The movie was about a brother and sister from the 90’s who get zapped into the 50’s television show Pleasantville where everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong. Throughout the movie their ideas contaminate the people and things are no longer so pleasant. What we see in the end though is that even the things that seem terrible actually serve a function in the way that things work.
One of the most obvious symbols in the movie is that when people do something that they normally would not have they become “colored” while everything else is black and white. When people start becoming colored, the others start to discriminate against them. In same cases, through their anger for the colored people, these people did things they would not have normally done, causing them to become colored. Therefore the function in making these people colored was to eventually cause everyone to be colored and equal. It also caused a bond between the
people who were originally colored, and being outcasts already they were more willing to try new things.
Before the two teenagers arrived, the people of Pleasantville had never heard of sex. How they reproduced was never really explained (the stork maybe?). But anyway, these people would live their whole lives and according to Mary Sue (the girl from the 90’s) never experience the real pleasure in life. Well, she took care of that and before you knew it sex and masturbation was taking Pleasantville by storm. By having sex was how some people got their colors, and other just got their kicks.
Another big functionalist point in the movie was when a diner owner secretly admitted that he had always wanted to paint. After getting his colors he figured what the hell and it turned out he had a lot of talent. Painting things, in color no less outraged the town and before you knew it his home was being vandalized. This anger brought out the colors in some of t
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