Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
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. But when you stop and smell the roses ... Well, that scent isn't Miracle-Gro. The hairpin turns from farce to melodrama, from satire to bathos, are fresh and deftly navigated, but almost every one of the underlying attitudes is smug and easy: from the corporate flunky named "Brad" to the interchangeable gay neighbors (they're both called "Jim") to the brutally homophobic patriarch next door, an ex-Marine colonel (Chris Cooper) who has reduced his wife (the normally exuberant Allison Janney) to a catatonic mummy and his son, Ricky (Bentley), to a life of subterranean deception. (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. A real-estate broker who fails to sell a big house (her only potential customers are blank-faced African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and surly lesbians), she wears a mask of perky efficiency and insists on listening to Muzak while she and her husband and daughter eat her "nutritious yet savory" dinners. It's amazing that Mendes and Ball get away with recycling so many stale and reactionary ideas under the all-purpose rubric of "black comedy." It's not the druggy philosophizing, however, that makes American Beauty an emotional workout. It's that the caricatures are grounded in sympathy instead of derision. Everyone on screen is in serious pain. The manipulative sexpot Angela, who taunts her friend Jane with the idea of seducing her dad, acts chiefly out of a terror of appearing ordinary. As the military martinet, Cooper goes against the grain, turning Col. Fitts into a sour bulldog whose capaciously baggy eyes are moist with sadness over his inability to reach out. (When he stands helplessly in the rain at the end, the deluge completes him.) The character of Carolyn is so shrill as to constitute a libel on the female sex, but there isn't a second when Bening sends the woman up. She doesn't transcend the part, she fills it to the brim, anatomizes it. You can't hate Carolyn because the woman is trying so hard--to appear confident, composed, in control. When she fails to sell that house, she closes the shades and lets go with a naked wail--it's the sound of a vacuum crying to be filled--then furiously slaps herself while sputtering, "Shut up--you're weak--shut up. " Then she breathes, regains her go-get-'em poise, replaces her mask. Carolyn isn't a complicated dramatic construction, but Bening gives her a primal force. An actress who packs more psychological detail into a single gesture than others get into whole scenes, Bening was barreling down the road to greatness before she hit a speed bump called Warren. It's a joy to observe her--both here and in Neil Jordan's In Dreams (1999)--back at full throttle. American Beauty is Spacey's movie, though. He gives it--how weird to write this about Spacey, who made his name playing flamboyantly self-involved psychopaths--a heart. Early on, he lets his face and posture go slack and his eyes blurry. He mugs like crazy, telegraphing Lester's "loserness." But Spacey's genius is for mugging in character. He makes us believe that it's Lester who's caricaturing himself , and that bitter edge paves the way for the character's later, more comfortably Spacey-like scenes of insult and mockery. He even makes us take Lester's final, improbably rhapsodic moments straight. But do the filmmakers take them straight? If I read it correctly, the movie is saying that American society is unjust and absurd and loveless--full of people so afraid of seeming ordinary that they lose their capacity to see. It's saying that our only hope is to cultivate a kind of stoned aesthetic detachment whereby even a man with his brains blown out becomes an object of beauty and a signpost to a Higher Power. But to scrutinize a freshly dead body and not ask how it got that way--or if there's anyone nearby with a gun who might want to add to the body count--strikes me as either moronic or insane or both. The kind of detachment the movie is peddling isn't artistic, it isn't life--it's nihilism at its most fatuous. In the end, American Beauty is New Age Nihilism. Kevin Costner is 11 years older than he was as Crash Davis, the over-the-hill minor-league catcher in Bull Durham (1988), but he can still get away with playing a professional ballplayer. He moves and acts like a celebrity jock, and he can make his narcissistic self-containment look as if he's keeping something in reserve--to protect his "instrument," as it were. In For Love of the Game , he's a 40ish Detroit Tigers pitcher having his last hurrah: The team has been sold and the new owners don't necessarily want him back. For about half an hour, it's a great sports movie. Costner stands on the mound shaking off the signals of his longtime catcher (John C. Reilly) he forces himself to tune out the huge Yankee Stadium crowd (the background blurs before our eyes and the sound drops out) last year's A Simple Plan ) thought that all those scenes of Costner and Preston staring into space while the piano plinks would end up in the final cut, but Raimi apparently gave up control of the final cut for the sake of making his first, real mainstream picture. He might as well have stuck his head over the plate and said, "Bean me."

<question>:
According to the reviewer, Carolyn's preference for "Muzak" and "nutritious yet savory" food most likely symbolize:

<options>:
A The characters' desperate desire to be perceived as ordinary
B The deterioration of the American nuclear family
C The tendency for people to be consumed by what their values
D The dangers of standing out in a society that demands conformity

<answer>:

A