#21: Pleasantville — Pleasantville (film, Gary Ross, 1998)
Two 1990s teenagers are transported into a 1950s black-and-white television show and discover that Pleasantville’s perfection is maintained through the complete suppression of anything genuine: authentic emotion, sexuality, intellectual curiosity, and creative ambition all manifest as color, which the town’s establishment treats as a civic emergency. The film is a comedy, mostly, but the sequence in which the town council debates legislation against color is filmed as a historical echo specific enough to make the comedy very uncomfortable.
