By Popular Request, We Are Finally Showing "Pleasantville"

 If anyone cares to cast their mind back to the beginning of 2020 (back before we started to fill our lives with words like "Lockdown" and "Self-Isolation" and the ever-popular "COVID") they might recall that we were in the middle of a film series at the Victoria Park Baptist Church - a film series we never actually got to finish, thanks to the Armageddon.

I am pleased to announce that this Thursday (exactly twenty months later) we will be screening Pleasantville; the film that was to have concluded that pre-Pandemic film series.


Pleasantville centres around a (fictional) 1950s television series about a "perfect" All-American community full of happy home-makers, preppy kids and white picket fences. This is the fondly remembered past that many American Conservatives like to invoke when they talk about "traditional values" (basically, this is the again in "Make America Great Again").


Unfortunately (or not, depending on your perspective) this version of America was never real; it was just a construct of popular culture, and when a pair of contemporary siblings are magically transported into Pleasantville (just go with it) things begin to unravel very, very quickly.


For writer/director Gary Ross (making his very impressive directorial debut) the fictional town of Pleasantville becomes a metaphor for the fabric of American society itself. When characters in the film begin to talk about things that are "Pleasant" and things that are "Unpleasant" it inevitably raises echoes of discussions in the (real) 1950s of things that were "American" and "Un-American".

In last week's Passport to Pimlico, we saw a small community cut off from the rest of Britain, only to find that all of the red tape and bureaucracy just spontaneously generates, as if such things are a Force of Nature that cannot be stopped. Something very similar happens in Pleasantville, except here it is the social upheaval and Progressive politics of mid-Century America.

Such terminology did not yet exist in 1998, but today's generation would probably describe it as the whole town becoming "woke".


We will (finally) be screening Pleasantville on Thursday, the 18th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Please be aware that Pleasantville is rated "12" in the UK, and does feature one reasonably explicit sexual scene. Okay, maybe not sexual, exactly, but it is downright remarkable in a mainstream Hollywood film written and directed by a man. You'll see what I mean on Thursday...

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