MovieChat Forums > American Beauty (1999) Discussion > What was going on with Barbara Fitts?

What was going on with Barbara Fitts?


(Allison Janney character).

There is one scene where she is sitting at the table just staring ahead blankly, totally expressionless. I thought that was interesting but it never got explained. Other than being married to a repressed homosexual, what killed the soul of this woman?

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The movie never really explains, but I think she probably had dementia/alzheimers.

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That's what I think. It's not just her married to a repressed gay guy. She seemed like a dementia sufferer.

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Another possibility is that she was so traumatized by her husband's repressed homosexuality that she just mentally & emotionally shut down.

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idk but id have sexual relations with her for sure

https://imagesvc.meredithcorp.io/v3/mm/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.onecms.io%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F14%2F2018%2F08%2F28%2Fallison-janney-003-2000.jpg

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LOL! She sure didn't look like that in the movie.

I had to think for a bit to even remember where Alison Janney was in this.

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She was married to man for whom nothing could ever be done well enough; this is demonstrated by the scene where Ricky brings Jane over to meet her, and all she can express is her horror as to the disheveled state of her house, which is obviously in perfect shape. This has a deeper meaning in that she wasn't talking about the physical house in which they lived, but the house consisting of her family, within which she was just a passenger to her husband's bouts of rage and insistence on his adherence to his desired state of order and perfection, to which nothing could ever be good enough.

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being married to a crazy like her husband + probably on pills

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