Assignment 3- Part Two

For this assignment, I will be looking at the scene where Kevin Spacey's character is murdered in the movie American Beauty. In this scene, Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari have just finished a rather strange sexual encounter, where Lester (Spacey) decides not to take Angela's (Suvari) virginity and also realizes that there is much that is good in the world. The score is somewhat hopeful and resolved sounding, with lots of pleasant, calming strings. Angela goes to the bathroom, leaving Spacey alone in the kitchen to ponder the realizations he has come to. We see a medium shot of Spacey standing against his kitchen counter, smiling, and then he notices something across the room. We get a perspective shot of a photograph of Lester, his wife Caroline (Annette Bening) and their daughter, Jane, when Jane was a young girl and they were all smiling wildly on an amusement park ride. We get a medium tracking shot of Lester taking the picture off of the counter and sitting down with at a table, as we get a voice-over telling us about the joy that is possible in life. Then, as he sits at the table, we get a close-up of his profile. The voice-over script continues and then stops just as we see the tip of a gun move up just behind the profile of Lester's head. The camera then tracks to the wall across the table from Lester, we hear a shot, and see a splatter of blood hit the wall. Though the music remains the same throughout, what originally seemed resolved and pleasant in the end seems slightly sinister and mysterious. 

I believe that the shot where the gun enters the screen just behind Lester's head is symbolic of the message of the movie, which is that one never knows when one will die and so the best thing to do is to make sure that we focus on the things that matter at all times. Lester is killed when he is focusing on his family, who he loves, and thus has learned the lesson well. The scene is followed by a series of replay-reaction tracking shots, while we have a voice-over from Lester. This scene helps us, because it is mysterious, to simultaneously feel the fear that death and murder provokes as well as the peaceful resignation that we must eventually come to about death. 

I plan to teach film in my classroom next year. I would like to design a unit around two or three films and I would like the students to watch them, analyze them based upon their elements (as we have here), and then create their own films. I have had students make their own films in my class this year, but we have not studied the film elements as well as we could have. Right now, I would continue to have the students storyboard and script before they film (just as I have in the past) and I would also see if it would be possible to use other cameras than the ones we have (which are flip cameras). Our flip cameras only film in 30 second clips, so it makes editing very difficult. My students have said that their favorite thing we have done this year is making videos, so clearly there exists a large opportunity for the students to be both engaged and to learn.