American Beauty and Missattribution of Arousal

The film American Beauty (1999) directed by Sam Mendes is set in the early 90’s in a suburban American town. It tells the story of a family who is dealing with seemingly typical problems including Lester who is experiencing a midlife crisis; Carolyn who has become obsessed with success to cover up that her life is a failure and their daughter Jane who is discussed by both her parents, depressed and does not feel attractive enough, which is evident by her saving for breast implants. Jane’s best friend Angela who gives everyone the impression that she is this very experienced sexual girl when in fact she has “daddy issues” and really is the ordinary person she does not want to be. The life of this family collides with their new neighbors Cornel Frank Fits who is a anal retentive ex military father who is extremely conservative. Next we have his wife Barbra, who is extremely detached from reality. Their son Rickey who has had a long history of abuse from his father and has created a secret life for himself as a marijuana dealer in which he is very successful.

The dominant theme, which I have identified in the movie, is the theory of “misattribution of arousal” which is quite prevalent in this movie. This theory is important because this “misattribution of arousal” can cause many different emotions, which we may attribute to the wrong source. This can lead to many different problems as which we can see in the movie. We will first elaborate on the theory and later in the paper show where the theory applies

Many times we have a stimulus, which we give labels such as happiness, sadness, love, anger and attraction. This is combination of stimulus with label leads to our so-called emotion. The way misattribution of arousal comes into play is sometimes we put an incorrect label on our emotion. The theory of misattribution of arousal was initially studied by Schacter and Singer (1962). After being injected with epinephrine, which causes arousal, participants were more...