A few years ago, my now-teenaged niece couldn’t get enough of wholesome, handsome pop singer Shawn Mendes.

Ask her about Mendes now, however, and her response will be visceral and decisive. To say she no longer likes his music is to grievously understate. Mendes does not simply represent a taste she has grown beyond, he is an object of unadulterated hatred, physical repulsion.

He has been disavowed.

And of course, methinks the lady doth protest too much, the opposite of love being indifference and all that.

So what is it about our former affections that inspire such passions? What hold do they still have on us, requiring such insistent, bombastic shows of disavowal?

Perhaps adolescent psychology holds the key.

I have read that adolescence is a time during which the child is struggling to individuate themself, to establish a unique identity separate and apart from their parents’ and other caregivers’.

To disavow them, if you will.

Therefore, the hallmarks of adolescent behavior–defiance, surliness, withdrawal–should be read not as rebellion against parents and caregivers, but as the child rebelling against the former version of themself.

Could it be that our 20-plus year disavowal of a once-beloved film represents a culture rebelling against a former version of itself rather than a rebellion waged on aesthetic grounds?

(Within the context of a great nation’s lifespan, what is America but an awkward teenager, anyway?)

If we give this theory some credibility, it is perhaps most useful to view American Beauty in a different way: as a feature-length pilot for the “Golden Age” (quotes mine) of television that soon followed it.

Rewatching American Beauty now, one is struck by how familiar and stale it seems. And I believe this owes to the fact that we have seen its subject matter, tone and manner of execution iterated upon endlessly over the past 25 years of premium cable comedy-drama. The film arguably created a style that immediately rendered it, the source, obsolete.

All of it–the sitcom beats married to graphic frankness regarding sex and violence, the reaching for profundity, the attempt to be all things at once, drama, comedy, satire, thriller, inspirational fable–seems, in my memory at least, to comprise just about the whole of Showtime’s programming for the first 15 or so years of the 21st century. Nurse Jackie, Weeds, The United States of Tara, The Big C, Happiness and on and on and on…

And that’s just one network. The most obvious extension of American Beauty’s sensibility would be screenwriter Alan Ball’s follow-up, Six Feet Under, the acclaimed hourlong dramedy that aired on HBO from 2001 to 2005.

Six Feet Under seemed to take American Beauty’s tone and thematic interests–death, sex, family, the afterlife–and more successfully realize them in an hourlong R-rated television format. A format, it is worth mentioning, that didn’t really exist when American Beauty was released.

So…why so much hate? Need we fling vitriol at a film for the small sin of presenting its subject matter in the wrong package? Or is the memory of its celebration, and this former version of ourselves that was so easily duped by undeserving art, simply too excruciating to bear?

(For my money, if there is any film of that era deserving this sort of permanent revilement, it’s Crash, but I digress)

Rewatching American Beauty recently for the first time in years if not decades, I still found plenty to enjoy. The first third of the story in particular moves at a satisfying clip and is often extremely funny. Call me old fashioned, but I enjoy a film that begins with the main character informing us, in voiceover, that he will be dead within a year. I also enjoy a movie that begins with that same voiceover quipping, as the camera pans through the bathroom, “Look at me, jerking off in the shower. This is the high point of my day. It’s all downhill from here.” This kind of would-be edgy humor and imagery has been beaten to death (no pun intended) by two decades of cable hourlongs, but in 1999, it was new and exciting.

In 2025, nearly everything about American Beauty is, in fact, quaint. It can be viewed, to some extent, as First World Problems: The Movie, which speaks more to our time than its. I imagine a better film exists within it, one that is more European in its sensibility, far heavier on the satire and far easier on the sentimentality. Perhaps Sam Mendes (who, it’s worth saying, is European, and it’s also worth saying, is no relation to our dear Shawn), was not the man for the job. He is a mawkish and sentimental director, if one skilled at composition and working with actors. Technical knack aside, his version of American Beauty necessarily slogs into treacly territory from which it can never really extricate itself.

But then again, perhaps that is the appropriate mode for a film so explicitly about late 20th Century America, a place of lassitude and abundance, a place trying constantly to be all things to all people, to have everything: the humor, the pathos, and the transcendence.

To slap these things together in a shiny, self-congratulatory package and later disavow it for a newer, shinier model, is after all, very American.