There is yet another seemingly unconnected scene in this movie where Night takes up on unfinished business against the feminists who gradually took over the education system starting 1970, as they also took over the "Nuclear Family" as "ordered" by Germaine Greer in her Bible to the Sisterhood in 1970, The Female Eunuch.
We see he gives our couple an "issue" of "responsibility" and I will cover that in detail in another post, but here he returns to the poet Robert Frost, whose "Waspish" has been written on the blackboard by Elliot to effectively explain the whole basis of the movie. But here it is Frost's more famous poem Birches.
To get the vibes, it goes like this
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
[ ... ]
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.
So Night invents 2 boys that are the exact opposite of Frost's boy. They are overweight from lack of exercise and as products of their education start to lecture Elliot on how a man "must take responsibility in marriage", this being one of the main dogmas of the Sisterhood, so the stage is set, but here is the closing of the poem.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Once at the house Alma asks what sort of tree it is and Elliot says he thinks a Maple, so we get the clue right there that this tree is important, albeit for practical purposes the tree must have horizontal branches so a Maple is substituted and an actual swing is used instead of a boy "swinging a Birch". Next clue is a cracking noise and the question is asked of is it safe to swing, and of course the boys have ignored the swing and it is the girl who is doing the swinging.
The boys go to the windows and start to get obnoxious, yelling out "pussy", which is exactly as Night has created them, ie like the Nerds who can't get girlfriends he creates in Signs. And for their sins he has them shot, and you will note these are the only characters who don't suicide [or be part of a suicide as with Jeep].
We are left with the question of just who was it inside who did the shooting and I would be betting on Robert Frost [his ghost] getting his revenge for just how far the American Beauty has departed from the America he left in the 1960s, probably taking back his words of "That would be good both going and coming back".
I figure if he was to be plonked back down in the American Beauty of 2001 [same as Dave in 2001 A Space Odyssey] he would have changed his mind on "Earth's the right place for love"
