I recently re-watched the 1998 movie “Pleasantville.” For those unaware, this starred a pre-Spiderman Tobey McGuire as a kid who’s a fan of the fictional 1950’s black and white TV show “Pleasantville,” sort of a cliche of the bland, utopian family shows of the time. It turns into a fantasy when Don Knotts shows up as a TV repairman who gives Tobey’s character a magical remote that zaps Tobey and his sister, played by Reese Witherspoon, into an episode of “Pleasantville.” There everything is in black and white, the world is *extremely* limited, and the other people are devoid of curiosity or initiative, just fulfilling their roles. The two new people begin to add a note of chaos to things, and in the process the characters begin to have awakenings… and color seeps into the environment. A flower here, a tongue there, and soon signs, trees, cars and whole people are appearing in glorious technicolor as they realize that there’s more to life than their roles. It’s an amusing fantasy that I first saw in the late 90’s, and last saw probably more than 20 years ago.
But upon rewatching it… I’ve decided it’s not just some lighthearted fantasy. It’s a sequel to “Tron.”
The “TV show” is a simulation based on the old TV show. The characters are actual NPCs, nonsentient avatars just going through their programmed motions. The “magic remote” is a much more advanced version of the laser “scanner” from “Tron,” and it uploads the two new users into the Pleasantville grid. The simulation is capable of learning and growth, and the non-sentient NPC slowly, and sometimes quickly, come to awareness. And when characters or objects get a resolution increase, they go from black and white to color. At the end, the simulation expands: previously, when you went to the end of Main Street, you found yourself at the beginning of Main Street: the simulated universe was at best a few miles across. but now there is a college in the town of Springfield, 12 miles away. The simulation is growing.
I assume Don Knotts is a former employee of Encom, likely a friend and co-worker of Kevin Flynn. In “Tron: Legacy” Flynn is stated to have disappeared in 1989, and we find out that he’d been stuck in a simulation of his own ever since. In 1982’s “Tron,” the laser scanner was the size of a building; by 1989 it was portable enough to be installed in a basement. I guess Knotts, who was clearly enough of a fan of the old “Pleasantville” show to have created a simulation based on it, had continued development to the point where the scanner was now hand-held. Throughout the course of the movie it’s shown that he stays in a “TV Repair” van outside the real-world house of the two experimental subjects; perhaps the scanner is connected to the actual simulation hardware contained within the van through a wifi system.
At the end of the movie, Tobey returns to the real world, while his mean-girl, vapid and slutty sister stays behind: she does so because she, too has come to an awakening, and is now going to the college that appears at the end of the movie. Since several days had passed within the simulation while less than and hour had passed in the real world, the sister should be able to get a fair education in relatively short real-world time; of course, the education will be uncredentialed. But it’s better to be educated than not, regardless of whether you can prove it with paperwork. On the other hand… at the end Knotts drives away, presumably taking the simulation with him. How will Tobey get back into it? How will his sister get out? How will they communicate? These are left unanswered.
9 responses to ““Pleasantville” re-contextualized”
There’s nothing I like more than the occasional bit of fan theory. Remind me to tell you why the first officer of USS Enterprise, the computer, and the feline communications officer all have the same voice.
“First officer”, or “nurse”?
First first officer, under Pike.
Right, Number One under Pike.
Number One was deeply involved in building Starfleet’s computer systems, and her voice became the “Starfleet standard.” Lt. M’Ress (or her species) is mute or otherwise unable to imitate human speech, so she uses an artificial voice she has tweaked to give it a Caitian accent.
Why Nurse Chapel has the same voice, I don’t know. Maybe she’s related to Number One.
That’s a remarkable observation.
It wouldn’t be hard to make it obvious, almost canon.
No “deep fake” tech needed, just add some occasional pixelization to the NPC’s, maybe “distress” the background with rendering artifacts here & there, add a few Encom logo’s occasionally…
A good place for an ENCOM reference would’ve been on the TV repair van. License plate, or “A division of ENCOM,” something like that.
Huh. So *that’s* where the “van” went as I was typing and got bumped by a cat…
An interesting theory, but It give the movie too much credit and is waaaaay deeper than the film itself.
I remember taking a date to this back in the day and was unimpressed.
Ross, Kilik, Degus and Soderbergh seemed to me to only want to show their shallow perception of “normal” people and exposing them to something new adds “color” and wakes them up. The not so subtle cultural/political remarks seem to bear this out.
While you are not wrong, it’s always fun to take something minor, shallow or leftist and re-imagine it in a way that “subverts expectations.” I haven;t seen “Barbie,” for example, but I know that it’s meant to be a feminist takedown of “the patriarchy…” but I’ve seen a *lot* of people who see it as showing the exact opposite. it’s actually the story of how ken is oppressed by “the matriarchy,” and how by introducing a little masculinity into hit world, he makes it a much better place.
“Black Panther” is not the story of how great Africa would be had it never been colonized; it’s the story of how African culture is stagnant and backwards. How with a ten thousand year head start on the world, Wakanda is on the verge of becoming a technological backwater, it’s time of relevance nearly at an end. Tony Stark alone is able to reproduce all the miracles they spend millenia producing, and seem unable to improve upon.
And so on.