Question for Discussion: How does Far from Heaven (2002) challenge the conservatives' claim that life in the 1950s was just like it was portrayed in 1950sTV family shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best?Buchanan, 1992 Speech to the Republican Convention ; Ebert, "Review of Far from Heaven" ;
Edelstein, "Review of Far from Heaven" ;
Rolling Stone, "Review of Far from Heaven" ;
Taylor, "Review of Pleasantville" ;
Maslin, "Review of Pleasantville"Video: Far from Heaven (2002)
Critical Reviews of Far from Heaven (2002)
American Society and Culture in the 1950s
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"Even acute observers, noting
the
numerical weakness of the Communists
have taken false hope from this fact.
Such people fail to understand that the
Communists are able to rally into their
service multitudes who are completely
unaware that they are serving the
Communist cause. Our purpose here is
to study those attitudes which transform
well-meaning, patriotic, Christian
people into the allies of Communism."
Dr. Fred Schwarz, You
Can Trust the Communists (to be Communists)
Pat Buchanan, 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."
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."
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."
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Sewall Academic Program; University of Colorado at Boulder
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