I saw the second movie last night,
Pleasantville. Today, I went back and read CalGal, Judith and
Super's comments about it.
If I would add anything to what they said, it
would be to describe what is becoming an American desire, to live
and re-create the lives of our imaginative world, found in
television and the movies. How appropriate to cast Jeff Daniels,
who played a more dashing character in similar circumstances in
Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo. Could it be that in the way
that Greeks or Romans personified and re-told stories about their
gods, or artists of the Middle Ages embodied the stories of their
Christian religion in all most everything, we feel a kinship with
our fictive characters and worlds, and so the Brady Bunch or
whatever must come back alive again and again?
The flatness of Pleasantville, reflecting all
those 50 Eisenhower era shows like (as CalGal pointed out, the
Donna Reed Show, but also Father Knows Best and Leave It To
Beaver), is cannily pointed out in the high school geography
lesson. The teacher asks her students about the geography of Elm
Street and Main Street. That is the world for these students, an
endless loop of two streets. And in this movie, we see the same
back lot streets over and over, much like the original tv shows
did.
Last year, there was an artist who had a show
at the Corcoran Museum who does the architectural floor plans of
television sitcoms. After watching these shows for years, he
started drawing out the reality of the houses or apartments
depicted on a range of shows, including Bewitched and Hazel and
the Park Avenue Aparment of Family Affair. On the surface, it's
silly to think that one would be so obsessed with a tv show that
an artist would try to recreate and capture it in something
mundane like a floor plan. But the drawings drew quite a reaction
from people who attended the show, as various people connected
with their own video memories of these fictive families.
