The quote 'Look closer' serves as both a tagline and a philosophy for 'American Beauty.' To capture the strange, plastic beauty of suburban life, composer Thomas Newman utilized the marimba. The marimba is a percussion instrument consisting of wooden bars struck with mallets, featuring resonators underneath. Newman used it to create 'rhythmic cells'—short, repeating patterns that felt both playful and emotionally detached. This was a radical shift from the lush, melodramatic scores of 1990s dramas. The marimba's hollow, woody sound perfectly complemented the film’s legendary 'plastic bag' scene and the character Lester Burnham’s ironic dialogue. This score became a movie legend itself, influencing a decade of film and television music by showing that percussion could be more emotional than a full string section.