Was Carolyn going to shoot Lester?

Well you will notice that folk here [those living IN the Beauty] say he did everything wrong, which they confuse with him simply getting off his ass to "I will buy this car today".

MS B was all hype and never "sold this house today" or any day and was in a self-help small f feminist haze [woe is me] so could have done anything like murder, espec if she too was on Zoloft [as for Ricky and mum].

But seeing Lester dead brought her back to earth but maybe she cried wolf too long and got pinned with murder

http://www.kindleflippages.com/ablog/

According to Carolyn's framing, Lester lost his job and was now a deadbeat, simply because he re-evaluated his life and found that to be true to himself, he needed a change. He needed to have a job that he enjoyed. He needed to wake up from the mindless striving for the "perfect American life." It is no accident that the job he fled was in the advertising industry, where the "American Dream" was being sold to generations. Remember that he wasted no time after obtaining his severance package from the writing job. He went and got a better job (in his estimation) at Mr. Happy.

To Carolyn, he was destroying her life and the dream she had worked so hard to build: the roses, the red door, the matching gardening attire and accoutrements, etc. So, yes, there was a motive and in her eyes, he was doing everything wrong.

I believe the answer lies not in Carolyn's motive but in the motive of the scriptwriter. That scene was set up to show, in some respect, that several people "might" have wanted Lester dead, including his wife and his daughter. We really don't know what was going through Carolyn's mind at that time, she is a fictional character and nothing contained in the movie tells us that she had the desire or the will to physically hurt Lester. All we can glean is that she has a gun. Maybe she just had it for protection? Ultimately it isn't important because we see that she didn't shoot him.

..*.. TxMike ..*..

Yes, the purpose of showing her with her gun and just the tip of the Gun that kills Lester and keeping the killer semi-anonymous was to show that it wasn't one person that killed him, but his environment. By rejecting the social norms of suburbia it in turn rejected him, and his death was inevitable as long as he overtly did what those around him deemed bad.

Carolyn may have thought about killing Lester, or may have been thinking about suicide. She stayed in the car a really long time. Either way, it would have nothing to do with him losing his job - after all he was still getting paid with benefits for another year - but it had everything to do with ruining her own chances at happiness with the real estate 'king'. They couldn't be together after that even if Lester would never inform on him, because it showed the real estate guy he had been too sloppy.

It ended her affair, which she was using to escape Lester's weirdness at home.

No way. At most she was just planning on scaring him to win an argument about 'being a victim'.

But the main reason I think it's there, is because there was an alternative ending where Ricky is charged with the murder of Lester. It's why the movie opens with Jane saying she wants her dad dead and Ricky offering to do it, because they use that as evidence in court at the end. I think they were setting it up so that maybe Caroline would also be a suspect, or even another alternative ending where she is charged with murder.