The Characters Of Pleasantville And Pleasantville

The 1998 film, Pleasantville, written, produced, and directed by Gary Ross is a “swell” example of the three perspectives of sociology. Two 1990 teenagers get trapped in the blue-sky world of a 1950’s sitcom. While spending time with the people in the small town of Pleasantville, the teens begin to drastically change the the bland ways of the townspeople and alter their world completely. Throughout these events, viewers can find examples of the functionalist perspective, interactionist perspective, and conflict perspective.

When discussing American culture, the influence and interplay of film cannot be understated. We are a nation consumed with the media. Today, the movie business is one of the highest grossing businesses there is. We hold movie stars up as though they are super human. We closely watch their style, their dating lives, their party habits, and even their favorite restaurants, among many other things. We rely on movies to lift us up, teach us about other cultures and time periods, and even to teach us about our own culture. Often, movies reflect the time period they are filmed in and directly reflect the social tensions of that time and the film noir genre is no different. One of the most famous film noir movies out there, The Maltese Falcon,

"Happiness is not something you postpone for the future, it is something you design for the present." (Jim Rohn) The dystopian genre includes stories where they try to maintain the "perfect" society. This is going to be a comparison of two different dystopian stories. The first one is the movie known as the “ The Truman show". This movie is about a man named Truman whose life is a TV show. All of his friends and family are actors or actresses. During the movie Truman slowly catches on to the fact that he's living in the alternate reality. The book we are reading is called "Fahrenheit 451." it is about a man named Montag who is a fireman. Notice he is called a fireman rather than a firefighter? That is because rather than putting fires out he starts them. In this society people get so offended by everything that people have outlawed books so they have to be burned by fireman. The book is about Montag's experiences as a fireman and his struggles with society. Although they there are minor differences, the similarities between "the Truman show," and "Fahrenheit 451," Leave both main characters feeling helpless, confused, and lonely.

The movie ‘‘Pleasantville’’, written, produced and directed by Gary Ross, approaches a period in America’s history which subsequent generations idealise as a better and more stable society. He portrays this time period of the 1950s as a time when people and life were less complicated; a time when everyone knew their place in society. However, as the film ironically shows, this was a time when people were more ignorant, racist and most certainly sexist. Ross demolishes this illusion of the great 1950s American society by showing how its defects are gradually changed from black and white to colour. Ross shows that ‘change is inevitable’ once a catalyst for change is added to the ordered life of “Pleasantville”. Once David and Mary-Sue begin

Ray Bradbury is a great foreshadower. His work is generally fantasy and horror and he it is exquisite. Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 back in 1953 and it still connects with the conflicts of today. The way society was in Fahrenheit 451 is similar to how it is today. The society is arrogant and selfish. No one cares about anyone or anything besides the TVs and technology. In Fahrenheit 451, the lack of physical communication and relationships between people due to the development of technology sabotages society before they know it.

Film Noir was extremely trendy during the 1940’s. People were captivated by the way it expresses a mood of disillusionment and indistinctness between good and evil. Film Noir have key elements; crime, mystery, an anti-hero, femme fatale, and chiaroscuro lighting and camera angles. The Maltese Falcon is an example of film noir because of the usage of camera angles, lighting and ominous settings, as well as sinister characters as Samuel Spade, the anti-hero on a quest for meaning, who encounters the death of his partner but does not show any signs of remorse but instead for his greed for riches.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel published in 1950. The novel takes place in the futuristic American society where technology dominates in people’s lives. This is an era of prosperous technological advances, but people’s life quality is bad. The people live their life without knowledge, wisdom, and self-awareness. People are not critical because all books are banned, and illegal. The people think the same thing and they look alike also. The government uses propaganda to manipulate the people. Fear is the effective method the government uses to control them.

“Five hundred men moved silently toward the gates that would shut out life and hope for most of them forever. Quarter of a mile from the railroad we came into a massive palisade with great squared logs standing upright in the ground. Fires blazed up and showed us a section of these and two massive wooden gates with heavy iron hinges and bolts. They swung open as we stood there and we passed through into the space beyond. We were at Andersonville.” – Private John McElroy.

Fahrenheit 451 is not the only society with a government that uses censorship. The movie, Pleasantville, does the same. Mayor Bob gets very angry when the people in town start to change. After some turn colors, he expresses how he feels through a letter which was a set of rules instructing everyone on how they should act. It informs people of what music they should listen to, and even what paint colors they should use. Since Bob holds the position as mayor, he

In the novel ‘The Giver’ written by Lois Lowry, and the film, ‘Pleasantville’ by Gary Ross, there are many similarities and differences in the themes and ideas explored. These are represented in the novel and movie’s main themes, such as freedom and choice, colour and the description of utopian and dystopian societies.

Popular culture is the artistic and creative expression in entertainment and style that appeals to society as whole. It includes music, film, sports, painting, sculpture, and even photography. It can be diffused in many ways, but one of the most powerful and effective ways to address society is through film and television. Broadcasting, radio and television are the primary means by which information and entertainment are delivered to the public in virtually every nation around the world, and they have become a crucial instrument of modern social and political organization. Most of today’s television programming genres are derived from earlier media such as stage, cinema and radio. In the area of comedy, sitcoms have proven

The Fahrenheit 451 is a novel published in 1953 by a writer known as Ray Bradbury. The book is regarded as one of the writer’s best works as a novelist. In the book, the writer presents a future American society where there is no freedom or democracy. This is shown through an act where books are outlawed and in a case where they are found they are to be burnt by ‘firemen’. The society is obsessed with the mass media and driving fast cars. The main characters in the book are Guy Montag, Clarisse McClellan, and Beatty. The genre of the book is based on science fiction.

A lot can happen in sixty years, and America is no exception to that statement. It is arguable that one of the biggest differences regarding America in the 1950s to modern America is culture. The movie “Pleasantville” reflects much of these cultural differences from 1950s to today in a creative and thoughtful way. It also provides much useful insight into the cultural conflicts America faced throughout the 1950s. The many differences between 1950s culture and modern day culture, my own opinion which time period I would personally choose to live in and cultural conflicts of the 1950s will be discussed throughout this essay.

We sit on the subways and we ride on the busses, we drown the outside world with our headphones and our television sets, and we walk on the sidewalks brushing past one another just enough to avoid physical contact so that we can continue on our "merry" way towards our next destination. As a society, we beeline our way through life, weaving between moments of rendezvous and accidental concurrence, and we surround ourselves with instruments of interference in an attempt to pull ourselves out of the day-to-day life. As they say, art imitates life, and in a very sadistic way Fahrenheit 451 imitates what we are, and what we could become. Fahrenheit depicts a future where the common people surround themselves

Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury, is a unique book that takes place in a dystopian future in which Guy Montag’s life has turned utterly upside down. His peculiar neighbor named Clarisse, who narrated his stories about the peaceful past which opened his eyes to a twisted present where people pay more attention to TV Families and not their actual families. Where people continue their senseless, ignorant lives blind to the fact that men like Montag who burn history to ashes, jail readers and destroy their houses all in effort to make everyone “equal” and “happy”. When Montag abandons a life changing mess by his house through burning Captain Beatty and the mechanical hound, he escapes by taking advice from Faber, an old man who was