In Pleasantville (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120789/), the Pleasantvilleans live in a completely self-enclosed universe, and are utterly perplexed at the question of what might lie outside of it – it’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole.
Well enough. But Pleasantville High has a basketball team, the “undefeated Pleasantville Lions,” which plays games against . . . well, against whom? Where do the “visitors” come from (if only for the sake of getting beaten)? No matter how stupid and complacent the Pleasantvilleans might be, if they are aware that there are “visitors,” the question, “What’s outside of Pleasantville?” should not baffle them – should it?
No, it’s clear enough that they often play opponents; and after David and Jennifer show up and start planting the seeds of doubt (and sex) in their world, they actually, for the first time ever, lose a game; and they must have lost it to somebody.
I suppose you’re meant to get the idea that such ideas never crop up in the mind of the Pleasantville citizen, and thus the apparent paradox can never create a problem.
Since when can a town only have one high school? How else are the kids supposed to get into hilariously convoluted plots involving going out with someone from a rival school?
But, it’s more than that – it’s not just that they’re unaware of the outside world, it’s that, in the Pleasantville universe, the “outside world” categorically does not even exist.
Not exactly. Remember, Pleasantville is the small town of a 1950s-era sitcom, and there is an outside world If you remember, at the end of the film, Reese Witherspoon’s character decides to stay and go to college.The outside world is some place that is “off camera” and would only be talked about on the series. Much like the big city that Barney on The Andy Griffith Show went off to in the later seasons.
Think of it like this: The outside world exists only on the level that the series writers need it to exist. So, if in one episode a writer decided that the folks of Pleasantville needed to have a fierce rivalry with the town of Cornhole, everyone in the series would suddenly know about it and agree that Cornholians were the vilest creatures they’d ever met, even though they’d never said anything about them before this. It’s sort of like how color came to Pleasantville.
Obviously, a town that small needs to import a whole lot of stuff. E.g., they couldn’t have multiple-brand car plants, TV factories, etc.
So things just “show up” at the right place at the right time. E.g.,
Color TVs appear in the local appliance store.
Tuckerfan: The incident you mention occurs at the end of the film and is symbolic of the town “opening up”. Such a thing would not have been doable in the early part of the film.
Anyway, there’s also the symmetric issue of where do things go? It must be like Chuck Cunningham. People/things just disappear without being seen again. Maybe Billy Mummy wished them away?
Yes – but I got the impression that that was like the colors, and fire, and sex, and the text in the library books; it did not exist at all before David and Jennifer showed up and started meddling with the cosmic order.
