Pleasantville

Conflicts and clashes of all sizes occur throughout the movie. The conflicts cover a wide variety of subjects, from sexual morals to discovering something new about one’s own self. The movie plays out individual struggles along with tying these conflicts in with a larger story line.

The setting of the story is a 1990’s family. The parents are divorced, the son is a TV watching geek and the daughter is rebellious and popular at school. The Mom is leaving for a weekend trip, Jennifer, the daughter, has a date that night and David plans an evening home watching his favorite oldies television show, “Pleasantville”. They fight over the remote control and it winds up getting broken. A TV repairman shows up out of nowhere on their doorstep offering to fix the remote. The repairman quizzes David on Pleasantville trivia and after he answers all of his questions correctly, he gives David a “special remote”. The brother and sister fight over the remote and get zapped into the television show “Pleasantville”. This sets up a majority of the clashes with a 1990’s brother and sister team going back in time to a perfect small town family of 1958.

The time period chosen for the television show was intentional. The oldies telev

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Pleasantville was functioning very well before the Brother and Sister show up. There were scenes from the classrooms where the teachers had nothing but bad news for the future- no jobs, pollution, drought and famine. Once they are transported to the TV show, David begs his sister not to change the way of life there. David is defending the rights of the colored group and for everyone to open up to their point of view. The Mayor is changed by David when he tells him, “You can’t stop everyone from feeling a desire to find something new in them”. There will always be groups that resist change and others that welcome it. As people learn to discover something new about their selves, they turn from black and white shades to full, vibrant colors.

David and Jennifer learn early on that they are living in past episodes of the television series and if they stray from the original story line, they change the town in a domino effect. The court room and town then flow into color. When David defends his TV Mom, who is in color now, from being harassed by a group of black and white kids, he earns his color.

The movie brought out issues that have remained topical for centuries.

Jennifer started the whole process of changing the town to color by having sex with her boyfriend.

David and his sister Jennifer are an example of conflict eventually turning into respect for each other. David desires to live in the Pleasantville life style.

Approximate Word count = 1413
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

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