"Too Close for Comfort": American Beauty and the Incest Motif

Abstract

Through a reading of the film American Beauty, this article explains how the structure of father-daughter incest, working through displacement, has provided a narrative that links a series of recent cultural developments: the sexualization of ever-younger girls, cinema's erasure of mothers and of career women as sympathetic figures, and efforts to remasculinize the middle-aged white male.