonely and numbed by continuous unchanging routine of his everyday life. In the movie, his wife portrayed as a successful real estate agent, but she was also going through her own midlife crisis in both her career and personal life. Lester’s daughter, Jane Bumham had alienated her parents and was going through puberty. They have a new neighbor who is a U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Frank Fitts, and he has a son, Ricky Fitts, who is a drug dealer. Lester was going to get fired from his company that he had worked for fourteen

All humans have an imagination. Frye speaks upon how those who read literature and analyze it has a well-educated imagination. However, those who are left, do not have an imagination or it is easily influenced. In Chapter 6, Frye says “ Advertising is one example, though an obvious one, of the deliberate creation of an illusion in the middle of real life.” (85) Frye interprets advertising as an illusion in life that a purpose. This connects to the beauty industry, specifically cosmetics displays the perfect image that the public must embody. However, it is known there is the chance of becoming the perfect face of beauty is impossible. The illusion made by the beauty industry is made for the purpose of showing what all society believes is

Throughout the essay “The Ugly Truth About Beauty,” Dave Barry tries to explain how cosmetics are not important to the average male, but is an important topic for women. Men usually do not place as much importance in one’s appearance as women do. As Barry points out, if a group of men were instructed by Brad Pitt to apply cosmetics, they would quickly realize that the task was pointless, even demeaning to an extent. Most women on the other hand, place higher importance on their looks, even to the point of setting unobtainable goals of beauty. An example that Barry makes, is that women become obsessed with these looks because men want women to look that way, even though majority of men don’t care about cosmetics for the most part. These different

Does being outwardly beautiful make us feel more confident in ourselves? How often do we bring ourselves down because we don’t feel beautiful, but what is beauty? Alice Walker addresses the topic of not accepting and embracing oneself because of outward appearance. In Alice Walker’s narrative, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self,” she describes her story of feeling beautiful to completely ugly and then beautiful again. Her story gives the reader a better understanding of what true beauty is. Narrative rhetorical pattern, pathos, and rhetorical questions help Alice Walker teach her audience about beauty.

The draft changes in American Beauty altered a good idea into an amazing original script . The first draft resembled many crime films / shows and had heavy descriptions and unneeded content. Deleting the unneeded content and rearranged scenes pulled it together to tell about the disguised unhappy lives of a family and how their lies and actions all affected one another to the point of Lester's ultimate death. A noteworthy edit from the first and final draft is changing the movies sense from a CSI episode to a peak of masked lives in the neighborhood. The biggest and first obvious change from the first script is the deletion of the first Jail Cell scene.

I’m too tall. I’m too small. I wish I could be more skinner, have bigger muscles, look like someone I might have seen in a popular magazine. Do these questions sound familiar? Maybe questions one have asked before? If someone has asked these questions before, they are not the only one’s. Dave Berry says, “Why do women have such low self-esteem? There are many complex psychological and social reasons”(343). I do agree with that statement because as a person grows and gets older, there physical image changes along with their body shape as well. But there are multiple factors that lead to these questions such as self-esteem issues, not knowing your self-worth, and self-esteem instability. After reading “The Ugly Truth About Beauty” by Dave Berry and “Externally Contingent and Unstable Self-Worth as Predictors of Depression in College Women: A 3-Month Study” by Lopez, etal. I was able to correlate the two and come up with three intersections of why women can sometimes have no confidence in themselves.

Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty can most simply be summed up as the life of Lucy Grealy and her lasting impact on people. Patchett writes from a colloquial sidelines point of view meaning Grealy is depicted as a type person who is like an unyielding force. She was a force that gained momentum as it swept up more followers and Patchett became subject to this overpowering presence that Lucy effused. Patchett uses letters from Grealy to explore a part of this invisible attraction which Grealy seemed to radiate.

The Fairy Tale “Beauty and the Beast” by Jeanne-Marie Leprince De Beaumont as the Remedy for Depression

The Scene shows the conversation between Lester (employee) and Brad (manager of the company). Towards the start of the scene, Lester is frustrated with his life. His wife is so worldly and they hardly determine each other, and his young offspring cannot determine both of them. He is working as a writer in the media magazine, he is caught for a difficult and futile occupation.

Beauty is something that can be interpreted completely different from person to person. A famous quote that goes along with this perfectly is “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” I think a person’s inner beauty should be taken into account when deciding whether or not a person is beautiful. Wikipedia’s definition of beauty is, “a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure or satisfaction” while Oxford Dictionary states, “beauty is a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially sight.” As you can see, inner beauty could be paired with Wiki’s definition and outer beauty could be paired with Oxfords. Of course, there

"Does this make me look fat?” Everyone at one time or another has experienced this iconic question in some way. Your best friend may have asked it, as she was getting ready for a date or maybe you muttered these words to yourself as you stared disapprovingly into a mirror; either way, this six-word question alludes to a standard of beauty that everyone strives to meet. A standard of beauty that is almost impossible to meet. The definition of beauty has evolved greatly over the years and it differs from culture to culture. Today, western culture idolizes the woman who is “thin, large breasted, and white (tanned, but not too brown)” (WVFV, pg. 220). This woman is one that millions of women strive to look like in