American Beauty and postmodernism-in practice, somewhat!!!

The idea of postmodernism is a unique and objective way of looking at a text like Mendes’ film American Beauty. The film tries to pick apart the idea of what beauty is and how it can function in a mundane setting such as the ordinary, everyday life of the average America. In my paper for this course I would like to try to pull apart some of the ideas that Mendes explains in the film and try to focus them using a variety of critical cultural and literary theories but mainly focusing on a postmodernist perspective.
In order to critique the movie with any effectiveness I think that I am going to need to try to further understand what postmodernism is and to try to understand it in both a literary and cinematic viewpoint. I am going to need to address the idea of cinema veritae and to try to explain why American beauty provides and exemplifies the this idea in a postmodernist, post-structuralist viewpoint.
Many cultural theorists including beaudrillard, lacan, and derrida have compelling arguments about what truth is and Mendes expands on these ideas in the film American Beauty. I think that getting to the idea of what truth is and how it functions is an important point to make in this paper as well as foucault’s idea of the author function and how who says the idea in question is very significant to the idea of truth and reality. The other idea that I would like to focus on in this paper is how does the film change our ideas and understanding of what is simulation, simulacra and the superreal in the context of everyday American life as we know it and the movie shows it. In the paper I would also like to tease out the idea using theory of how some of thoughts and actions in this movie may be considered area while in another context they would be thought of as profanity or obscenity and to examine the idea of what makes this movie aesthetically acceptable while in another setting it would not be and tie that idea into postmodernist thought and specifically the author function as Barthes and Fouccault describe it.
The paper will utilize the 6 to 8 sources that are required for the assignment as well as many more because, I would like to examine what scholars and theorists think about the ideas of postmodernist beauty and the film American beauty. Within these sources I will also use different types of theory like feminism and even liberal humanism to explain the concepts of beauty in American beauty.
These are some of the main points that I would like to explore in the paper and would like to show how postmodernist theory can be applied to contemporary texts and ideas to change our understanding of them and how they work.