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...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The calla lilies are in bloom again...

Image
At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China. While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful  career . Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother. Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people . They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood a
Read more

A Wife in Every Room

Image
In Bringing Up Baby , Cary Grant became the first person to use the word Gay (in its modern sense) in a Hollywood movie. One might hypothesize that by 1938, the film censors were starting to become more permissive about the subtext that was regularly being slipped into films of the era. One would be completely wrong to thusly hypothesize ( to hypothesize thusly ; excuse me). Film censorship in the late 1930s was just as draconian as ever: a year earlier they had insisted that a shot of a  gravestone  be cut from a film because the character in question had committed suicide, and it was "inappropriate" to show her receiving a proper burial. The word gay had only slipped through in Bringing Up Baby because no one at the Hays Office knew what it meant in that context. (I won't tell them if you don't.) Cary Grant certainly knew what it meant, and it's very interesting that he was the one who got to introduce the word to American film audiences. Because Cary Grant, th
Read more
Image
  Movie Nights at the  Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae?   Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite
Read more

Depression/Comedy Act II: The RKO Cinematic Universe

Image
If you follow any aspect of modern Hollywood (you know, the stuff I don't usually screen at these film nights) you will probably have noticed that there are a few topics which tend to dominate the discussions these days. In between chit-chat about  Star Wars and Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead , you will almost certainly have encountered people talking about the Marvel Cinematic Universe . Everything, it seems, is a "universe" these days. Mark Zuckerberg is currently trying to turn Facebook into a "Metaverse". Godzilla and King Kong have recently been punching each other to death in the latest instalment of what Universal Studios is calling its "Monster-verse" and Captain America, Iron Man, Thor et al inhabit something their fan base likes to call the Marvel Cinematic Universe . In the early days of comic books, superheroes usually travelled alone. Superman of the 1940s was never going to cross paths with Batman or Wonder Woman (except perhaps
Read more

Carry On... #phishing

Image
Like many other "vocabulary nerds" around the world, I have lately fallen into the habit of playing Wordle every day. For the blissfully unaware, the object of Wordle is to identify a five-letter word in six guesses. There are approximately 13,000 five-letter words in the English language, but not all of those words are included in the Wordle solution list. Some have been omitted because they are considered offensive or incendiary, while others are absent because they are merely obscure. Unfortunately, the algorithm for including or excluding words is a bit arbitrary, and not always transparent. LYNCH and SLAVE have both been removed from the official list. PUSSY (which has a perfectly benign alternative meaning) was excised, although HUSSY (which only ever means one thing) was left in place. PENIS was cut from the list, but HYMEN is still intact. Go figure that one out (and take note, all you Wordlers: PENIS is out; HYMEN is in. And stop sniggering.). For my part, it's t
Read more