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Sometimes a movie comes along that perfectly captures the zeitgeist—that practically cans it and pickles it—and you know you are looking at something with legs. Such is Gary Ross's Pleasantville. The movie's appealing premise is that two kids from the rad nineties—brother and sister—are magically projected into the black-and-white world of a fifties sitcom called "Pleasantville," where they are cast as Bud and Mary Sue.
The sitcom is in the classic Leave It to Beaver/Father Knows Best vein. Everything is Eisenhower peachy: Pop has some vague job that requires a suit and a briefcase, but is close enough for midday pop-ins; Mom smiles and bakes 24 seven, and if Junior ever forgot to wax the Ford or Princess dated a guy without a cardigan, the sky would crack and fall to earth.
Now, some of us still like Ike and his prehallucinogenic era. But this film will have none of that. My goodness, it seems to be saying, haven't you seen Blue Velvet? Didn't you know that most of those handsome hat-wearing men were closeted gays or wife-beaters—or women, waiting for Christine Jorgensen to blaze a transgendered trail? There, there. Pleasantville is here to remind us. And remind us.
All of which is a terrific pity. No sooner are you thinking how fun this is going to be, wondering what retro delights the director has in store, than he begins to fulminate and cluck like a tie-dyed schoolmarm. "Now, now," he tsks, "This was a bad, repressive society! Women had to wear dresses and cook dinner—simultaneously! Nobody even knew who Mick Jagger was!" You can practically smell the codliver oil approaching.
To remedy this backward state, Ross arranges for the cynical, sexually active Mary Sue to seduce Skip, the innocent captain of the Pleasantville basketball team. Unlike her brother, Mary Sue never liked this dull sitcom in the first place, and while she's trapped here she's going to have a little fun rocking the boat. She knows that introducing sex to this cloistered world will begin its eventual unraveling. That it does.
Immediately after their tryst, a single rose blooms red on the otherwise black-and-white screen, and we know that sin has entered Pleasantville. It should be a supremely sad moment, recalling the last, tragic lines of Paradise Lost, where the freshly fallen Adam and Eve "with wand'ring steps, and slow, through Eden took their solitary way." You could get a lump in your throat. But Ross treats it like the kickoff to the Superbowl. Clearly he thinks this the best thing that could have happened to this unhep, black-and-white Squaresville Daddy-o. He has opened Pandora's box with a crowbar and is ready to party. The very next day the fresh-faced swains and maids are all abuzz about Skip's date, and that evening, in the requisite parked sedans, they leave their innocence behind.
In Pleasantville, Ross takes the myth of Genesis and turns it upside down. Here he joins a long line of rebels who have refigured Satan and Eve as enlightened Promethean heroes, liberating the world from its killjoy Creator by disobeying him. Self-expression is at the core of this rebellion—think of Bryon and the Romantic idea of the artist: we aren't sinful, but innocent, and therefore must express our inner light.
What distinguishes twentieth-century versions of this myth is their emphasis on specifically sexual self-expression—a theme not entirely missing from earlier versions but one that has received full expression only in the Age of Freud. On this point the prophets of the orgasm will brook no contradiction: the sexual urge is the ne plus ultra of human existence. It follows that suppressing the libido is the paradigmatic sin against the self, and releasing its pent-up force the ultimate virtue.
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