Pleasantville = liberal?
Check out this blog post. Is Pleasantville the most liberal movie ever?
http://reelchange.net/2012/04/22/the-most-liberal-movie-of-all-time-pleasantville/
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yes, but only if you define "conservatism" to mean xenophobic, jingoist, intolerant fear and hatred of anything that isn't just like you
shareThat's pretty much what social conservatism is.
"So no need to call others a dumbass, you hypocritical dumbass."
That's pretty much what social conservatism is.
Amen
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"Why you gotta be so mean?"
-Taylor Swift share
Ah. Such tolerance. That lets people know you really don't know what conservatism is. Conservatism is about individual liberty and personal responsibility rather than blindly believing what government tells you. Among a zillion different other things. I bet you also think Abe Lincoln was a Democrat.
sharecarrie_713 do you speak only in republican buzz words? Because everything you just wrote is basically nonsense.
sharePersonal liberty huh? And you mention Lincoln who is the only President to suspend Habeas Corpus. No, Lincoln would not be a Republican today. He was a progressive after all.
shareNo, Lincoln would not be a Republican today. He was a progressive after all.
Agreed. Democrats are pretty hypocritical and cynical about race. Typical Lincoln.
He was a progressive after all.
And gay. Like there's a difference.
https://www.google.com/#q=abraham+lincoln+gay] share
[Citations Needed]
Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and Reconstruction for some places or types of cases.[46][47] During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt suspended habeas corpus. Following the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush attempted to place Guantanamo Bay detainees outside of the jurisdiction of habeas corpus, but the Supreme Court of the United States overturned this action in Boumediene v. Bush.
Social Conservatism is literally none of those things. And Lincoln was a leader of the Union. So yes, now he would have been a democrat.
shareRight, because YOU don't have individual liberty unless you take away other people's liberty, destroy the environment, control women, oppress minorities, censor opposing political views, & pay your employees starvation wages.
shareConservatism is about individual liberty and personal responsibility rather than blindly believing what government tells you.
Ah ... no! That is not even remotely close to a definition of conservatism. Evidently it's YOU who really doesn't understand what conservatism is. If you want to be a proponent of conservatism that's fine - each to their own - but you should at least find out what it is before you become one...
We're from the planet Duplon. We are here to destroy you.share
In today's world he would be. So would Eisenhower, who was a liberal republican. Those are as rare today as hens teeth. Democrats used to be more conservative and Republicans used to be more liberal. The change started around 1964 when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
shareHilarious that you can get away with saying this and call conservatives bigots.
Communism was just a Red herring!
I guess it can't be the most liberal movie then, because "hatred of anything that isn't just like you" is the liberal mantra.
shareThat's funny, because homophobia, racism and sexism are all conservative ideas.
sharethat must be why conservative parts of America are such culturally diverse, immigrant-friendly places where people love to tell stories about their overseas vacations, and a typical Saturday night involves a non-English language movie, a Lebanese or Pakistani restaurant, and a café where multi-ethnic groups of friends gather to sip cappuccino whilst questioning the veracity of fundamentalist Christian dogma
Czech(oslovak) Cinema: http://www.imdb.com/list/7Fxr9DriTes/
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Yes...10 years of living in a very conservative part of Arizona, two years living in logging country in the pacific northwest, and extensive travel throughout much of the continental US
I'm quite familiar with conservative America
He was so crooked, he could eat soup with a corkscrew.
[deleted]
But that is American Conservatism
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that's a common form of American Conservatism anyway
there are conservative Americans who actually know what "conservative" means, and believe in that general ideology, which is mostly about minimizing the cost of government, eliminating unnecessary government intrusion into citizens' lives, and avoiding military engagement as much as reasonably possible
but we don't hear from that kind of conservative nearly as often as we hear from Americans who use "conservative" as a brand name meant to represent whatever it is they happen to think at any given time, which lately tends to be mostly about social control, culture clashes, and class warfare
Czech(oslovak) Cinema: http://www.imdb.com/list/7Fxr9DriTes/
Well that's the extreme, but yeah, pretty much. Historically, that's the mentality to which unchecked conservatism and right-wing thinking leads. That being said, I think the film's greatest flaw was its own bias. I have no sympathy for intolerance or any "ism" that produces it, but a very simple and legitimate argument remains at the core of this film: Yes, they were ignorant. No, they had no sense of the bigger world around them or their place in it. But… they were happy. And happiness, for those who have lost it, remains the most precious commodity in human existence. "Pleasantville" asserts that more colors -- that is to say, more excitement, more life, more emotion, more freedom, et cetera -- is something that is worth sacrificing a little happiness for. I could easily disagree. What's the point in all those colors if we can't stay away from each other's throats all the time? I'll take a happy, black-and-white, ignorant world over an enlightened world of misery and suffering any day. Of course, as a depressed individual, this attitude is a result of my own emphasis on personal happiness. After all, we all long for the things we've lost. I acknowledge, however, that for those who are conventionally "happy", but spiritually unfulfilled in a dull, monochromatic existence, the opposite argument could easily be made. There's no right or wrong answer here. And that's why I say that "Pleasantville" was a disappointment in this regard. It was a clever, entertaining, thematically profound film with far more strengths than weaknesses, but ultimately it's own liberal prejudices kept it from addressing an important issue with the objectivity and honesty that such an issue demands. The movie's final statement seems to be, "Okay, we don't know where we're going anymore -- freedom means uncertainty -- but that freedom, and therefore that uncertainty, are paramount to our spiritual wellbeing as individuals. Ultimately, they have to be prioritized over provincial issues like personal happiness." Well, I, for one, don't need that freedom. I need a modicum of tranquility, some comfort, and a basic peace of mind, and I will gladly sacrifice all the colors in my life to get it. I can make this statement because I've experienced both ends of the spectrum, and I can speak from my own experience (and only my own experience, to be fair) that uncertainty, doubt, and misery are always worse, no matter how colorful they are. People who feel otherwise generally tend to be people who haven't yet experienced the full power of uncertainty, doubt, and misery. But I digress. My point, in fact, is that there's an argument to be made both ways. A legitimate argument. And "Pleasantville", instead of posing a dialectic on these very questions and issues, and exploring both sides of the argument without offering a definitive solution or "right answer", ultimately does nothing more or less than states an opinion. This was disappointing for me, given the foundation and premise of a film with so much thematic potential. It is certainly a liberal film. I like a film to be more concerned with exploring truth, and less concerned with professing specific ideologies, be they liberal, conservative, right-wing, left-wing, communist, socialist, or Marxist. Human thought runs deeper than any ideological platform, and to limit a film's ideas to the advocation of such an ideology is therefore to limit its depth, and therefore its impact, and therefore its value. I'm being critical, I know. "Pleasantville", believe it or not, is a film I really like. In the world of post-1980 American cinema, this was one of the most refreshing films I've seen in a very long time. It's quite a good film. And I suppose it's because of that fact that I wanted it to be so much more. I wanted it to be, well, perfect. Then again, both history and "Pleasantville" speak to us the same fundamental truth: Perfection is tyrannical and fascistic by nature.
shareThis film is about speaking out against censoring or refuting people who want to repress language or innocent actions in any way. In the 50's, yes, they were conservatives, but now, on college campuses in the US and Britain, it is the far left Liberal people who are the antagonists. This film is critical of a viewpoint, not a class or political party.
It says that EVERYONE has this ability to emote and be free inside of them, which means that everyone has the potential to deny others their rights, and these repressive morons can equally be on the left or right.
Anyone who attempts to deny someone else their rights isn't actually a liberal, no matter what they claim they are. A Liberal by definition, is one thing. Many folks who claim to be Liberal are something else entirely.
While it was ultimately about several different things, this film largely was about the Liberation of human passion, something that was suppressed in previous decades and centuries. "Liberty" means "freedom." The people in color were liberated. The ones in grey were conforming and simpleminded and willing to sacrifice freedom for totalitarian, stifling structure and order.
Despite this, it also was about a few other things, all of which overlap or intertwine together in some way or another. The most glaring part was when the girl had the protagonist in the field look over at an apple on a tree. She went to pluck the fruit, brought back to him and had him take a bite. Later on, the elderly wizard with the magic remote reminded the protagonist of this moment and threw it back in his face, as if he had taken a bite of a forbidden fruit of some sort. Sound familiar..?
The people in grey and their entire ways of thinking and repressing themselves were identical to that of religious peoples'. The colored folks and the fact that the modernized freedoms of passion that they were one-by-one falling into, were identical to that of nonreligious people, and the fact that, sooner or later, all religions become outdated, and more and more people in each generation are discovering that, which leads to more and more freedoms in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
I'm not a control freak, I just like things my way
I think that it's a thing of beauty that you, a viewer who understood and appreciated the message of the movie, have an avatar in color, but the person you are responding to, who doesn't get it, has an avatar in black and white. It fits perfectly.
share"No Coloreds allowed" That lines sums up this liberal trash of a movie.
shareThat now describes the left, interestingly enough.
shareIT IS NOT INTERESTING...AT ALL.
shareTHAT'S BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT A THINKER. YOU'RE A FOLLOWER. YOU ARE EXACTLY LIKE THE MAYOR OF PLEASANTVILLE. AND YOU KNOW THIS. AND IT MAKES YOU ANGRY. THAT'S WHY YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPS. SOTHEREEMOJI
share[–] desertsinger 11 years ago
I disagree. It is a movie about awakening in various forms. Mental, physical, spiritual. Liberalism and conservatism have nothing to do with any of those ideas. It's a movie about moving forward in life and all aspects of life. We can't, as an actual society, stick to the same old same old things. We grow, mature, see things differently. If we don't, we become stagnate and we lose the chance to learn more about ourselves and the world around us.
YOUR INTERPRETATION IS WRONG AND STUPID.
If you think the movie is taking aim at middle America's past or "conservatism", you are precisely the people the movie takes aim at. There never was an innocent 1950s middle America. That's the point of the film. Look beneath the surface of Reagan's rosey recollections and find the racism, xenophobia and rape culture that was there. And expose the hidden values of those who want to return to those fictional days. That's was the message.
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