 According to the reviewer, Carolyn's preference for "Muzak" and "nutritious yet savory" food most likely symbolize:
Early in American Beauty , Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a weary reporter for a media magazine, masturbates in the shower while informing us in voice-over that we're witnessing the highlight of his day. He peers through tired eyes out the window at his manicured suburban tract-house lawn, where his wife, Carolyn (Annette Bening)--whose gardening clogs, he points out, are color-coordinated with the handles of her shears--snips roses (American beauties) and twitters about Miracle-Gro to a gay yuppie (Scott Bakula) on the other side of a white picket fence. Apparently, Lester doesn't realize that snipped roses are garden-variety symbols of castration, or he'd know what he has lost. Ambient noise falls away, the crowd disappears, and there she is, Lester's angel, writhing in slow motion--just for him. She opens her jacket (she's naked underneath) and red rose petals drift out. Later, Lester envisions her on a bed of red petals, then immersed in a bath of red petals. The movie is convinced, too--which is odd, since the fantasy of an underage cheerleader making a middle-aged man's wilted roses bloom is a tad ... primitive. But American Beauty doesn't feel primitive. It feels lustrously hip and aware, and a lot of critics are making big claims for it. The script, by Alan Ball, a playwright and former sitcom writer, carries an invigorating blast of counterculture righteousness, along with the kind of pithily vicious marital bickering that makes some viewers (especially male) say, "Yeah! More important, it has a vein of metaphysical yearning, which the director, Sam Mendes, mines brilliantly. A hotshot English theater director (his Cabaret revival is still on the boards in New York), Mendes gives the film a patina of New Age lyricism and layer upon layer of visual irony. Mendes can distend the real into the surreal with imperceptible puffs. Aided by his cinematographer, Conrad Hall, and editors, Tariq Anwar and Chris Greenbury, he creates an entrancing vision of the American nuclear family on the verge of a meltdown. A merican Beauty is so wittily written and gorgeously directed that you might think you're seeing something archetypal--maybe even the Great American Movie. Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. (The colonel's idea of bliss is watching an old Ronald Reagan military picture on television: How's that for subtle?) Lester's wife, Carolyn, is even more stridently caricatured.
 The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary
 The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary  The deterioration of the American nuclear family  The tendency for people to be consumed by what their values  The dangers of standing out in a society that demands conformity