Vocab Web

Pleasantville Analysis

Pleasantville – A World of Colour

Daniel Lin

English 20

We live in a world filled with vibrant colours, to us, these colours have great symbolic meaning, strong and vibrant colours like red for love, and soft, mellow colours like blue for peace. In such a world, colour already has such importance, but it would be much more significant if colour were to be introduced into a monochrome society. In his film Pleasantville, director Gary Ross uses colour to bring a repetitive, boring, and monochrome world to life. Colour already has great meaning in our society, but it is still not enough for Gary Ross, for him, it means much more. For him, as presented by the film, colour symbolizes change, emotion, and segregation, while connecting to religious imagery. It is evident that colour is the most critical component of the film Pleasantville, without colour, that world would remain as it always was.

            The film starts off in our world. Two very unlikely siblings fighting over a mystical remote that transports them into a 1950s TV show that is in fact a utopian society, a place called Pleasantville. In this alternate reality, everything is monochrome; there is only black, white, and grayscale. As the name suggests, Pleasantville is a perfect place, or so it seems. Everything has a natural flow and order that has to be followed, as soon as someone or something disrupts this flow, change occurs, and change for a static utopian society, can very quickly become a dystopia if no action were to be taken, and that would prove to be true after a series of events.

Shown near the beginning of the film, Budd Parker (the protagonist), finds out that no matter how you throw or kick a basketball in any direction, it will always end up in the basket one way or another. After a while, Budd tells Bill Johnson (the soda shop owner) that not everything has to be done in order, and to switch things up a bit once in a while. That was the straw that broke the camels back, switching things up destroyed the natural flow of Pleasantville, and marked beginning of the change that would happen in Pleasantville that would bring unrest and chaos (black and white objects and people becoming coloured). It created problems for the people of Pleasantville, a problem called change, and without ever knowing of such a thing, everything spun out of control.

            Other than change, colour, especially red, also represents emotion. For the people of Pleasantville red symbolizes love, pleasure, curiosity, anger, and destruction. The first thing to turn coloured was a blood red rose, and a rose, as we understand, is a symbol of love. It is a flower we present to people that are held deepest in our hearts. Red also represents pleasure, when Budd’s mother was pleasuring herself in the bathtub, the tree outside their house burst into violent flames. In the Holy Bible, Eve’s sin was her curiosity causing her to pick the apple from a tree in the Garden of Eden for knowledge. As punishment, she and Adam were cast away from the utopia created by god, a place called Eden. In the film, Budd’s girlfriend picks a crimson apple from a tree and gives it to him to eat. This symbolizes that, in return for knowledge, the place called Pleasantville can no longer be accessed, and that there is no turning back. Before things started to change, all the books in Pleasantville were blank, but now, they are filling themselves in. This results in the anger of the people that want Pleasantville to return to the way it always was, and causes them to burn all the books in the public library in raging flames, and this time, instead of a black and white fire like one would expect, the flames were a violent shade of red.

            Colour also establishes segregation, it creates a line of separation between the “unchanged” and the “changed” people of Pleasantville, the contrast of putting a coloured person beside a black and white person will cause the viewers eyes to instantly recognize how different they are. Big Bob, Pleasantville’s mayor states, “Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant. Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are unpleasant from the things that are pleasant.” (Pleasantville) and a short while after, during the trial of Budd Parker and Bill Johnson (for painting something in colour on the wall of the police station after it was banned), you instantly see that the black and white people are sitting in the courtroom on the bottom floor while the “coloured” people are packed and standing on the balcony. This is direct evidence of segregation by separating the two groups of people, coloured and non-coloured.

            For most people, colour already has a lot of meaning, but it is different for Director Gary Ross. As shown in the film Pleasantville, colour means much more than we would think of, it represents change, emotions such as love, pleasure, curiosity, anger, destruction, segregation, and connects to religion. It is made evident by the events of this film that colour is the film’s main highlight. It is the most noticeable element of this film. It symbolized the change of a boring, monochrome town into a lively and vibrant society.

Works Cited

Pleasantville (New Line Platinum Series). Dir. Gary Ross. Perf. Tobey Maguire, Jeff Daniels, Joan Allen. New Line Home Video, 1998. DVD.

Oryx and Crake Question 2

1. Oryx and Crake includes many details that seem futuristic, but are in fact already apparent in our world. What parallels were you able to draw between the items in the world of the novel and those in your own?


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http://blog.bioethics.net/baby

This picture shows a new born baby with its eyes filled with curiosity, it does not know anything of this world, remaining innocent and pure.