Time Travel Week: Pleasantville (1998)

1 year ago

Time Travel Week: Pleasantville (1998)

THE END OF MAIN STREET IS JUST THE BEGINNING AGAIN

by Katherine Spada

Gary Ross’ Pleasantville is not really a movie about time travel. While high school seniors, twins David and Jennifer (played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon), do suddenly find themselves in a world 40 years earlier than their own, the real adjustment they make is traveling into a strictly rule-bound world of fiction. At first glance it may seem that the film is a commentary on the differences between modern (well, late-’90s) life and the idyllic 1950s, though it soon becomes clear that it’s not the decades that have to be reckoned with, but rather the willful ignorance presented in the era’s iconic pop fiction. When the inhabitants of Pleasantville encounter David and Jennifer, it’s not so much their 1990s sensibilities that affect them as much as it is their knowledge of real life, their lack of fear when it comes to curiosity and change. Their journey from black-and-white to technicolor is more reflective of Pinocchio and The Velveteen Rabbit than of any mental or emotional journey to the future.

The opening of the film works hard to establish the gritty realities of late-20th Century life, with David’s high school teachers lecturing about global warming, HIV, and unemployment. His own family is splintered by divorce and disinterest, and while his sister relishes a life of carefree, even reckless popularity, David occupies himself with an encyclopedic obsession with an old television show called Pleasantville, watching reruns over and over, wishing life were as simple and nurturing as it is for the sitcom’s central family.

When a mysterious TV repairman (Don Knotts) arrives and transports them into the show, Jennifer and David’s initial concerns are superficial. They are certainly dismayed at being stuck in Pleasantville, but the focus seems to be more on the pastiness of black-and-white skin, conical brasseires, and a super-high-calorie diet. This is where it’s made clear that they are not stuck in a 1950s suburb, they are stuck in a 1950s sitcom. It’s not the trappings of the past that flummox the twins, it’s the eeriess of firemen who’ve never seen a fire, high school basketball players who can’t miss a shot, and bathroom stalls with no toilets.

Pleasantville is known for its integration of black-and-white and full color photography. While it may seem like an easy enough trick - film everything in color and then filter everything into black-and-white in post - the effect still stands out as impressive thirteen years later. Particularly because lighting is so different for black-and-white than it is for color, so scenes where a black-and-white character interacts with a color character had to be meticulously crafted, while nobody onset would have been unable to tell the difference.

Color plays a few roles in the story, mostly representing awakening. Jennifer wonders if it’s just newly found sexual activity that’s giving her classmates their new hues, but David theorizes that it’s more than that. Indeed, it seems color appears in a character’s life whenever their eyes have been opened to new possibilities, deeper emotions, self-awareness. Later in the story, color is used as an allegory for racial segregation, in one of the film’s clumsier attempts at moralizing. It’s already been made evident that the characters who have blossomed into color represent progressive thinkers, not racial minorities, so the segregated courthouse scene does ring false. Another moment that stands out as an unnecessary bit of “see what we did there” grandstanding is when David’s Pleasantville girlfriend innocently offers him a bright red apple. The scene is even replayed when the architect of the situation (Don Knotts) tries to hold David accountable for what’s happened to the town, to make sure the audience doesn’t miss it.

David expressly acknowledges that Pleasantville’s inhabitants are fictional, telling Jennifer she can’t sleep with someone who’s not real. But still he forms emotional bonds with the sitcom characters, particularly after they start transforming. The knowledge that specifically awakens the residents of Pleasantville to a full-color life is not knowledge of the future, or even knowledge of good and evil (despire the ham-fisted Eden analogy). It is knowledge of the real world, and an understanding that Pleasantville is a fiction. They are exposed to literature and art from the real world, that which their real-world contemporaries would have had access to, and they accept them as souvenirs from the real world, bringing their existence closer to reality. As the people turn colors, so too does their environment, until by the end of the film, “Pleasantville” has become real, with a bus connecting it to nearby towns.

While the tone of the film certainly feels explicitly political, I find it odd that the filmmakers did not do more to establish similarities between David and Jennifer’s fraught world of 1998, and the real world of 1958. Sure, Pleasantville (the sitcom) inhabits a sanitized universe, but once it transforms into a real town, shouldn’t its denizens become aware not just of art and sexuality, but of civil rights, the space race, and the Cold War? I think the juxtaposition of reality (color) and fiction (black and white), would have been better illustrated if the world David leaves behind at the end of the film more closely resembled the one he returned to.

In the end, David decides that there is no right way to live, and this brings him peace. He is no longer disappointed by the real world which cannot stand up to his notion of Pleasantville. He sees how his real mother (Jane Kaczmarek) struggles just as his fictional one (Joan Allen) did. While I like the message that there is not one perfect way to conduct one’s life, I wish the film had taken more of a stand. It is left unclear whether Joan Allen’s character, Betty, reunites with her old-fashioned husband George (William H. Macy), or stays with the artist Bill. Jennifer chooses to stay behind in Pleasantville and pursue her studies, which isn’t a plot point you should think about too hard or else your brain might start to hurt.

The people David leaves behind in Pleasantville when he returns to his real life come to understand the conceit that he and his sister, people they would have known their whole lives, suddenly transformed into visitors from another reality, and they accept it. The layers of reality in this movie have become so baffling to me the more I’ve thought about it, that I have less of a grasp on it than I did on Inception. It is interesting to note that for many years, black and white photography reflected realism in cinema, while bright colors told of fantasy. Think of The Wizard of Oz, which differentiates between Kansas and Oz in this way. In Pleasantville this is true, as in our real world, life is in color. Perhaps we associate different messages with the reliable black and white newspapers versus the glossy, full-color tabloids, but objectively the real world is fully colorful. Pleasantville has a wonderful concept, and fantastic technical execution, but I wish the story had been told more deftly with an attention to what David and Jennifer’s experiences could mean for a real, modern audience, and how viewers could learn to see the world “in color” more.

Katherine Spada is a Hollywood assistant and sometimes writer. She trains in Muay Thai, contributes to MediaBlvd Magazine, and, when the mood strikes, she blogs here.