Pleasantville

We enjoyed this movie at Film Club Extra on Friday night. Here is the text of my closing thoughts.

Cultural guru Graham Cray analyses where we got to in the 1990s as follows. Once upon a time people looked to their roots to find their identity. From the mid 20th century onwards there was so much technological and cultural change that enthusiasm was only for the future. It was bound to be better. But this too changed. The onset of the cold war and the possibility of mutually assured destruction, the break-up of the family and a rising divorce rate, more and more natural disasters and famines being televised (if not actually happening) and optimism retreated. All that was left, he suggested, was to live for today and go shopping.

It is in this world that David sits, a world where the school asks about famine and poses worrying statistics about the job market, watching his Pleasantville marathon and wondering, as the circle comes round again, if the past wasn’t better after all. He sees a perfect family. Meanwhile his Mum squabbles on the phone with her ex about who is to look after him and his sister this weekend.

Director and writer Gary Ross has a go at answering the question by throwing his 1990s teenagers into a 1950s world through the screen. He compresses the big leaps of cultural change over the last seven centuries – books, art, liberation in gender and racial issues, jazz, rock and roll and fashion into 112 minutes and lets his characters jump.

So everything changes. And the movie asks us how we would react to change.
Do we welcome it? Are we to give in to it? Or maybe we chain ourselves to the old ways so we can’t be made to let go.

Pleasantville celebrates change - as flowers, people, scenery and even books turn into colour. Joanna Wood says in her Damaris culture watch article on the subject, ‘... who wants to be in black and white when you could be in colour? Black and white is continually associated with an old style of life (e.g. black and white TVs, photos, etc.) and the arrival of colour heralds a new way of thinking within the film.’

Lots of changes start happening as David and his sister Jennifer hit town. Holding hands turns to sex. Art and literature are discovered. But the basketball team start to lose. David’s Mum begins looking for more to life than greeting her husband from work but finds liberation in a sensual bath and the suggestion of leaving. Joanna Wood again, ‘Perhaps the film is trying to indicate that the choices we make in 'black and white' and the changes that we instigate now may result in 'joyful colour' for a while but have implications further down the line. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for...’

How would we react to colour coming into our black and white world? Would we embrace it or side with the rioters, vandals, book burners and segregationalists? How eerie was that first hint of racism in the line ‘What are you doing with a coloured girl?’ And the response we heard to the idea of women actually thinking for themselves, ‘This is not about George’s dinner or Roy’s shirt; it’s a question of values.’ Everyone used to think that. Not so long ago. We still encounter such prejudice today.

Pleasantville helps us examine our own attitudes to changes around us - whether we like the change or not? What has changed us in our lives? What inspired our passion? The film is happy to say that sex may be a blind alley. Jennifer is coloured by study. In her 1990s world she had been aggressively pursuing a mate. David had been timid. His colour comes from a willingness to fight to protect.

I think this film speaks about and celebrates our individuality. We are all unique and therefore inspired by different things. Do you know what turns you 'into colour', what makes you passionate? How will you allow that to change your life and the world around you?

Pleasantville also asks us questions about holding on to the past. What are the principles, the values, the certainties which we should never let go of? What is the wrapping paper, the tradition or illusion of permanence, the cultural baggage which we should jettison?

Once upon a time there was a first opening of eyes. Pleasantville reprises the story of Genesis, showing us a woman giving an apple to a man and him eating. As the man says he didn’t do anything wrong we see blood, destruction of art and book burnings. The narrator says ‘You don’t deserve to be in that paradise.’

In a brief discussion of change we hear this:

What went wrong?
Nothing went wrong. People change.
People change? Can they change back?
I don’t know. I think it’s harder.

The Bible’s words that in Christ we should know neither slave nor free, male nor female, Jew nor Greek set the bar high for avoiding prejudice. But we might ask, do you have to lose your innocence in order to be prejudiced? Or are we all just drawn that way?

See you next time.

Steve Tilley