This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page

A surprisingly complex film with ambiguous moral overtones. And the photography was good too.

The plot is quite simple. A couple of modern american teenagers, brother and sister, end up in a TV show set in the 1950s. The TV show is about a little town, Pleasantville, where everything is nice and ordered, and there is no sex, violence, lust, hate or colour (the show being in black and white).

When they were living in the late 90s, the kids used to watch the show, and the brother particularly loved it and the contrast between its ordered, polite, moral lifestyle and the sex, drugs, divorce, and uncertainty of his own life.

Use of a magic remote control sends them both into the show, and they get to live in what had been a nostalgic dream. The boy, a fan of the show, was able to fit right in and began to enjoy the calm and certainty of this new world.

However the girl, being a total slut and extremely attractive, soon seduces one of the boys in the town and introduces sin and sex into this previously innocent world.

At this point the previously unchanging world starts to be altered. With the introduction of sex and lust, people's minds start to change, and colour appears in the previously black and white town. At first it is just one red rose, but it starts to spread, and with it a breakdown in the society.

It is at this point that the ambiguity appears in the plot. Is the introduction of sin and colour a good thing or a bad thing? To the slut of a girl and her brother, who was starting to grow bored of the constant unchangability of the town, it is a good thing, but the audience is not so sure.

The introduction of colour and change is nice, to be sure, but along with it comes other, more evil things. Leaving aside sex itself, the introduction of lust causes marriage breakdowns and adultery. Fires break out. Others, scared by the changes become reactionary and oppressive in their efforts to stop the spreading plague. Even the weather takes a turn for the worse.

Eventually the whole town in made colourful and changeable, and the boy returns to the future happy in the knowledge that he has saved a town from itself. However not all the evidence agrees with him.

For one thing his sister has changed her mind. She decides that life in the wholesome world of 1950s TV land is preferable to life as a slut in the 90s (her words) and decides to stay.

Meanwhile a lot of the details and symbolism in the show indicates that in reality, the kids have really just corrupted a previously innocent place. As is made clear, to begin with everyone is happy, yet by the end of the movie the town is torn apart by hatred, and the association of hatred with colour shows that this too is part of the change brought about by the newcomers. The movie ends with a previously happily married couple now involved in an adulterous love triangle, and wondering what their future holds.

Yet there is one last point to make, the boy from the future took a long time to revert back to colour, and his critical moment occurs when he eats an apple in a garden. It is then that the analogy becomes clear. This is a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden. A perfect paradise, unsullied by good and evil, that is lost forever when the serpent (in this case a blonde) introduces sin. However the tragedy may not be a complete loss, for now mankind has the knowledge of good and evil, and can learn to choose between them.

And the old TV repair man, who provided the magic TV remote control in the first place, is revealed to be pleased, because this, like the fall of Adam and Eve, was part of God's plan in the first place.

Return To Patrick’s Homepage