Pleasantville: Change Is Reality

Nothing I like about the movie has anything to do with freedom, but I think you see that now.

It’s not that change is necessarily good. It’s just that change is reality. The choice is either to deal with that reality or pretend it doesn’t exist, that we can will it away. In my opinion, the church in the past has done the latter too often, which hurts both the church’s impression of Christianity and Christianity itself. My opinion. But yeah, it’s not that change is always good. It’s that we need to recognize that it’s real in order to deal with it effectively.

I will say though that I think Christianity may be changing. I dunno. I’m basing this all off of how it’s dealt with AIDS. You know, in the past, I think the church might have tried to ignore it, or written it off as a gay man’s disease. But today, the church really is at the forefront of American society in raising awareness and dealing with AIDS issues, especially in regards to Africa. It’s mainstream America that has lagged on this issue. I dunno, I find how Christians have taken the lead on this encouraging.

As for freedom, that’s there in the movie also. It’s not a message I jive with, I might even disagree with it, but it’s there. But even with that, I dunno, I don’t think they say freedom is always good. The movie shows that with “freedom”, there comes violence, envy, all these negative things. Like there’s this scene where Don Knotts gets pissed at Tobey Maguire for introducing all these problems to Pleasantville, where he shows him the shot of him eating the apple. So yeah, there’s negative aspects to freedom shown in the movie. It’s complex. The last shot kind of sums it up. Joan Allen has gotten into this strange precarious situation with another man, and now what is she gonna do with her husband? No clue. It’s completely vague. And it attests I think to freedom not always being good, but complex.

The point the movie makes about this, which again, I’m not sure how I feel about, is that freedom does not always lead to only good, but life is far more interesting with it than without it. So that it’s worth taking the bad that comes because of the good that comes also. But I do think it dealt with negative parts of freedom, not just blaming those who don’t want it, but understanding that freedom itself leads to these things. But I dunno.