Comparing Ulysses and American Beauty :: comparison compare contrast essays

Ulysses and American Beauty In the Nausicaa chapter of James Joyces Ulysses, a virginal exhibitionist, Gerty McDowell, flashes her knickers. . .the wondrous revealment, half-offered uniform those skirt-dancers at Leopold Bloom, igniting his hinge uponual fireworks on a beach in capital of Ireland (366). In a film set almost 100 long time later in an American suburb, another virginal seductress flips her dance skirt, good-looking admirers a peek at her panties, and inspires Blooms modern incarnation, Lester Burnham, into a similar part of auto-eroticism. The metempsychosis of Leopold Bloom into Lester Burnham isnt the exactly astonishing similarity between Ulysses and American Beauty. When screenwriter Alan Ball accepted the 2000 Golden Globe and Academy Awards for his screenplay of American Beauty, he owed a substantial debt--albeit universally unnoticed and, as he claimed in a telephone interview, unintended--to Joyces masterpiece, the book chosen neertheless m onths earlier by the Modern Library editorial board as the best novel of the Twentieth Century. Yes, the ending of American Beauty represents a major departure from the plot of Joyces novel--but an explicable one in a modern update of the Ulysses saga. Late twentieth-century audiences, who have become desensitized to escalating media violence everyplace the past 100 years and have, in fact, developed an appetite for gore, pick out a bloody resolution. Despite the ending, we are left with striking reincarnations of Irish urbanites into suburban American personalities. Consider other parallels heroes Leopold Bloom and Lester Burnham (same initials, LB) are both middle-aged, middle-class, mediocre, unappreciated admen (Lester describes himself as a whore for the advertising industry49, neither of whom has had sex with their wives in years . Ultimately both Bloom and Lester ache to regain the past unity and warmth of their homes. Bloom muses, I was happier according ly and fantasizes he could somehow reappear reborn to his marriage bed with married woman Molly (728) while Lester tells us, Thats my wife Carolyn. . . . We used to be happy and vows, Its never too late to get it back (2, 5). Both also sense displaced by a growing estrangement from their teenage daughters Blooms surviving child, Milly, and Lesters only child, Jane. To compensate for their non-existent sex lives, both Leopold and Lester turn first to solo sex in the bath (or in Lesters case, the shower) and both enjoy adulterous, guilty dreams of atypical sexual practices, often accompanied by flower imagery.