Published April 19, 2020
This quote has been stuck in my head for 22 years. It’s been knocking around a lot in the past decade or so, and a year ago I decided to write about it.
And then life threw me a curveball.
It was April 19, 2019 — a year ago today — and I was eating an after-midnight meal after getting off work from my second-shift job at the newspaper. I was enjoying the food and an adult beverage when some of the worst pain of my life hit me. Hard. I thought I was dying. Twelve days and two surgeries later, I was released from the hospital. I no longer had a gallbladder or the extra debris they removed, and I was about 20 pounds lighter. Recovery was slow and riddled with complications.
Who knew it would take me a year to get back to thinking I should write this piece?
Pleasantville (1998) is a fun ride as teenage siblings Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon find themselves trapped inside a “Father Knows Best” type of 1950s television show (in black and white, of course). Their arrival in the town of Pleasantville shakes things up.
Pops of color begin to appear. In nature and on people’s bodies. The residents of Pleasantville are startled by real fire — and real rain — for the first time. They discover strange and delicious new desires and pleasures. New ways and new talk. Dangerous! Why, it’s shocking, really, the things that begin to show up in this Mayberry-like town, and people really aren’t sure of what to do about that.
The high school’s boys basketball had never lost a game before. I’m not sure they ever missed a shot! But oh my, after things heat up when Witherspoon’s character goes on a date and gets frisky with one of the local boys, things really start to go sideways all throughout Pleasantville.
I mean, would you look at that? One bed for two people instead of the usual one bed for the man of the house and another bed for his wife. It’s the talk of the town when it suddenly appears in the furniture store, right where passersby and window shoppers can see it. Scandalous!
Really now, what’s next?
As the townspeople see their lives increasingly altered, conflict abounds.
There’s a taste of that here.
As you can see, some serious themes infuse the movie, and those themes have at least as much resonance today as they did 22 years ago.
“It’s a question of values,” J.T. Walsh’s character, the mayor, tells the troubled menfolk. “It’s a question of whether we want to hold on to those values that make this place great.”
At a town meeting, he appeals to the residents to help him put a stop to all of the disruptions.
“It seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant.
Right. At no point in human history has that ever been applied with regrettable or horrific results. Who gets to decide what’s pleasant and what’s not? Who gets to declare their “values” the appropriate ones, whether they are empty words that in secret they don’t actually live by? At what point do we stop subdividing, creating one subgroup after another, every time something happens that we don’t like, until we’re 300 million nations instead of a nation of 300 million people? When your splinter group starts having trouble getting along, what’s next?
To “separate out” is a thing America got really good at in its first 200 years, and it’s proving to be resistant to going in another direction.
Anyway, maybe don’t yuck people’s yums, and maybe look to pull together instead of separating out. For a change.