‘Once In a Lifetime’ and ‘American Beauty’: How Talking Heads and Sam Mendes studied the suburban slide
Staring into its white-picket heart, Talking Heads’ ‘Once in a Lifetime’ and 1999’s American Beauty both made admirable efforts at grappling with the existential pangs taking place among much of middle-class suburbia.
The USA was on the cusp of major cultural shifts back in January 1981 when Talking Heads’ defining single was unleashed to the world. Released three months after its Remain in Light album, President-elect Ronald Reagan was due to take office and bring with him a brand of conservative patriotism and restoration of traditional values deemed to be sorely undermined since the countercultural explosion. Alongside this came a tsunami of unreined capitalism, promoting the message that greed and rampant individualism were all well and good.
A paragon of material ascent since the 1950s, the phenomena of the American suburbs loomed large in the conservative psyche. A neat, clean-cut, uniform row of tract housing one after the other, uncomplicated by the chaotic spectrum of humanity that comes with the urban milieu, and unconcerned with the need for nearby cultural nourishment or anything in the way of basic, social bustle. Naturally, such sterile environments were the dream of many who were driven to ‘keep up with the Joneses’, or a claustrophobic nightmare for the dissenters. If you’re David Lynch, such surreal Americana captivated and terrified in equal measure.
The shift in the air was sensed by team Talking Heads. After orbiting the previous decade’s premier soundtrack to youth pessimism, frontman David Byrne and producer Brian Eno were keen to forge a new sonic and thematic statement contrary to the malaise that still mired much of the new wave. Inspired by the vocal delivery of Pentecostal preachers and the latest innovations in Afrobeat music heard in West Africa, Talking Heads penned a slightly frenzied but weirdly radiant anthem to the American aspirant who’s struck by the large automobile, beautiful house, and beautiful wife, asking, “Well, how did I get here?”
Such material gain was still entirely possible in the early 1980s, tapping into an existential phenomenon felt by many 30-somethings, which feels like ancient history in today’s economic climate. Less a critique of social climb, Byrne had stepped away from the anguished idiosyncrasies that prickled the post-punk bite of 1979’s Fear of Music, and wanted to jump into positive affirmations of the place people find themselves while wandering the world on cruise control.
“It had all been done,” Eno told NPR’s All Things Considered in 2000. “And the only thing left worth doing was some sort of urban pessimism of some kind, and that record is terribly optimistic in a way. It’s very up and, like, looking out to the world and saying, ‘What a fantastic place we live in. Let’s celebrate it.’ And I think we knew that was a fresh thought at the time.”
A prescient single indeed anticipated the decade’s optimistic veneer. As the 1980s passed into the ‘90s, the economic settlement that promised new wealth and unimpeded roads to fortune had already curdled, now cemented as the era’s cast-iron orthodoxy, marvellous neoliberalism here forever and a triumphant declaration of history’s end. While the deindustrialised working classes already knew the era’s loss of agency and identity years back, the gnawing pangs of waning purpose and private alienation managed to penetrate the suburban edifice as the 21st century neared.
“A mystery story, a kaleidoscopic journey through American suburbia,” and “a series of love stories…” according to the director Sam Mendes, American Beauty depicted middle-aged media executive Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey, who seeks escape from his unfulfilling job and stale marriage, sparked by his sexual obsession with his daughter’s 16-year-old friend Angela Hayes, the blonde symbol of infatuation adorned with rose petals that triggered the film’s most enduring image.
In American Beauty, many of the characters are in desperate pursuit of meaning, be it Burnham’s yearning to break free from the cubicle monotony of his office day job, or the romantic interest of his daughter, Ricky Fitts’s poetic embrace of the iconic windswept plastic bag, but arguably reaches a more cynical conclusion, being that for all the dreaming of escape, deep down in their psyche they cannot envisage any other life for themselves. The perfect middle-class crisis.
When weighing up both Byrne and Alan Ball’s takes on the suburban slide, the respective vantages of time become apparent. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ examines domestic confinement with innocence, an affirmation shaking the lyrical husband out of their material coma and wishing to inject a zest for life. American Beauty, however, could only have come from the late 1990s, a black comedy drama that’s fogged with a black cloud of ennui that never quite wafts away, no matter what kinds of epiphany reveal themselves within touching distance.
