I have seen this movie several times before, but never have I thought so critically about the material and media aspects of the film. When watching it, I kind of kept thinking of the "Industry, Nature, and Identity in an Iron Footbridge" article by Carlo Rotella. He talks about the bridge being a structure that bridges not only people to a physical environment, but also people to their emotions past and present. Similarly in the movie, the TV transports David and Jennifer to another place and time and reconnects them with emotions and situations from the past. "Even as a object of analysis, the bridge serves its traditional function: it allows us to distinguish each term from its opposite, like two banks of a river, but it gives us a way to understand the pair together as a single terrain" p. 191. The whole experience that the two siblings have in this movie bridge the gap (pun intended) to a new way of thinking that was learned from the almost primeval way in the town of Pleasantville.
The whole movies screams "I should be a part of the Marling book, especially since I'm about TV". The set design (or should I say design of pleasant Pleasantville) struck me as an example of Marling's chapter called "Disneyland, 1955". Not that the town of Pleasantville is like Disneyland in the fact that Disneyland "was commercial, a roadside money machine, cynically exploiting the innocent dreams of childhood" p. 90 Marling. But the design of Pleasantville is campy and almost a parody of real 1950s towns. The seemingly picture perfect homes, manicured lawns, and layout is portrayed that way to entice someone like David to feel as though this is a perfect place where life is happy and cheery. Disneyland is similarly designed, to entice a false sense of perfection and calm. The clothing design in the film (again, or should I say the real not-so-real lives of the Pleasantvillians?) does a similar thing that the set/home design does. When seeing Betty's character in the clearly "Mamie Eisenhower" looks, its so obvious to see that 1950s mentality! It also made me wonder how the history of women's wear has gone from the corset to the Mamie look. The clothes worn by Mary Sue/Jennifer and Betty were totally of the time period. But were they comfortable? Were they any more 'liberating' than the corset? Leslie Shannon Miller, in her article called "Styles of Womanhood Embodied in a Late-Nineteeth-Century Corset" says that "Granted, not many women were killed by their corsets; the majority of women merely lost the spirit and energy of youth even as they attained its physical shape" p. 138. Did the same thing happen or not in the Mamie Eisenhower look that Marling talks about in her chapter called "Mamie Eisenhower's New Look"?
I think that you could have a whole semester long class on this movie. There is just so much to look at, and each thing seems to have a deeper meaning!
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