By Jonathan Hastings
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March 23, 2000 | Page 1, 2

Jules Feiffer's 1979 graphic novel Tantrum tells the story of 42-year-old Leo Quog, who, faced with the perils of middle-aged maleness, makes himself into a two-year-old as a last-ditch survival tactic. The book's opening image shows the adult Leo slumped in his office chair, staring vacantly off-page, silently chanting, "No give. No give. No give." He's experiencing a kind of sensory overload that he feels as physical pressure immobilizing his body. (Here, and throughout the work, Feiffer makes his character's psychic damage visible in physical terms.) The demands of his life, supporting his wife and two children, working a deadening job, dealing with the small failures that have slowly built up to eclipse his successes, have pushed him into a desperate retreat into childhood, an attempt to shut down part of his consciousness.

Lester Burnham, the protagonist of American Beauty, a film directed by Sam Mendes from a screenplay by Alan Ball, undergoes a similar regression. After a sudden infatuation with his 16 year-old daughter's gorgeous 16 year-old best friend jolts him awake from the somnambulistic routine of his life, Lester decides that walking the path to happiness mean reverting to the way he lived when he was just seventeen. He quits hacking for a glossy magazine and gets a job at a fast food restaurant. He trades in his reasonable family sedan for his dream sportscar. He starts smoking pot to relax, and starts lifting weights so he'll look sexier to his daughter's friend. He sits around his house drinking beer and playing with a remote control car. He calls his daughter's best friend and hangs up the phone when she answers. When she comes to sleep over at his house, he doesn't hide his leering glances.

Leo and Lester both flee from all responsibility because by denying responsibility they can hide from themselves their complicity in their own unhappiness. Feiffer exposes this denial for what it is: an impossible attempt to erase and write over personal history. Feiffer sympathizes with Leo, but he doesn't spare his protagonist the same satire he wields against the other characters in the book, like Leo's narcissistic brother or his out-of-control children. From Leo's metamorphosis, which we see as the act of a simultaneously pathetic and imaginative man, to his final compromise with his wife, which we can see as both pitiable codependency and a revolutionary new kind of design for living, Feiffer gives each image in the book a sharp edge of ambiguity. Leo finds he has as many problems as a toddler as he did when he was an adult, because it's Feiffer's conceit that Leo continues to talk and think like a 42 year-old man. As Ray Mescallado put it in Tantrum's entry in "The Top 100 Comics of the Century" list published in The Comics Journal No. 210, "Leo can't help acting like an adult, though that doesn't always mean he's behaving maturely when he does so."

However, in American Beauty, Lester Burnham successfully shuts down his adult mind. He deafens himself to the needs of his wife and daughter, and devotes himself to his self-righteous and self-centered quest to recapture the spirit of his seventeenth summer. Unlike Feiffer, Mendes and Ball's "boys will be boys" attitude protects their protagonist from anything but the most shallow criticism. If anything, Mendes and Ball seem to think that Lester is justified in trying to escape from his responsibilities. They seem to buy into Lester's delusion that he's somehow been victimized all these years, by his wife, his daughter, his job, and that he doesn't deserve to continue to be burdened with the responsibility of adulthood. We're supposed to applaud Lester when he accuses his wife of being too materialistic to enjoy life, but he makes only token effort to share his newfound enjoyment of life with her. We're supposed to cheer Lester on as he stands up for himself at the dinner table by throwing a plate of asparagus against the wall, even though his behavior is that of a whining, two-year old. Mendes and Ball lack the moral acuity to realize that Lester hasn't found the secret to happiness, he's just throwing a tantrum.

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