A Pleasant Change

I remember watching clips from Pleasantville in class and was rather intrigued by it's concept. Without having seen the entire film before, I was at first confused about the black and white that was sometimes color. It didn't take long to convince myself that I wasn't going crazy therefore, the color had to hold some sort of significance. Thankfully, I was right, but I still didn’t fully understand until I checked out the full movie from the media library and watched it with my roommate.

At first, the movie seemed to be promoting sex, especially to teenagers. Even the synopsis on the back mentioned ‘what would happen if 90s culture met 50s culture?’ That makes a great point—our culture doesn’t have a problem with this issue. To Christians, it’s still black and white (pun intended) because the Bible mentions it countless times.

An interesting observation I draw about that fact: Why would Paul write to the early Christians about sexual purity if they weren’t struggling with it? Don’t you think that if they had been sexually pure that he would have spent his time focusing on some other problem area? This means that it’s always been a problem humanity has struggled with, even during the 50s.

Of course, towards the end of the movie we see that color is “earned” when people step out of their comfort zones and push against the old way of doing things. This idea can be both good and bad, which is why it’s interesting to talk about. In the example I have already referred to, changing a culture to think that a morally wrong action is socially appropriate is a bad form of change. Changing something from right to wrong seems completely insane, but it happens.

There are many good example of change, and this message is generally advertised because things in life change constantly and we need to accept that fact of life rather than wish everything was back the way it was. Personally, I tend to like changes in life better than other people, but it still can be hard to accept change that doesn’t seem to go my way, and that’s a matter of selfishness.

There is so much that could be said about this subject that I don’t know how to continue, so I’ll just end with that