American History and Film

Question for Discussion: Why were late 1990s'
Americans interested in life in 1950s' American
black and white TV families? Can 1950s' TV
families help Americans better understand family
life in the early 2000s?

Reading: Roger Ebert's Review of Pleasantville;
Salon Online Magazine's Review of Pleasantville;
Janet Maslin's Review of Pleasantville ; James Berardinelli's Review of Pleasantville; Buchanan,
1992 Speech to the Republican Convention

Critical Reviews of Pleasantville (1998)

Memorable Quotes from Pleasantville

American Society and Culture in the 1950s

The values of the liberal consensus

THE VITAL CENTER-THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

The Organization Man

3. Pat Buchanan's Speech at the 1992 Republican Convention
"My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him."

4.The Clinton Impeachment and
the Lewinsky Scandal

"The film observes that sometimes
pleasant people are pleasant simply
because they have never, ever been
challenged. That it's scary and
dangerous to learn new ways. The
movie is like the defeat of the body
snatchers: The people in color are
like former pod people now freed to
move on into the future. We observe
that nothing creates fascists like the
threat of freedom."
Roger Ebert

I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of ``Pleasantville'' than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for.

Roger Ebert

Welcome to a world where Father knows best, where Mother cooks dinner, and where Sister and Brother's small missteps are treated with stern-but-kind lectures. It's a realm where everyone is nice to one another, where neighbors greet each other with a kind word, and where there's never any sign of lingering ill will. Obviously, this is not a real place, nor was it ever. In fact, it's the landscape of homogenous, black-and-white '50s television, the bastion of clean living and family values that has recently found a new generation of viewers through repeats on nostalgia cable channels like Nickelodeon.

James Berardinelli

"Pleasantville is about the falseness of
family values and the need of the
individual to break through society's
shield of conformity, but, most of all,
it's about having fun at the expense of
nostalgia."
James Berardinelli

David's Mom: When your father was here, I used to think, "This was it. This is the way it was always going to be. I had the right house. I had the right car. I had the right life."

David: There is no right house. There is no right car.

David's Mom: God, my face must look like a mess.

David: It looks great.

David's Mom: It's really sweet of you but I'm sure it does not look great.

David: Sure it does. Come here.

David's Mom: I'm 40 years old. I mean it's not supposed to be like this.

David: It's not supposed to be anything. Hold still.

David's Mom: How'd you get so smart all of a sudden?

David: I had a good day.

David: People change.

George Parker: People change?

David: Yeah

George Parker: Can they change back?

David: I don't know. I think it's harder

"Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel" (1959, p. 3).
"What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination" (1959, p.3)

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination

"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. 'Great changes' are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power" (1956, p. 3).

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"In America and in Russia--in differing ways but often with frightening convergence--we now witness the rise of the cheerful robot, the technological idiot, the crackpot realist. All these types embody a common ethos: rationality without reason" (1958, p. 175).

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three

1. What is the nature of late 1990s' America that Pleasantville opens in? What are the major problems facing Americans in the late 1990s?

2. How does late 1990s' America contrast with the 1950s' Pleasantville America? Is Pleasantville really the ideal America it pretends to be?

3. Why do you think that it is the teenagers in Pleasantville who first make the change from black and white to colored? At what physical locations are colored people first seen?

4. Do you agree with Roger Ebert about one of the larger themes of Pleasantville:

"The film observes that sometimes pleasant people are pleasant simply because they have never, ever been challenged. That it's scary and dangerous to learn new ways. The movie is like the defeat of the body snatchers: The people in color are like former pod people now freed to move on into the future. We observe that nothing creates fascists like the threat of freedom."

5. Do you agree with Roger Ebert that Pleasantville is a parable about the present and the past, that the present isn't as bad as we often think it is and the past wasn't as good as we often remember it to be:

``Pleasantville'' is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom. I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of ``Pleasantville'' than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for."

6. Why do you think 1990s David is so fascinated by 1950s Pleasantville? Is he trying to escape from his troubled life in the late 1990s?

7. What causes David/Bud to decide to stop trying to prevent Jennifer/Mary Sue from changing the people of Pleasantville? Why does David/Bud, like Jennifer/Mary Sue, begin to consciously introduce change into the lives of the people of Pleasantville?

8. Why do you think Pleasantville focuses so much attention on Betty Parker's transformation from black and white to colored? Is this a not-so-subtle comment on the June Cleavers of 1950s' TV families?

9. Do you agree with Salon Magazine's Charles Taylor that Pleasantville is a parable about democracy and freedom:

"He's clearly working off the now familiar equation of the present with the conformist '50s. Ross wants to tell us that the rigid controls that religious and political authority figures try to put on us run contrary to both our natures and the meanings of democracy. He wants us to accept that change and uncertainty and even inchoate upheaval are a necessary part of democracy."

10. What is the significance of Pleasantville teenagers' emerging desire to read books and understand the larger world outside of Pleasantville? Why do the town fathers later burn these library books?

11. How is Jennifer/Mary Sue transformed in Pleasantville? What is the significance of her reading D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover?

12. Do you agree with Salon Magazine's Charles Taylor about the contradictory message presented by Jennifer/Mary Sue deciding to stay in Pleasantville:

"And why does a movie that makes such a stink about authority figures who sit in judgment of other people's behavior wind up having Witherspoon announce that she needs to stop being a slut (the character's words) and hunker down and study -- particularly when her unbridled sexuality is what begins the loosening up in the first place? The message that teens who explore their sexuality are headed for trouble is exactly the same drivel issuing from the cultural ayatollahs Ross is excoriating."

13. Do you agree with James Berardinelli that "Pleasantville is about the falseness of family values and the need of the individual to break through society's shield of conformity, but, most of all, it's about having fun at the expense of nostalgia."

14. Why are Pleasantville's black and white people so threatened by colored people and colors? Why do they try to outlaw colors?

15. What does the Director Gary Ross imply with his description of David/Bud's character about 1990s' young people:

"For Tobey [David/Bud], it's from disengagement to engagement. He's distanced, he's removed... he's voyeuristic. He looks at life from a kind of distance, which is so much of what cynical kids do today, that... the cynicism is a defense against hope. And so they stay safe by judging, by putting up a cynical veneer. By not showing that kind of vulnerability or that kind of exposure. And the moment that Tobey [David/Bud] turns color in the movie is the moment that he engages, emotionally."