A metaphor: American Beauty

After reading Thought and Cinema and Image part in Seven-film thinking, two rhyming words, which are metaphor and metonymy, led me to think about.  In the Thought and Cinema, metonymy is defined as which separates images whereas metaphor connects images together with the whole. Eisenstein mentions two different images can have the same harmonics for making metaphor.

At that point, American Beauty clearly exemplifies the concept of metaphor.  There are two striking metaphors in this movie or maybe we can also say first one is metaphor and second one is metonymy: The first one is rose imagery referring to beauty.  Mena Suvari is depicted as an object of desire because of Kevin Spacey’s fantasy about this girl and the rose image is detached herself with the imagination of Spacey.  Except this detachment, the red is apparently used as the color of door, flower standing on the table, Real Estate posters of Peter Gallagher, Annette’s clothes and Spacey’s new car.  Alan Ball, the screenwriter of American Beauty, uses red color in different ways during the film.  As for the question of what this color generally symbolizes is life force.  Every character defines their life force (soul, sex, assertion, individuality, ambition etc.) differently.  Also, Suvari is an object of hatred linked with Annette Bening that she cultivates the roses in her garden at the first scene.  Second one is the plastic bag dancing in the air also has a red wall behind it.  We can say this is another object symbolizes again beauty in more spiritual way.  Wes Bentley’s words explain why I said it is spiritual: “I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid”.  Also, this object is again used at the end of the film because now it is associated with Spacey’s death at peace.

Here, we can see the red color as a distinctive metaphor generally referred by viewer to the rose in the film and then embeds the other images.

Eisenstein also adds in the first article: “A circuit which includes simultaneously the author, the film and the viewer is elaborated.  The complete circuit thus includes the sensory shock which raises us from the images to conscious thought, then the thinking in figures which takes us back to the images and gives us an affective shock again.”  Here, the rose appears as a way of transmission from the image to thought, then coming back for recall of our sensory shock.

Lastly, Nietzsche declares On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense that truth is in fact ‘a movable host of metaphors and metonymies’ due to the fundamentally metaphorical nature of concept-formation, a series of creative leaps from nerve stimulus to retinal image (first metaphor) to sound as signifier (second metaphor).

I think our mind actually needs syntagmatic and synthetical connections between signifiers and signified or metaphors and metonymies in a movie to make meaningful, instead invasion of signs without any connection as Godard does in Histoire(s) du Cinema.  That’s why it gets help from our memory.

Actually, discussion about metaphor and metonymy goes on but now it is just a little end waiting for the new ones..

References:

“Metaphor in Philosophy”, Wikipedia

“Thought and Cinema”, (156-187)

“Seven-Film thinking”, Image

Aytul Demiray