Recently, as someone was criticizing my novels for what they called “inappropriate content,” I suddenly felt like I was living in Pleasantville, and, shortly afterward went back and watched Gary Ross’s profound 1998 film.
Over a decade after I first saw it, “Pleasantville” holds up well, and is just as relevant. If you haven’t seen it, or if it’s been a while, consider taking a trip across the universe to visit Pleasantville.
Pleasantville is a colorless, lifeless, pointless place where repressed people pretend the world is the way they want it to be.
A brother and sister (twins, David and Jennifer) from the 1990s are transported through their television set into the 1950s style black-and-white television show, “Pleasantville.” Here, they have loving, if robotic, parents, values that seem old fashioned, and an overwhelming amount of innocence, even naiveté. Not sure how to get home, they integrate themselves into this bland society as well as they can and slowly begin a revolution.
The revolution they start, like all revolutions, begins with freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom to be.
Fear imprisons. Love liberates.
We were created to be autonomous, formed to be free (we were created to connect, too, but that’s a different column). We can’t be who we’re really meant to be without being free.
Perhaps the single greatest tragedy of life is how frequently, how readily, how willingly, we give away our freedom.
We do it out of fear. We trade our most precious birthright for a false sense of security and the safety-in-numbers uniformity the prophets of fear peddle.
Of course, like many of us, the people of Pleasantville don’t know they’re not free. So mired in the quicksand of culture are they, they are no longer conscious.
In Pleasantville, everyone is asleep, all dreaming the same boring dream.
But David and Jennifer wake them up.
The awakening of Pleasantville is accomplished by a variety of means—all having to do with freedom.
It begins with questions. Jennifer asks what’s outside of Pleasantville—something no citizen of Pleasantville had ever even thought of. For them, Pleasantville is the world entire, in the same way we often think that our world, our way of seeing the world, is all there is. We can never be completely free until we question everything—every assumption, every belief, everything every authority ever told us. Questioning is key to enlightenment. Questions are far, far more important than answers.
Then, Jennifer introduces Pleasantvillians to sex. You can’t have a revolution without sex. Like questioning, people seem to be particularly fearful of sex—of sex in general of sexual freedom in particular—especially that of young people and women. The residual Puritanism so prevalent in our culture has people afraid of their sexuality. But the awesome power of sex should be respected, revered, not feared. Sex is, or can be, a revelation, a revolution. Rarely does one have a true spiritual or creative awakening that does not include, or was not inspired by, a sexual one.
The revolution in Pleasantville continues when David and Jennifer introduce books and reading. Nothing equals freedom like the writing and publishing and reading of books. The sharing of ideas, the intellectual intercourse that occurs between writer and reader in the bedroom of a book is truly one of the highlights of being human, and this, too, is revolutionary—both personally and politically. No wonder the establishment (those that benefit most from the domination system and the sleeping of the masses) wants to ban and burn books.
Eventually, David introduces art to the pale people of Pleasantville, and the revolution really begins to swell. Vivid colors, unique expressions, the artistic appreciation of the female form, and the powers that be come undone.
Then, there’s choices in music and food and fashion.
Suddenly, people are bursting into full-color, experiencing their lives fully awake for the first time. How does the establishment respond? By closing the library and lovers’ lane, by outlawing all colors but black and white and gray, by having book burnings and destroying any and all acts of art, all expressions of creativity.
Those in power are oppressive—ever trying to cling to the power they have and acquire more. But the real problem in Pleasantville as in Pottersville as in Niceville as in ourville isn’t oppression so much as repression.
Of all the crimes against humanity, repression is one of the most insidious. Unlike oppression, which can be an exclusively external force, repression involves complicity on the part of the repressed.
True repression—like the systemic and institutional sexism, racism, and homophobia that leads to desperation, frustration, and self-loathing—is not only an external condition but must be so internalized that those imprisoned in it become co-conspirators—jailers in their own captivity.
If there’s anything missing from the awakenings in Gary Ross’s “Pleasantville,” it’s religious awakening. Though everything that happened constitutes a spiritual awakening, I wish Ross would have depicted a religious awakening, too—the reformations and counter-reformations that make up the best of religious traditions. Fundamentalists and literalists of every tradition claim theirs is the only way to be right or orthodox, but the very religion they pervert wouldn’t exist had someone not questioned and challenged and reformed the one that came before it.
In the great irony of human history, God created us to be free, insists on our absolute freedom (has God ever made you do anything?), yet it is out of fear of God that so many surrender their freedom. False religion teaches followers to be afraid—afraid to be human, afraid to mess up, afraid to do anything but conform to its fear-based rules.
But God is not to be feared. God is love. Perfect love, in fact—the very antithesis of fear.
The good news is we are loved and accepted unconditionally. We have nothing to fear.
Be free. Be yourself. Relax. Rest. Stop resisting. Love’s not going anywhere. Be creative. It’s okay to use all the crayons in your box, okay to color outside the lines.
Like the people of Pleasantville, intellectual, sexual, religious, artistic repression is killing us. It’s a slow suicide of the soul, a drifting off into a sleepy stupor that only waking up and being free can cure.
Awakening.
You and I hold the key to our own prison cells.
Like the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, Moses in the wilderness, Jesus in the desert, we must awaken. With openness and freedom, we must explore, experiment, experience, be—knowing that as we do, life isn’t always pleasant and was never intended to be. Awakening, being free, is a sometimes chaotic, wild, messy process, requiring that we take risks, explore, experiment, color outside the lines, and fail, but there’s no other way to be fully human, no other way to achieve enlightenment.
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