Pleasantville
Rating ** Worth seeing
“The movie is sincere about inexplicable mush.” –Manny Farber on Samuel Fuller’s China Gate
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A calendar reads April 1958, but in fact the clothes and decor are from five or six years earlier–around the same time, in fact, that Ozzie & Harriet was launched on television after almost a decade on radio. And as the new Bud and Mary Sue head off for school, the Pleasantville they encounter is less the 50s than the sitcom version of it–“Nerdville,” as Jennifer/Mary Sue calls it–made surreal by their 90s perspective. No one has sex, the fire department exists only to retrieve cats from trees because nothing burns, the books in the library all carry blank pages, every tossed basketball enters the basket, and no one in school can conceive of anything beyond Pleasantville. Yet it’s only a matter of time before the new Bud and Mary Sue introduce color and other disruptions into this hermetically sealed universe. The color arrives gradually–Mary Sue’s date glimpses a solitary red rose on his way back from having sex with her on Lover’s Lane–and the other disruptions follow in comparable fashion: after the same fellow tells his friends on the basketball court about his sexual encounter, they all miss their baskets.
Ideologically speaking, such fancies seem based on our glib sense of superiority to the past: Gosh, weren’t they naive and simple back then? This might explain why, 40 years later, David loves the show so much that he can recite many of the characters’ lines. Aesthetically we associate this superiority with the superiority of color, which we equate with truth and reality, over black and white, which signifies deprivation and repression. (The movie takes this mutable metaphor a little too far when a merchant, alarmed at the encroachment of color on his black-and-white community, posts a “No Colored” sign in his window; given the total absence of blacks in Pleasantville, it’s a tacky spin on the material.) Yet equating the reality of the 1950s with hokey black-and-white TV from the same period is itself a simple, naive conceit belonging squarely to the 90s–a quaint, industrially produced falsehood that deserves to be shelved beside the fiction that Quentin Tarantino is an independent filmmaker.
The fact that the movie has connected so quickly, readily, and even beautifully with the mass audience is partly a testimony to Ross’s deft handling of his actors. But surely that same audience recognizes how deprived we are in the 90s, a point made explicit only in the film’s prologue and epilogue. Pleasantville pretends to show how the life-enhancing spirit of the 90s brings color and flavor to the moribund 50s, yet in fact it does something much closer to the reverse. Just as we need the apparent simplicity of black and white to apprehend “true” color, we need the apparent simplicity of the 50s to bring life and art to the 90s.
Mike Leigh’s Meantime (1983) offered a more cohesive attempt to describe what produces an English skinhead in London’s East End; the designated turf of American History X is Los Angeles’s Venice Beach. Like Leigh’s effort, American History X concentrates on the relationship between two brothers (though it’s important to add that the relationship between the brothers in Meantime is largely hostile whereas the one in American History X is deeply affectionate). Screenwriter David McKenna is a 28-year-old native of Orange county, yet Kaye is English, so it’s plausible that he used Meantime as a reference point.
