An analysis of the Oscar winning movie “American Beauty”.
This paper examines the film “American Beauty”, about problems in interpersonal communication among several characters and how the husband and wife in the film in particular suffer because of their failure to communicate effectively with one another. The paper also shows many of the pressures on the family that exist today and the ways in which those pressures increase problems in interpersonal communication. It discusses how the application of social psychology in this situation could be used to identify the sources of cognitive dissonance and to develop ways of bringing the nature of this dissonance to the awareness of the couple so they could alter their behavior, shift their expectations and find ways to accommodate one another through better communication.
“The primary problem for both husband and wife is that they have discovered that there is a significant gap between the expectations society has given them in their socialization process and the reality encountered in life. Both husband and wife experience a form of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when our behavior or situation does not reflect our beliefs, causing us to experience dissonance, or a conflict between our intellect and our actions. Both husband and wife have lived with certain expectations,a nd both find that the life they are living does not meet these expectations. This is not surprising. We receive messages from our surroundings all the time which may challenge our assumptions, our beliefs, or our behaviors, and we may continue behaviors which counter these messages even if we believe the message as well.”