Pleasantville: Colorful Beauty

Colorful Beauty

Pleasantville is trying to portray society in a way that can be perceived that the world is beautiful. In the beginning of the movie it shows the viewer how ugly the real world is. When introducing the 1950s show Pleasantville, its conveyed to be a perfect little world where nothing goes wrong and everyone is just constantly in a happy state of mind. This world rapidly changes from black and white to color, which can be considered faulty or undesirable. The color represented a certain beauty that Pleasantville needed to be truly pleasant.It begins with David and Jennifer who are siblings and are present-day teenagers, both with different levels of high school popularity. David, is socially awkward, is a shy and withdrawn guy. But, Jennifer is an aggressive extrovert

who sometimes can be superficial. David loves watching Pleasantville, a 1950s black and white sitcom and he wants to watch the marathon that will be coming on soon. But, Jennifer wants to watch a concert on television, but it hits on the same day and time where the marathon will be released, so of course the classic feud of brother and sister arguing on who get to watch what happens.

And this causes them to break their remote control. Then mysteriously, an old television repairman suddenly showed up and gave them a remote control. Which transported them into the television set and now they play as bud and Mary Sue on the show. Now they do things from their world and introduce them into Pleasantville. So every time things do not come about the way they should be in the show, Pleasantville happens to change from black and white into a colon. This consists of people’s faces and its surroundings. It also depicted communal protests in art earlier in the 1950’s. Pleasantville was to mimic how the 1950s society looked like. There is a standard in the Pleasantville community intended that everything and everyone has to be uniformed. If this standard was not followed, the community will go against the offender.For some the citizens in Pleasantville, they didn’t understand that color has a deeper meaning than it just being change. They did not dwell on its literal aspects and attributes as for its ornamental purposes and beauty. Color highlighted development in art during the 1950’s where paintings of Picasso and other famous artists during his time

were shown in some clips. The characters in the film portrayed people in the 1950s where some get to agree with the new art while others remained to be on the same standard, the only standard that they were accustomed to which caused rioting, anger and hate.Pleasantville had created a different mindset that does not want change, into a place with an open mind to explore new ideologies. The flaws in art led to a discovery of a fresh kind of beauty that despite not being perfect, because of it creates something just absolutely beautiful. Beauty is something that not everyone adheres the same understanding because its depends on that one specific person. Not everything that looks one way may look the same to others. Like in the movie, the black and white was the standard existing in the town of Pleasantville. The shades of gray were considered the pleasant one. In the eyes of Jennifer, everything seemed extremely bland. But for the community, it was beautiful. When things came into color, some people felt uncomfortable. It seemed almost ugly for them to see some color. The people in Pleasantville upon seeing diner owner’s artworks, they rioted over his art. And they didn’t find any in looking at it because they sought it to be repulsive. But at the end of the movie after everyone and everything has been colorized, the people of Pleasant saw and embraced just how much more beautiful all of these changes actually were.