Pleasantville Character Essay

There were no black families living in Donelson when I was young.It was only my thrice weekly trips to downtown Nashville that let me view the world in black and white, and not just white.

There were no black families living in Donelson when I was young.It was only my thrice weekly trips to downtown Nashville that let me view the world in black and white, and not just white.

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It’s about memory, memory and its bastard cousin, nostalgia.

Current nostalgia for the suburban 1950s targets the memories of boomers such as myself, but it depends upon the coincidence of those memories with the more general phenomenon of childhood memories.

She’s mortified, and can’t talk in person without the stutter—until they ask her about her radio rig, and suddenly the speech impediment disappears. I can easily remember a dozen 50s-early 60s sitcom plots that could never have appeared on the imaginary .

But that’s because Pleasantville isn’t about 1950s sitcoms, any more than it’s really about suburbia, or the 1950s generally, or even about childhood and adolescence.

What distinguishes Pleasantville, however, is the device used to show the transformation: the slow-ripple change from black-and-white film to color.

It's one of the most ingenious visual devices ever conceived for a mainstream movie, and certainly makes for one of the most inviting preview trailers in a long while.

[This essay originally appeared in my newsgroup on Feb. I'm uploading it here because I'm about to post an essay on Rick Nelson, whose early life appeared on a sitcom.

Note: the first couple of times I began this essay, it dissolved into failure, mostly because I was attempting to synopsize portions of the movie. Movies are experiential, even more than most; if you haven’t seen it, you should might want to skip this essay, not so much because of “spoilers” but simply because what I’m saying may not make much sense.

Pleasantville charms; on the visual level, it dazzles.

Half comedy, half fable, it flips the premise of The Truman Show, presenting, instead of a man trapped in a TV world he thinks is real but discovers to be a colossal fake, a TV world made up of potential Trumans who need an outsider to help transform the fake into reality.