UNPLEASANTVILLE

...The world of the sitcoms was fantasy—as David Halberstam reminds us in The Fifties, his encyclopedic answer to propaganda about the decade, pro and con: "The American dream was now located in the suburbs, and for millions of Americans, still living in urban apartments, where families were crunched up against each other and where, more often than not, two or more siblings shared the same bedroom, these shows often seemed to be beamed from a foreign country, but one that the viewers longed to be part of...

...The girls wear poodle skirts and sweater sets and have two first names, the fire department rescues cats from trees, and married couples sleep in twin beds...

...It's meatloaf for dinner and cholesterol for breakfast: pancakes and waffles swimming in syrup, scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon, and—why not?—a ham steak, too...

...That too should sound familiar...

...Satire is thesis art," as novelist Milan Kundera put it...

...Bill Clinton admitted that he was wrong about having sex with babies out of wedlock...

...And on the other side of the equation, even some of the most progressive baby-boomers are coming in middle age to appreciate the restrictive values of their parents...

...It's supposed to be...

...And above all, the people of the era were sitcom characters—devoid of free will, playing to type, as incapable of imaginatively creating lives for themselves as the stock suburbanites manufactured by the limited imaginations of Burbank hacks writing under restrictive production codes...

...About a third of Americans lived in suburbs then, while more than half do today...

...Familiar...

...The task of maintaining an identity as a cultural freedom-fighter must be difficult in the face of an increasingly amorphous foe...

...What this crypto-fascist town needs is some sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll...

...Communitarians like Alan Ehrenhalt are unsentimental about the 1950s: They realistically concede that recapturing the order, security, and stability of those times means sacrificing some degree of individual choice and variety...

...How much simpler to turn the clock back, as Gary Ross tries in Pleasantville—back not to the 1950s, but to the 1960s: a time when battlelines were clearly drawn, the culture war was waged in black and white, and countercultural fable served up a reliable bogeyman...

...The debate has moved beyond sloganeering and mutual caricature...

...While some will maintain that the film's allegory is universal and time-less—about the lapse from innocence or the dangers of totalitarianism—I suspect the film-makers aimed at a narrower and more immediate political warning against those 1990s social conservatives who would turn the clock back to a postwar American Golden Age that never was...

...In accepting the idealized sitcom world as representative of American life in the period, Ross makes the same mistake as those from whom he would preserve us: the real or imagined folks nostalgic for old-fashioned values manifest in the 1950s television version of the suburbs...

...It never rains in Pleasantville, the high-school basketball team never loses, there are no toilets in the stalls...

...UNPLEASANTVILLE How the 1950s Looked in the 1960s By Daniel Wattenberg Welcome to Pleasantville, the town portrayed in the satirical allegory now playing in theaters, the first feature film directed by Gary Ross, who wrote the movies Big and Dave...

...The critics are right about its visual delights: The eruption of a black and white tree into orange flames and the application of black and white make-up to the sexually awakened mom's newly colorized skin are worth seeing...

...But those same critics are wrong about the message...

...Suburban horizons were as narrowly bounded as the limited sets of these low-budget entertainments...

...While sitcom viewers may have yearned for the fantasy, much of the intelligentsia of the time had already begun to reject it as a dangerous illusion—antiseptic, status-seeking, materialistic...

...That's too bad, for a fascinating debate is underway about the proper balance to be struck between community standards and individual choice...

...It's lily white and male-dominated: Challenge the town fathers, and you'll discover the brown shirts beneath the white collars...

...Their 1990s individualism proves contagious to the conformist town...

...Subtle it's not...

...Pleasantville is in fact satirical...

...And in Hollywood itself, it has been a season of reconciliation for boomers and their Depression-era parents...

...America during its imagined suburban idyll was not in fact very suburban...

...The movie, number one at the box office in its opening weekend, has won critical superlatives, for both its technical ingenuity and "complex" philosophical message...

...invincibly ignorant, their children precociously wise...

...And many, no doubt, regarded suburbia with the kind of ambivalence expressed by Philip Roth's Neil Klugman, driving from his Newark apartment to the suburb of Short Hills for a date with Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus: It was, in fact, as though the hundred and eighty feet that the suburbs rose in altitude above Newark brought one closer to heaven, for the sun itself became bigger, lower, and rounder, and soon I was driving past long lawns which seemed to be twirling water on themselves, and past houses where no one sat on stoops, where lights were on but no windows open, for those inside, refusing to share the very texture of life with those of us outside, regulated with a dial the amounts of moisture that were allowed access to their skin...

...And those televised suburban fathers who appeared, as if on cue, for a martini before dinner and then presided over the family meal...

...Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan symbolically reconciled veteran fathers and their draft-deferred sons...

...Sure of its own truth, it ridicules what it determines to combat...

...He's always there when you need him, children: the smugly authoritarian paterfamilias who ruled the airwaves in the 1950s, the scripted lightweight who hasn't had an idea since the advent of color television...

...In its self-assurance, Pleasantville belongs to an earlier, more militant phase of the culture wars...

...In reality, the long commutes required of the newly suburbanized professionals often meant leaving before the kids went to school and returning after they'd gone to bed...

...Candice Bergen admitted that Dan Quayle was right about not having babies out of wedlock...

...The elders who rule static Pleasantville fear change above all...

...The movie's Pleasantville seems intended primarily as a metaphor for life in the 1950s: American life, the old story goes, used to be as predictable in its rhythms and as aesthetically bland as the sitcoms of the time...

...They land in the home of series parents George (William H. Macy) and Betty (Joan Allen) Parker and assume the roles of their teenage children, Bud and Mary Sue...

...On the contrary, it is usually doctrinaire...

...Pleasantville is also sexually and emotionally repressed, intellectually and aesthetically barren...

...One True Thing, based on Anna Quindlen's novel, aimed at the same for home-maker mothers and professional daughters...

...But satire is typically not complex, and it's not philosophical or interrogatory...

...And as the sitcom characters begin thinking and feeling for themselves, the gray scale comes alive with color—and Lover's Lane becomes People's Park, Gene Vincent rocks the juke box, Mom learns to masturbate, and the bowling league (Robert Putnam's famous metaphor for a more civic-minded culture) becomes the incubator for a counter-revolutionary Kulturkampf...

...In Pleasantville, this old heroic myth of the counterculture is recycled by teleporting two 1990s teenagers, David (played by Tobey Maguire) and sister Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon), from their frayed, single-parent home into Pleasantville, the setting for the reassuring 1950s sitcom David watches devotedly on a cable channel...

...There is no room in Pleasantville for director Ross to incorporate any ambivalence about the 1950s...

...Parents are Daniel Wattenberg is a nationally syndicated columnist...

...It's the gray-scale world of the 1950s family sitcom, the idealized picture Ike's America had of itself, as represented in such escapist television fluff as Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, and Father Knows Best...

...Does the generation that weathered the Depression, waged World War II, and watched the Iron Curtain fall across the heart of Europe really need another lecture on adapting to the new from a privileged segment of a generation whose idea of change was co-ed dorms, pass-fail grades, and junior years abroad...

...It's the 1960s counterculture's idealized view of itself as the brave guerrilla fighters of America's domestic liberation movement...