Perhaps if we view American Beauty with a remnant of empathy for our teenage selves, its merits will surface in a different light.
JoinedMay 18, 2020
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Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a lowbrow cinephile. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, selected by Cheryl Strayed for the Kore Press Memoir Award. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Literary Hub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. She grew up in the woods of Southern Connecticut and now lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.
Like many of its 1980s sci-fi contemporaries, the threat in Earth Girls Are Easy is humans, specifically those driven by greed and narrow-mindedness. But there’s also a lesson to be learned about our collective perception of the Valley—a place widely regarded as America’s vortex of vapidness.
It’s easy to write off a movie like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, so married as it is to the neon tackiness of the early 1990s; it’s much harder to recognize that placing itself squarely into that context is an extraordinary device.
Like many American landscapes, Connecticut’s pop culture identity is so omnipresent that it’s sometimes difficult to tell where the stereotypes end and the real place begins.