Pleasantville

Pleasantville is the New York town where, supposedly, the Reader’s Digest is published. I’ve always pictured the place as bland, unremarkable, and inoffensive. Pleasantville is also the title of a 1998 film starring Tobey McGuire, Reese Witherspoon, Joan Allen, Jeff Daniel, William H. Macy and others. The film uses the town’s bland name as an emblem of an equally bland American ideal: down home values, conformity, community cooperation, universal subscription to common political and moral principles, conservative lifestyles, and so on. It is the kind of life we like to think (incorrectly) characterized America during the 1950s.

Pleasantville uses the bland ideal of America in the 1950s as imposed on the public by such situation family comedies as Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. The film begins with the following improbable premise: When two modern-day American teenagers fight over the remote control, it malfunctions and they are sucked into the world of 1950s black-and-white television—a world much like that of the sit-com they were watching, a sit-com named Pleasantville. The town they find themselves embodies the ideal described above. It is also a black and white world, devoid of color, characterized by blandness and conformity. Gradually, as the brother and sister upset the order of things, color comes to the small town.

The film wants the audience to equate color with life, with individualism and creativity and passion. In a very general way it uses as a framework the beginning of the shift in the late 1950s from black and white to color television. It relies on two historical movements of the 1950s to create a context in its depiction of the battle between conformity and individuals. One is McCarthyism, and the other is the Civil Rights movement. (As people gradually change from, black and white to natural colors in the film, the townspeople who have not changed yet refer to them as “colored.” Several stores in the town display signs that say “No Coloreds.”) The film doesn’t take this particular parallel very far, but it does make the point that the world depicted in the film (and the mythic ideal it embodies) depends on the suppression of anything that diverges from the norm. The parallel with the greatest force in the film is that of McCarthyism, but even this one is only generally present. The film doesn’t work in terms of specific political issues or struggles. It explores broad, abstract issues of free expression, individualism vs. conformity, repression vs. passion and freedom of thought, etc. In this way the film manages to make its point without offering controversy. Since the world of Pleasantville is an imagined fantasy world, one that we all know doesn’t exist, and one whose blandness virtually none of us would countenance, the film’s argument for free expression and individualism is one virtually none of us would disagree with. We all want to be like the “coloreds.”

Another way to look at the film is the fact that in many ways the divisions in the town are not merely between the “coloreds” and the “black and white” folks, but also between the young and the old. With some notable exceptions (the malt shop owner played by Jeff Daniels—an artist—and the oppressed house wife played by Joan Allen), the young people in the town revel in the openness and free expression of the dawning world of color while the older people favor colorless conformity. The notion here is that while the young are just beginning to discover life, the old are forgetting it. Exploiting generational divisions in this way, the film appeals to its mostly young audience, who believe that the adult world is repressive and dead to begin with.

Pleasantville is superficial in its treatment of such basic issues as individualism and conformity, the needs of the community balanced against the yearning urges of the self, and in its allegorical dramatization of movements at work in America during the 1950s and 60s. That being said, Pleasantville is diverting entertainment. It’s a true feel-good film, effectively directed and produced, with good acting and strong production values. It is easy to be caught up in the its celebration of art and openness and love and personal development. This film is eponymously self-confirming—pleasant.