Pleasantville/Headscratchers

• Just how the hell will David explain to his real parents that they'll never see Jennifer ever again?
  • He may not have to. Note the ending — the whole events of David's time in the show take up just one hour of real time. So Jennifer could conceivably spend three years in college and then return with about a weekend passing in the real world. Now given Jennifer being who she is, would it really be so surprising for her to just vanish for a random weekend? Doubtful.
  • That explanation above is indeed Word Of God according to Gary Ross' DVD commentary (although he admitted he made up that explanation on the spot). 1 hour in real life = 1 week in Pleasantville. Three years of college works out to be about 6 days.
  • Made up on the spot or not, it makes perfect sense. Most shows are 1 hour long and run once a week.
  • He'd still have to explain how she aged. Even a couple of years does wonders when you're gone. Party hardy, maybe.
  • Maybe Pleasantville runs on Comic Book Time and she won't age...
  • Or maybe she'll just age in people years and won't show dramatic aging after a year or two. But hey, I could be wrong.
    • Three years isn't actually that much when you're Jennifer's age - even if she ages, it won't show THAT much. She could put it down to maybe getting a full makeover while out of town for about a week. It's not like she'll have lost three years of her life; just... misplaced them. And if she doesn't age, problem solved.
  • What about the thing they did in The Chronicles of Narnia? Those kids were there like fifteen years living there and aged normally, but when they got back into their world, they were children again.
  • This is sort of supported. When David is about to be transported back to the real world, he has his hair combed back and is wearing a basketball jacket. When he's back in the real world, he looks the same he did when he first left, although he still has the jacket.
  • I figured that, when David came back but Jennifer didn't, the same reality warping magic that was transforming Pleasantville altered the real world so that there never was a Jennifer.
• 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.
  • A lot of people in remote parts of the world never want anything more than what they have because they never realize that there's anything more they could do, be, or have for themselves. Of course when many of them do connect with the outside world they become "saddled" with "miserable" things like ambitions, hopes, and dreams. Just because you'd be happy being a mindless automaton and never knowing the richness of life you were missing out on as you went through your day in an empty-headed predetermined haze doesn't mean that everyone else would be.
• If there is no "outside of Pleasantville", then who is the basketball team playing against? And if the Pleasantville team always wins, then that means someone always loses. It surely isn't pleasant for them, whoever they are.
  • It seems obvious that Pleasantville's general idealism means that nobody was expected to really think about it. Alternatively: "It's not the winning, it's the taking part that counts."
  • According to the DVD commentary by director Gary Ross, he explains that the opposing team is indeed an unknown visiting team that is perpetually always in town playing against Pleasantville, a la the Washington Generals in relation to the Harlem Globetrotters.
  • Wow, now that is a Fridge Logic Fate Worse Than Death. You're stuck outside of your (non-existent) home, always losing The Big Game , forever. Even if they're too lobotomized by the Fisher Kingdom powers of the setting to notice, you can't help but sympathize.
  • I'd have guessed cross-town rivals, myself.
• What happened to Bud and Mary Sue? I understand they were replaced when David and Jennifer came, but when David left, did the real Bud come back?
  • Additionally, if he did come back, how would he adjust to the radical changes that took place while he was gone?
  • I always figured that Bud and Mary Sue just took the places of the main characters in the real world. Considering that they pretty much had to have gotten used to differences in people and changes in society while they were in the "real world", they shouldn't have too many problems returning back to Pleasantville. Hell, the still changing, fairly conservative Pleasantville would probably be a relief from David and Jennifer's world. Or, alternately, they went completely insane from the culture shock and won't notice the difference anyway.
  • At the switch point, Bud and Mary Sue weren't real people. They were just flat, one-dimensional characters that probably couldn't exist outside of Pleasantville, and didn't. It'd probably be different if someone who was "colorized" tried to leave the screen.
• Will the toilets appear in the soda shop now?
  • You probably meant that as a joke, but I can't resist answering the question. Yes, if the map outside of Pleasantville fills in, that would suggest the emergence of other common infrastructure.
  • Unless the toilets were smashed when the shop was ransacked.
    • What a perfect time to install new ones!
  • A better (if squickier) question might be, if the toilets have all appeared, but the residents of Pleasantville haven't ever used a toilet before, does that mean we now have an entire town full of people who need to be individually toilet trained?
    • Think of all the unused food sitting in them up until this point. That food has to come out on their first BM... and they're not trained!
      • Why would they have it built up? They clearly don't or everyone in Pleasantville would look like the fetishy parts of deviantart.
• What good is it for Jennifer to go to college in the Pleasantville universe? It's not like it'll change her (presumably shitty) real-world grades, nor will her Pleasantville degree be honored by real-world employers. Does she plan on staying in Pleasantville forever?
  • She could just be going to college because she wants to learn. Her big color changing moment is when she chooses to stay home with a book rather than go out with Skip, because reading is fun and learning is its own reward.
  • Besides, as discussed above, with Year Inside, Hour Outside, in several days of real-life time she would return with all the knowledge of a post-graduate. Then she'd just take an external degree in the real-life analogue of the institution she'd gone to in Pleasantville.
    • Except her knowledge would be a half-century out of date.
    • Well only some of it, she'd miss out on recent developments and all her history would be out of wack from the 50's inaccuracies, but most of her math and science would be the same, English too.
  • She'll have learned how to buckle down and study, and she'll have matured, making mistakes and learning from them. Those mistakes won't affect her real life and she'll still be the wiser for them. And yes, she'll have learned a lot - psychology, medicine, geography, math and numerous science majors still have a lot of information that is used today. Not to mention her history is only missing 50 years - American history has been around for a lot longer than 50 years and hasn't changed a lot in how it's taught. Alternatively if she decides to throw it all away and party constantly, she'll have it out of her system by the time she gets back.
• How do they know what colors are if everything is monochrome? Also, how do they not know of sex if they had children?
  • Taking into account that Pleasantville is a show, you could think that it poofed into existence with all of them in their pre-defined positions, and not knowing anything else than they need to make their sitcom.
  • When things start colorizing, a background character mentions seeing something that was "red red." I got the impression that while characters are aware that everything's in black & white, the conceit that it was black & white versions of colors was kept in place.
    • This is also seen at the town meeting once the issue starts getting more urgent. One woman accuses a man's door of being "blue". His response is "its always been blue!" so they've always known the color things were, but now they can actually see it.
  • Pleasantville parodies older TV shows, and one aspect of this parody is that they never address things like sex, or even allude to it. Shoot, in the 1950's, married couples on TV couldn't even share a bed.
• So, why were there no fires in Pleasantville before David and Jennifer showed up? Surely they enjoyed restful evenings next to the fireplace back then.
  • Yes, but they never got out of the fireplace. Nothing "bad" happens in Pleasantville. That's sort of the whole premise of the setting.
    • I was just about to add that I remembered that they had fire pretty much under control. After all, their food was cooked.