The Conformist Beauty: An observation of 90's cinema

None of the images used in this post are mine but from the films that I discuss.

"It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about."

Although the sense of conformity and natural unhappiness in our daily life is something really common in our overall society. (The notion of conformity really visible, the notion of unhappiness, sometimes really well hidden) Is an aspect of life that cinema has only decided to truly analyze in these recent decades in a deep psychological, dramatic, surrealistic and even funny ways.

In the late 90's a new wave of seeing and portraying life through fiction started to emerge in the world of cinema. A new fiction that revolves around common human beings, living a mundane life. The type of people who you usually ignore when you're walking on the streets: the common day slacker, the common day office man, the common day clerk and the common day writer. Which in our minds, in our world, they are there, they are always there but do we really think about them? Not really, since they are so common, their lives must be equally common and equally uninteresting.



Some people prefer to see the story of a movie star, some other people prefer to see the story of a successful musician, some people prefer to see the story of a famous serial killer or a gangster. When in reality the greatest protagonist that could ever exist in the history of fiction is indeed the common day human being living in a common day life and having mundane existence.



When you see trough the eyes of a common day man, you see everything that his environment has to offer,  because he is his own environment, he is the person who is contact with the real world every single moment of its existence and he comforts it. He adapts to it, and they suppers their own self, to adapt and comfort in this society, they become this society, they do that and they stay that way. And that's when the conformity domain emerges. And it's time to look a those people, because when we do, we look at our real world. And that's what these movies did:



The main four movies that I will be discussing here: Clerks, American Beauty, The Big Lebowski and Fight Club were all release in that same time and era: the 90's, an era that people are just learning to appreciate until now. And by watching those films nowadays, you can really grasp and see those feelings of unhappiness through conformity, numbness, frustration, materialism and crisis of existence that attacked the youngsters, the middle-aged men and even the oldsters of that era until these days. I'm not saying that the 90's where the time when all of these feelings , ways of thinking and emotions started to arise, but it was the time when we actually started to analyze them in a more deep and meaningful way. Stories, with a powerful message for the common guy inside a satirical, comical, extreme and even surreal exterior.



What I found to be the most interesting aspect of all of these films (yes the themes that they explore, which are themes that we all have live and we all have experience) are the actual protagonists and the age that they have. All of them suffer from the same kind of repression despite being of different ages and going through different stages of their lives. Showing us that those feelings are present in every age, every social status and every period of our lives.

The four main protagonist of these films deal with these several themes, but every one of them reacts in a different way and every one of them has their own resolution: Some of them positive, some of them neutral and some of them completely negative.

In Clerks we have Dante, a young clerk working in a small convenience store who couldn't be any more unhappy with his current life and his current job, despising almost everything that he has to do, but without the actual will to change his situation despite having several chances to do so.

In Fight Club we have the Narrator, a common young middle-aged man, who suffers from insomnia and who's also trapped in a world of consumerism and materialism. When suddenly he "liberates" himself from that world, doing this in an extreme, radical, violent and nihilistic  way.

In American Beauty we have Lester, another middle-aged man, a magazine writer who also hates his job. But Lester is a little bit different because his the only one who has a family, well a dysfunctional family to be more honest: He has a neurotic materialistic wife who is obsess with success and a low self-esteemed daughter. But suddenly after experiencing a series of uhh... revealing moments with a young lady, Lester's life begins to change when he blackmails his boss for $60,000 and quits his job, and he then goes to live the life that he wants to live.

And in The Big Lebowski we have none other that "The Dude", the slacker and arguably the most triumphant of all of these characters. The Dude is a middle aged man, and in contrast with all the other characters: his unemployed (or at least he never has a job in the entire film), he is a conformist person and he's actually happy with his current life and status. But things begin to change for the Dude when he gets involve into an underworld criminal scam that he originally had nothing to do with.

We have our main characters but not only that, in every single one of these films we also have characters who are the complete anti-thesis of these protagonists.



In Clerks we have Randal, Dante's best friend and his complete antithesis, he's arrogant, misanthrope, has no respect for authority and despite being in the same situation as Dante he's completely OK with his job in terms of conformity and he's overall happy with his current situation in comparison with Dante.

In American Beauty we have Carolyn, who I already described as been materialistic but not only that, she's also extremely superficial, always trying to "emit an image of success", completely guided into what other people (more successful than her) think of her.

"This isn't life, it's just stuff. And it's become more important to you than living. Well, honey, that's just nuts"

In The Big Lebowski we have none other than... The Big Lebowski, and old man who is also the complete antithesis of the Dude and really similar to Carolyn if you start to think about it. He's also extremely materialistic, he has a trophy 20-year-old wife, he's also obsess with success, but he's not actually interested in achieving success, he's interested in pretending that he has achieved success. He is so obsess in keeping an image of success that he goes as far as planning a complex criminal scam so that his image and reputation could be intact while earning a few thousand dollars. Oh yeah that's right! the guy is not even a millionaire, he actually has no money and everything that he has is property of his late wife. So the guy is a complete delusional materialistic hypocrite and a fraud.

And in Fight Club we have none other than Tyler. He's everything that the narrator wants to be, all his anger, hate, and inner dark desires repressed. Emerging as a nihilist terrorist with a desire of senseless destruction masked as an anarchic revolution.

As I said before, the outcome of these characters is completely different to one another:

Clerks ends when Dante has survived possibly one of the worst working days ever, he has seen what this horrible job is doing to him, his best friend Randal and his Girlfriend (well Ex) Veronica, they give him enough motivation to change his job and his life completely: Randal implies that Dante has to be qualified for at least another more decent job and Veronica tries to convince him to return to College. At the end of the movie we don't know what decision we makes, but the most probable thing is that he decides to keep working at the convenient store after all.

Fight Club ends in a climatic rampage, when the Narrator realize that his is actually the one who's destroying the city, Tyler is actually the outcome of all The Narrator's repressive life surrounded by a materialistic, superficial, consumerist society that he decided to comfort in.

American Beauty ends in a redeeming note, when Lester has a final encounter with Angela, the young girl who he fantasized about. Lester viewed her manly as a sexual object, but he finally finds out that she's just a frustrated little child who tried to be popular and unique hiding who she really was and lying about herself and her life. After comforting her, Lester finally manages to see all the true liberating beauty of the world for a brief eternal moment of his life.

And The Big Lebowski ends with The Dude's confrontation with the Big Lebowski revealing that instead of the successful, hardworking, first class man that he pretends to be, he's only just a low hypocrite con man. And that's when we realize that the Dude, despite been a slacker and a conformist man, he actually has higher values, a better sense of morality  and a better way of seeing and living life than the whole crazy dark world that surrounds him.

One of them doesn't reacts at all, another reacts in a complete destructive and hateful way, the other one manages to truly free himself from that life for a brief period of time and the other one has an inner balanced slackery life who we all... at certain moment of our lives, want to live.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480"] The Dude abides![/caption]

Thanks for reading.