Change In The Movie Pleasantville

Every face is welcoming, no one ever argues, and the biggest problem is a cat getting stuck up in a tree. The movie Pleasantville is a commentary on how humans are afraid of change in the world. A lot of the time we get so used to our daily routines that whenever we have to overcome an obstacle we crumble and don’t know what to do. This film does a great job showing how change can really affect people. The Pleasantville society shows a great deal of prejudice by being discriminate to those who were multi-colored. The multi-colored citizens were the ones who have changed and found themselves. With that said, the more rules that were being broke, the more color was appearing. Pleasantville represents society’s fear of change and the discrimination …show more content…
Throughout this film there are many themes that display change. Pleasantville encounters social issues as objects and people start to turn multi-colored. As the more rules were broken the more colors started to appear. This was a big change for the citizens of Pleasantville and all the people discriminated against these multi-colored humans. This displays how media presents us with one way to look at things. An example that reminds me of media presenting a way of how humans look at things is segregation in America. The town started putting up signs saying “No colored allowed” or they would separate them whenever they were in the same building. For example, when the town had a meeting the multi-colored audience was forced to sit on the top while the black and white audience sat below them. This is exactly the way Americans used to act against African Americans. The town’s people made it seem that it was shameful to be colored when really these multi-colored humans were the ones that found themselves. They were being criticized for breaking out of the social norms. Another theme that is shown in this film is the double standard for women and men. This is how we allow media to dictate who we are as an individual. There are many scenes throughout this film that show this theme where the mother stays at home cleaning and cooking while the father goes to work. A great scene that shows this is when the father comes home from work and yells, “Honey, I’m home!” The wife runs up to her husband gives him a kiss while there is a hot plate of food waiting for him on the table. This soon changes when Bud and Mary Sue’s mother turns multi-colored and stops serving her husband 24/7. At first the mother was very upset to show everyone that she has changed to multi-colored. She didn’t want to be judged, which relates to significantly how we allow media to dictate who we are. While this change is going on the husband is going crazy