Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon in Pleasantville
Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema

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Identity

‘Pleasantville’ Was Only Pleasant Because of Its Erasure of POC

On the 20th anniversary of "Pleasantville," we look back at what this dramedy implies about society then and now.

"Cold Takes" is a column in which we express our passionate beliefs about insignificant events and Internet discourses at least several months too late.

Twenty years ago today Pleasantville, a dramedy about two siblings who get pulled into a television time warp, made its debut —and painfully, it is as relevant now as it was back then. David, played by Tobey Maguire, is an insecure, lonely teenager with problems at home. All day at school, his teachers rattle off bleak statistics about unemployment, AIDS, and global warming. The future does not look bright. To escape from these harsh realities, David, despite the begrudging of his sister Jennifer play by Reese Witherspoon, watches his favorite retro Leave It To Beaver-inspired TV sitcom “Pleasantville,” over and over again.

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It’s obvious why David is so preoccupied with the wholesome show. The characters are always happy; life is predictable and safe. Nothing ever goes wrong. The community is depicted as an idyllic place void of everything that’s unpleasant. Unfortunately, that includes people of color. This glaring omission in casting would bother me no matter what, but the name of the town makes it that much worse. Even if it's in irony, couldn’t the filmmaker see that calling a place where only white people live "Pleasantville," a bit concerning? Twenty years later, this question is still what I fixate on when I think about the film.

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Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema

I didn’t see Pleasantville in the theater when it first came out, but I watched it on video not long after its initial release. I remember feeling conflicted—I enjoyed the movie, but as a Black woman, I did not enjoy feeling erased. Note that this is not a film with a small ensemble cast. The town of Pleasantville is brought to life with dozens and dozens of background actors, every single one of them being white. Watching Pleasantville though a 2018 lens, I like to think that it would be cast more diversely and maybe even be called something else if it were made today. And if it weren’t, I can only imagine the think pieces and straight-up dragging that would happen on the internet in response. And that means we have made some progress in terms of how we hold Hollywood accountable in how America is presented in film and television shows, versus what was acceptable in the 1990s.

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Point is: In failing to include people of color, even in just the optics of casting, the film ignores how actual racism and systematic oppression affect every corner of America— even in this fictionalized version. Pleasantville pacifies viewers to the real danger in non-inclusion and, really, white-splains xenophobia for people of privilege who don't really have to deal with it.

To be fair, there are plenty of other important things missing from Pleasantville besides diversity. For example, rain (the forecast is always a clear 72-degrees), books (all the pages are blank), sex (couples sleep in separate beds), and bodily functions (there are no toilets) are devoid of existing in this perfect world of heterosexual-cisgender norms. We find out these bizarre details when David and Jennifer initially get transported into Pleasantville via a magical remote control that they receive from a mysterious TV repairman. The two find that they’ve somehow swapped places with the actors who play siblings Bud and Mary Sue, the model children of parents George and Betty, on the show. David and Jennifer never question the absence of other races and ethnicities in their new environment, but perhaps they were distracted by the whole traveling back in time and suddenly being trapped in a TV show thing.

What they do notice right away is that their new townspeople are weird. For starters, everything is in black and white. And everyone seems to be extremely sheltered. Jennifer/Mary Sue shocks her geography teacher and classmates by asking “What’s outside of Pleasantville?” They have no idea what she’s talking about. David/Bud arrives for his after-school job at the local soda shop to find out that his boss, Mr. Johnson, is stupefied when their daily tasks are done late or out of order. The residents don’t think for themselves; they just do what they’ve always done, day in and day out. They find the sameness of their daily lives and the homogeneity of people around them comforting. Naturally, things go awry when the look and feel of the neighborhood start to change, thanks to the worldly influence of David/Bud and Jennifer/Mary Sue. Color begins to pop up. It starts with a single flower, then spreads from the landscape to the residents themselves as they begin to blossom from their newfound exposure to things like free will and sexual pleasure. It’s enticing, however, not everyone is so quick to get on board.

As the number of “colored” people in Pleasantville begins to grow, the voices who oppose the transformation get madder and louder. At a private meeting in a bowling alley, an alarmed group of middle-aged men decide that it’s time to do something about it—otherwise, there goes the neighborhood. “That is real rain out there, gentlemen. It’s not some kind of virus that will clear up on its own. Something is happening to our town and I think we can all see where it’s coming from,” says the mayor, Big Bob. They organize a town hall meeting for “all true citizens of Pleasantville” and the next day signs that say “No Coloreds” begin to pop up in storefront windows. Things turn violent and ugly until David/Bud gets everyone to finally come back to their senses. If only it were that easy to do away with hate in real life.

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Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema

When I re-watched Pleasantville this week, I was struck (and disappointed) by how much the themes of the film are still relevant. Director Gary Ross explores fear of change, the tendency people have—usually the privileged ones—to label change as bad, and the pattern of blaming the unwanted change on groups perceived as “other.” It’s an all too familiar story and I don’t believe that including people of color in the cast would have diminished the Kumbaya point that Ross is making.

But as we see in the town of Pleasantville, society can evolve when we start asking questions, like what really makes a neighborhood pleasant or a country great? Hopefully, in another 20 years, we won’t need to unpack the answer.