From The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers (1956):
They place two fresh pods in Miles' waiting room next to them,
to grow duplicates when they fall asleep. Dr. Kaufman explains
the benefits and advantages to them:
Less than a month ago, Santa Mira
was like any other town. People with nothing but problems.
Then, out of the sky came a solution. Seeds drifting through
space for years took root in a farmer's field. From the seeds came pods
which had the power to reproduce themselves in the exact likeness
of any form of life...Your new bodies are growing in there. They're
taking you over cell for cell, atom for atom. There is no pain.
Suddenly, while you're asleep, they'll absorb your minds, your memories
and you're reborn into an untroubled world...Tomorrow you'll be
one of us...There's no need for love...Love, desire, ambition,
faith - without them life is so simple, believe me.
Determined to escape, wanting no
part of it, Miles
vows to get away, but realizes that there is little
choice. Becky cries in Miles' arms:
I want to love and be loved. I want
your children. I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty. I'd rather die.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
"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).
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite
"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 Elit
Buchanan, 1992 Speech to the Republican Convention
"One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America; and the only way to prevent even worse times, they said, is to entrust our nation's fate and future to the party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter and Michael Dukakis.
No way, my friends. The American people are not going to buy back into the failed liberalism of the 1960s and '70s--no matter how slick the package in 1992."
"Most of all, Ronald Reagan made us proud to be Americans again. We never felt better about our country; and we never stood taller in the eyes of the world."
"The presidency is also America's bully pulpit, what Mr Truman called, "preeminently a place of moral leadership." George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and lifelong champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.
Mr Clinton, however, has a different agenda.
Friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America--abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat--that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country."
"A president is also commander in chief, the man we empower to send sons and brothers, fathers and friends, to war.
Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choice religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.
We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and against putting American women in combat. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture. "
"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. "
Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.
God bless you, and God bless America."
Travers on the present Mood of the Country
If Haynes had stopped there, Far From Heaven would merely be a copycat triumph. Instead, he reinvents the genre, letting the passions that lay buried in Sirk's films explode onscreen. Haynes and producer Christine Vachon (cheered by The New York Times as "godmother to the politically committed film") aren't into nostagia. Their imitation of life from half a century ago holds up a cracked mirror to the here and now. Fears about race, sexuality, feminism -- craftily coded in packaging that sells religion, flag and family -- are hardly alien to George W.'s America. Haynes makes you drunk on movies again, on raw emotion delivered without the cushion of irony. There are bigger, splashier films this year, but none cuts a straighter path to the heart.
PETER TRAVERS
(October 31, 2002)
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."
