Significance Of The Color Red In American Beauty

In Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, there is a deliberate use of the color red throughout the film. The color is a clear representation of life and death, as the movie’s main theme is about both and how they go hand in hand. Blood is one of the things that gives human beings life, it is what keeps people living at the same time that if it’s gone, we die. Blood is the color blue below the surface of our skin when it is in our veins. But it is when it comes to the surface that it becomes the color red. And when it comes the surface, we are losing the blood that is so vital to keeping us alive. The red of our blood means we had less than we had before. And in the case of death, it means we’ve lost all of it, or we will lose all of it soon. From the

So we already know this movie is about Lester, his life, and then his death. The scene goes onto show Lester inside the house, watching and then pointing out how his wife - Carolyn - has clogs that match the handles on her pruning shears as she works on her garden. We see her cut a red rose close up, and then in the next shot from far away, showing her garden and how all of the flowers in said garden are red roses. With the pulled back shot of his wife gardening, we see the all red roses line the white picket fence around their property. So essentially, with the color red, the Burnham family is surrounded by death, particularly Lester, as he is the one who is going to die at the end of the film. Also, when the shot shows Carolyn, Lester’s wife, turn toward their next door neighbor to talk, we see in the background that the red roses really do wrap around their property as they line the whole garden against the white picket fence. The symbolic use of roses are typically used as a symbol of romance, but are not used for it in American Beauty. They are a representation of Lester’s death, and how his blood will be leaving his body when he is no longer living. Lester, at the end of the film, dies in his own house, so it is as if the red roses, representing his death, are

There is a beauty to Lester’s life, and his death. In the film, when Lester’s daughter Jane and Ricky, her boyfriend from next door, discover Lester’s body, Ricky crouches down to look at Lester’s dead face and stares, tilts his head and smiles a little bit before he truly realizes what he’s seeing. Ricky is finding some sort of beauty in Lester’s death, in the almost artistry of the blood surrounding Lester and the blood dropping down from his head onto his face. As ugly and horrid as death is, it seems that Ball was almost making a statement with that moment that there can be a sort of disturbing beauty in death