Material, Media, and Pleasantville

One element of the film that I found striking was its use of the material aspects of food and cooking to discuss the ideal of domesticity in 1950s culture. As in Werbel's Foley Food Mill analysis, the film is working with the idea that women are the center of the household-- processing the raw materials of everyday life to make them palatable and pleasant for the family unit (Prown/Haltman 240). It seems no accident that the first really major destabilization of Pleasantville society comes with the mother's transformation to color and her changed relationship to food. The breakfast scene, when the teenagers are newly introduced to Pleasantville, makes the link between the mother and food production as an accepted social norm. She reveals stacks of perfect pancakes and waffles, a veritable feast presented as just another morning's nourishing breakfast. Yet the film also makes this production disturbing, as the piles of caloric foods pressed upon the modern teenagers seems excessively heavy and caloric, producing a sense of disgust with the bounty. Thus the film both reveals and troubles the ideal of domestic plenty as evidenced through food. As Marling suggested, food production in the 1950s was tied to a display of feminine competence. Thus, the fictive Betty Crocker had to be attached to a logo that suggested her abilities and her endorsement of culinary products for women. Cake, along with other foods, came to evidence a woman's ability to manage and control her sphere of influence (Marling 239). In the film, when the mother leaves the home, the question of color becomes one of central importance to the community. When the husband comes home to find the kitchen empty of both his wife and his expected meal, the question of change in Pleasantville is taken up and challenged by a large group within the town. The middle aged white men in the town come to understand the absence of dinner as a major threat to their way of life, because it indicates the possibility of changing gender and labor relations. The film points to the media devaluation of women's labor by suggesting that food production isn't valued until it stops-- unitl the appliance ridden kitchen is empty of the person who knows how to use those tools to create a stable domestic space. Meehan's argument that television has traditionally privleged male veiwership as more valuable than female veiwership can help illuminte this assumption (Durham/Kellner, 310). It follows that in shows geared more toward pleasing a male audience, women's labor can be taken as a given. The film challenges the complacency of this attitude by showing just how much food, and all of the objects and actions involved in its production, actually did constitute a notion of stability in the domestic space in the popular narratives of the time period.

This concern over women's labor is also tied to larger questions about the necesity of labor in the world of Pleasantville. The introduction of color disrupts routine, and this discontinutiy makes people in the town start questioning thier jobs. The film shows how disruptions in the base of a production/consumption driven society are a real threat to the dominant social order, speaking to Williams' point that the lived relations of the base are primary in the maintenance or disruption of an economic order (Durham/Kellner 130). When his boss questions why he should keep on working despite the fact that he no longer sees the importance of the job, David exclaims that it is so "the people can have their cheesburgers!" When labor stops, consumption is stopped, and throughout the film charecters express anxiety about this fact because they sense that a change in those labor and consumer relations would be far more socially profound than simply the lost ability to readily obtain cheesburgers (which are yet another instance of the importance of stable everday culinary relations to larger social interactions and power relations).

The film also makes use of a discussion of racial dynamics, both overt and subtle. On the one hand, the eventual imposed divisions in the community based on color become a way in which the film can discuss the racial politics of the 1950s which remain somewhat veiled in most television of the time. The segregation based on color draws attention to the monolithic whiteness of the cast, even as it tries to trouble the unity of the racial culture. The town council button, for instance, becomes an ironic illusion to these racial politics, as the two clasped hands it depicts are both obviously the same shade of white. Yet at the same time the material and media props that the film uses to cue the transformation from uniformity to diversity and color also reference as less visible set of racial relations. Music is one of the first indicators that change is happening in Pleasantville; as more teens become colorized the soundtrack is either rock 'n roll or jazz. Among the first objects that show up in color are the soda shop jukebox and a car radio. Thus American music born out of black culture comes to denote the revitalization of white culture. With respect to literature too, the first of the books that catalyzed transformation is Huckleberry Finn-- another allusion to the US's racial history made into a medium for white intellectual diversity. In this way the film seems to fall back on the sentiment bell hooks discusses, that media portrayals often treat encounters with blackness as ways of improving one dimensional (or gray scale) white culture (Durham/Kellner 366). So even though the film does try to deal with racial politics, the technicolor analogy can only carry it so far in its reflections on cultural diversity.