Pleasantville

The movie Pleasantville touches on many important aspects of the 1950’s era. It touches on civil rights, conformity, sexuality, utopian thought, and education.

            The major hit at civil rights in this movie is the “No Colored” signs that emerge throughout the town when townspeople start to live in color rather than black and white. This is a direct reflection to the attitude of whites toward African Americans during the civil rights movement. The characters in this movie reflected history because they were subject to violence, but they tried their best not to succumb. They held meetings and tried to brainstorm how to make their society better and equal while trying to stay as peaceful as possible. The attitude in this movie is the exact same as racism in history.



            This movie also accurately reflected the utopian society and conformity that accompanies the 1950s. Everyone was fixated on the “perfect life”. Consumerism was big and everyone had to have the same nice car and white picket fence. The American society had a very happy and utopian exterior. No one spoke out very much in the happy towns like Pleasantville. This town was perfect- the basketball team ever missed a basket, the temperature was always 72 degrees, the firefighters only had to rescue cats from trees, and the mother looked flawless and had dinner ready when the father got home. This lovely patriarchal society seemed to have no glitches, but this movie challenged that utopian thinking.



            The education in the fifties was starting to change. They still had basic schooling, but people became a bit more aware of things in the outside world after World War II. For instance, “duck and cover” was taught as protection for bombs. Also, things that weren’t normally talked about, such as sexuality, became a bigger part of society, as sort of reflected in this movie. Towards the end of the fifties, the conformity of the earlier times was being challenged by groups such as beatniks. By the sixties, the traditional values prevalent in the fifties were starting to get shoved out the door, which this movie starts to show.



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