Twas beauty killed the beast

OK, now that everyone thinks I'm waaayy too fond of drinking, let me divert your attention to more a wholesome subject.

After a frustrating day - I mean, a day that was loaded, permeated, defined by frustration, a day ordained to frustration as if the stars foretold it, a day like 12.12.12 devoted to the destruction of the earth - and I am bombarded by the ugliness of people and the futility of the dumb stuff Im involved in, and the paltriness of the modern world, and the foolishness of children, and the disobedience of pets, and flat tires and dead batteries, then I watch a movie like American Beauty.  And it tells me that the world is so full of beauty, so full in fact that one of the main characters almost cant take it, and his heart is about to cave in, it's so full. And I remember, Oh yeah, there's also beauty, the true knowledge I apprehend through a pleasurable medium.

Now, this is a movie panned by Christian critics.  And it has just enough sexuality that I can't, within pleasant Christian circles, recommend it for fear of causing offense.  And it presents a man with whom the audience is sympathetic, doing very bad things like smoking pot and coaxing an underage girl, but we want him to do it, in our secret naughty intentions (or at least my secret naughtiness, smoking pot with him, rejoicing as he tells off his wife and as their marriage devours itself).  But the redemption is there, and it is almost too subtle, but it is there.

At the end of the film, beauty is hailed, and evil is downcast.  Beauty in the form of love, freedom, virginity, humanity, male and female forms, music.  Bad things are bad: violence, insults, unkindness, oppression, falsehood.  Redemption and then death, enlightenment followed by judgment through natural outworking of bad choices. Amazing.

And after a bad day, a film now 10 years old, dismissed by many, is able to preach to me an old message, a welcome message: the world is full of beauty, overlooked in little things, and we have to slow down to see them. You may have to take up a hobby like home video taping in order to make yourself slow down. But the frustration is not the end. Beauty is the end - look for it, they tell me, slow down.  See.  Look closer. Do something, your own preferred art form.