“Make Pleasantville Great Again.”
In 1998, Gary Ross struck gold with his dramatic-comedy film Pleasantville. Backed by immaculate direction, a stacked cast, delightful music, and groundbreaking special effects, this heart-filled tale centers around two late 90’s teens, played by Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, who are teleported into the TV and become trapped in a 1950’s ‘Leave it to Beaver’ style sitcom called Pleasantville. From the outside looking in, Pleasantville appears to be a utopia - a place that never rains, where hairstyles are always perfect, three-point shots are never missed, a fire department exists solely to rescue cats from trees, and the people are always happy.
The two teens try to fit in, trading in their JNCO jeans, scrunchies and overalls for poodle skirts and letter sweaters, but inevitably start bringing some outside influence to this idealistic midwestern town. Because of this outside influence, the people in Pleasantville start doing truly reprehensible things, like playing loud tock music, painting, and having sex (GASP)! The disruptions start turning things in the black and white town into full color - first flowers and trees, then cars, and then…entire people. The moral of the story is a strong one, one that Warren Epstein of The Gazette wrote, “…represents the transformation from repression to enlightenment. People - and their surroundings - change from black-and-white to color when they connect with the essence of who they really are.” Here we have a movie that presents the opinion that there’s no right or perfect life, no model of how life is supposed to be.
In 1998, you probably left the theater thinking, “I wonder how they did all of those special effects”, or “How the fuck is David going to explain to his mom that his sister is trapped in a TV program and decided to leave us and go to college in a fake TV universe instead of coming back to the actual real world, and how will they explain this to their relatives, the school, and ultimately, the authorities?”…but in 2020, you might walk away thinking that Pleasantville is more relevant today than it ever was upon release.
If you swap out the 1952 Buick Roadmaster Convertibles for lifted Chevy Silverado 6x6’s and plaster American flags and…”MAPA” stickers on everything, Pleasantville seems like the sort of place that Donald Trump and his supporters might envision as a utopian version of the United States. A white country, in which the men work and the women cook, where there are zero outside influences, a place that has no roads in, a country in which everyone looks (white) and acts the same, believing everything they hear from the one station that they watch, completely shut off from the outside world.
Take the character not so subtly named Whitey, for example. On the surface, Whitey has been a good guy throughout the existence of Pleasantville. He does well in school. He plays for the basketball team. He politely courts another female student named Margaret…until she turns ‘colored’. At this point, his chosen ‘crowd’ starts showing their true feelings, and Whitey has no problem revealing that he’s simply a racist asshole who hurls insults at others and even attempts to gang-rape a middle-aged woman with the help of his Wonder Bread friends.
Another interesting example are the actions of Big Bob, the mayor. He tries everything he can to suppress the outside influences, but realizing that he simply can’t, finally decides to hold a press conference…er…town meeting…about the situation. He suggests segregating those things that are pleasant from those that are unpleasant - including people - leading to signs in windows like ‘No Coloreds’. When riots start, Big Bob says that this isn’t the way to do it…all public acts of vandalism are to stop immediately, all but yelling, “LAW AND ORDER!”. Sound familiar? Don’t even get me started with the courtroom scene, which not only banishes the colored folks to the balcony, but also brilliantly illustrates how colored people in Pleasantville don’t have a shot at a fair trial.
The lessons not so subtly hidden inside of Pleasantville aren’t new, but they are important. In 2020, the movie is no longer seen as a morality tale concerning the values of contemporary suburban America by holding that social landscape up against both the utopian and dystopian visions of suburbia that emerged in the 1950s, but rather a story about how there’s only one race - the human race - and that the amount of color in our skin shouldn’t be important because whether you’re white or ‘colored’, that pigment resides inside of all of us. It’s a story about how a world with a lot of color can be a wonderful thing, and that we should stand up to those who say otherwise, a story showing that together, we can make the world we live in a better place. This is a movie that argues that the only way to truly make Pleasantville great again, is by loving the diversity and treating those around us with love and respect…a message that we could all use in the world we live in today.
