History Headscratchers / Pleasantville

* It doesn't matter: both of their parents are totally wrapped up in their own lives. Jennifer & David were already going to spend the weekend completely alone anyway. The explanation of "Jennifer taking off somewhere for a few days" would only be needed if worst comes to worst: that the parents will realise that they haven't seen her recently & actually start asking questions.

* Wow the mom is in color now! Great huh? Until you realize gaining color is usually associated with sex, [[ADateWithRosiePalms her husband was still black and white]]

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[[folder: What happens to the show now from the perspective of the real world?]]
* Now that the Pleasantville world has been turned upside down, if David continues to watch the marathon that weekend would he see the original show or the one he just left with essentially episode plots writing themselves as they go?

** This isn't really a headscratcher as much as it's the whole philosophical argument the movie is engaging in. To quote Carl Jung: “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The argument goes that in order to fully understand happiness, and thus be truly happy, you need to have at least some understanding of what it is to be ''un''happy in order to contrast it; essentially, you savour happiness because you also know what it is to feel the lows of sadness, loneliness, discontent etc. Otherwise, what you understand to be 'happy' would be artificial and meaningless. The inhabitants of Pleasantville are 'happy' in the sense that they don't really experience anything bad, but the whole argument of the movie is that they're not really alive or fully human either, because their concept of 'happiness' has nothing to contrast against and thus give it meaning. To illustrate; the basketball team always wins the game because winning is 'good', but it doesn't really mean anything or give them real satisfaction because they've never experienced what it means to ''lose'' the basketball game, and thus don't have the drive of avoiding that feeling to make the victory sweeter. The 'happy' marriage goes through the motions of domestic bliss, but it means nothing because they've not had to work to reach a true intimacy, which requires hard work and potential disappointment. Everyone's just artificially going through the motions of everything being nice and, well, pleasant. The movie is making the case that while it might not always be 'better' in an 'avoiding pain and unhappiness' sense, introducing colour -- and thus moral complexity and the possibility of hurt and pain, among other things -- into the lives of the people of Pleasantville is unarguably better in the sense that it makes their lives real, and thus gives them the possibility of finding true happiness and meaning rather than just going through the motions of faking it.

** This isn't really a headscratcher as much as it's the whole philosophical argument the movie is engaging in. To quote Carl Jung: “Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The argument goes that in order to fully understand happiness, and thus be truly happy, you need to have at least some understanding of what it is to be ''un''happy in order to contrast it; essentially, you savour happiness because you also know what it is to feel sadness, loneliness, discontent etc. Otherwise, what you understand to be 'happy' would be artificial and meaningless. The inhabitants of Pleasantville are 'happy' in the sense that they don't really experience anything bad, but the whole argument of the movie is that they're not really alive or fully human either, because their concept of 'happiness' has nothing to contrast against and thus give it meaning. The team always wins the basketball game because winning is 'good', but it doesn't really mean anything or give them true satisfaction because they've never experienced what it means to ''lose'' the basketball game, and thus don't have the drive of avoiding that feeling to make the victory sweeter. The 'happy' marriage goes through the motions of domestic bliss, but it means nothing because they've not had to work to reach a true intimacy, which requires hard work and potential disappointment. Everyone's just artificially going through the motions of everything being nice and, well, pleasant. The movie is making the case that while it might not always be 'better' in an 'avoiding pain and unhappiness' sense, introducing colour -- and thus moral complexity and the possibility of hurt and pain, among other things -- into the lives of the people of Pleasantville is unarguably better in the sense that it makes their lives real, and thus gives them the possibility of finding true happiness and meaning rather than just going through the motions of faking it.

[[folder: What happened to the original kids who got replaced?]]

* Maybe people in the actual 1950's weren't happy, but these were actual fantasy characters designed to be happy. Happiness is relative anyway. If you have 10 dollars, you want 20; if you have 20 dollars, you want 40. These people actually had everything they wanted because they honestly didn't know any better (unlike in the real 50's, where they pretended not to know or had feelings glazed over). But Witherspoon's character had to screw it all up, and the movie madze it clear she did it for her own amusement. Now they're saddled with the desires we have. You know, the ones we drive ourselves miserable chasing after, the ones that will never be satisfied. If these people had wanted these things for themselves, they would have snapped themselves out of this mode the way we did. They wouldn't have needed an outsider to do it for them. This makes the whole exercise of this movie either: a) tragic, b) pointless, or c) a worthless Strawman argument.

[[folder: The outside team in Pleasantville]]

* Just how the hell will David explain to his real parents that they'll never see Jennifer ever again?

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*** This is the correct thing. The mayor was previously nothing but the "big, jovial, easygoing guy whose entire thing is acting like he cares about everyone (with a side of being a bit of an overbearing minor jerk for light jokes)" type. When he gets angry, but more when he admits to being angry about the changes and ''not'' caring about the people he's hurting, that's when he becomes colorized.
*** More to the point, the mayor becomes colorized when he is forced to stop resisting the need to fix the pattern
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*** Even if that's true, there's still a Lover Lane which means sex existed. So why was sex treated like a new thing in that universe?

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*** The rule of the thumb is the only things which had explicitly existed in Pleasantville before David and Jennifer were those which were explocitly shown onscreen on the series as filmed in 1950s. And sex obviously wasn't. As for Lover Lane's purpose, well, you have to take them literally when they keep repeating the "holding hands" thing.

** Sex education was different back then and, besides, in TheFifties people weren't exactly candid about their sex lives or the subject entirely.

* Maybe people in the actual 1950's weren't happy, but these were actual fantasy characters designed to be happy. Happiness is relative anyway. If you have 10 dollars, you want 20; if you have 20 dollars, you want 40. These people actually had everything they wanted because they honestly didn't know any better (unlike in the real 50's, where they pretended not to know or had feelings glazed over). But Witherspoon's character had to screw it all up, and the movie made it clear she did it for her own amusement. Now they're saddled with the desires we have. You know, the ones we drive ourselves miserable chasing after, the ones that will never be satisfied. If these people had wanted these things for themselves, they would have snapped themselves out of this mode the way we did. They wouldn't have needed an outsider to do it for them. This makes the whole exercise of this movie either: a) tragic, b) pointless, or c) a worthless Strawman argument.

** Someone obviously hasn't read 1984.

*** Not exactly like the movie shows, of course, but yes, it did. Believe it or not, the teen pregnancy rate was actually higher in the 1950s than in any decade since. There are several reasons for this, not all of them "bad" reasons as such (for example, the age of first marriage was much lower then, so some of those pregnant teenagers were 18- or 19-year-old women who were already married and wanted to get pregnant anyway), but it was also partly because no one was teaching teenagers about how babies are made and how to avoid it. Even if teenagers knew about contraceptives, they were illegal in many places anyway.