American Beauty has been showing on TNT these past few weeks. Even though I own the movie, I seem to stop and watch it when it's programmed on a cable channel. Even though all the good parts are cut out (whoo, censorship), I still sit, enamored, jaw dropped like it's my first time viewing.

Unlike my first time viewing, I'm not sitting practically on top of the television with the sound turned to barely audible. Hoping and praying that no one in my family will walk in on me, wondering why I was watching a movie with an almost nude Mena Suravi seductively filling Kevin Spacey's midlife crisis fantasies. Being as it was on HBO, nothing was cut out.

I don't feel sick after watching it. No longer is there an urge to vomit. It doesn't shake my sense of safety or shatter my world view. It did that first time I watched. I don't know why I was so drawn to it. I'm not even sure if I understood what it would be about. I just knew that I wasn't supposed to watch it, but for whatever reason (probably a general distaste for my past years as a leming), I went against what I believed.

It's like being beat for the first time for no reason. Hit hard, repeatedly, and unmercifully. Your understanding of the world and humanity starts to crumble. It used to be friendliness, magnificant and pure beauty; it used to be hope and possibilities; it used to be safe, blindly safe. Now, it felt shattered. Sickening. I told an older friend, one not indoctrinated, that it made me want to vomit.

Even though it was just a movie, I believed it thoroughly. My world view was more fake than this fictional movie. Everything was different. People were liars, cheats, homosexual, sexually active, smoking, drinking, killing. I was more angry that they had been hidden from me, made an anomoly, than I was of their existance. I felt like the world had been misrepresented to me; I was the one that was wrong. My construction was wrong.

It was hopeful though. The scene of the video taped leave, dancing in the autumn wind. The character talks about how there's so much beauty in the world, even in things that might be considered ugly or distasteful. It makes him stop, question his existance. There's so much beauty that he can't contain it, can't process it all. Maybe that isn't hopeful. It's too much...too much for humanity to handle.