The Pleasantville Lie

Lynn Hunt, American Historical Association, University of California 2002, is best known for her 2007 work Inventing Human Rights, a cornerstone for academic work on the history of human interaction. This landmark work tracked the developing concept of human empathy across European history, especially the function that art and literature played in allowing humans to recognize the interiority and dignity of other humans who were different from them.

But in 2002, she shared in the May Issue of Perspectives on History her observations in “presentism,” and the uphill battle of even getting students to engage with history at all,

Gladiator (2000)

“Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior; the Greeks had slavery, even David Hume was a racist, and European women endorsed imperial ventures. Our forebears constantly fail to measure up to our present-day standards. This is not to say that any of these findings are irrelevant or that we should endorse an entirely relativist point of view. It is to say that we must question the stance of temporal superiority that is implicit in the Western (and now probably worldwide) historical discipline.”

         Hunt was speaking about how modern students may choose to approach history with a capital H—ancient societies and whatnot. She was pushing back against people who don’t think we should study Shakespeare or Ancient Rome because of their confining gender roles and the like.

    But this impulse can also color how we view time periods that are far more recent.

iZombie (2015)

    In modern pop culture, America of the 1950s is generally shorthand for a kind of bland yet imposing draping of conformity. And a lot of this was directly informed by the stories that fed America during a period when televised storytelling was finding it for the first time. Indeed, the very purpose of the rising genre of family sitcoms was to serve the population with pleasant visions that reassured them that all was well in smalltown America. 

Alan Brinkley wrote for The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, "The 1950s were good times for middle-class white Americans who were content with their era. But it was not a good time for dissent ... the fifties seemed haunted because the public culture of the time was so resolutely self-congratulatory and so stifling to alternative views; because the problems and injustices and dislocations of the time often seemed hidden under a haze of bright, cheerful, affirmative images of a prosperous middle-class nation happily embarked on a new period in its history—enthroned as the richest and most powerful nation in the world."

And so it becomes easy for a film like Pleasantville, released in 1998 and directed by Gary Ross, to use this period of American history as the target for an easy takedown of banality, while congratulating its target audience of 90s teenagers for their special brand of rebellion.

         The film sees two teenagers who are magically transported in a 1950s sitcom, where their very presence disrupts the bland uniformity that this universe depends on. Robert Beuka says in his book SuburbiaNation, "Pleasantville is a morality tale concerning the values of contemporary suburban America by holding that social landscape up against both the Utopian and the dystopian visions of suburbia that emerged in the 1950s."

    The movie wasn’t actually very successful upon first release, at least not commercially. It scored three Oscar nominations and helped springboard the careers of budding stars like Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon, whose most famous roles were still ahead of them. And it also found renewed appreciation through streaming and home media. Earlier this year, Slash Film remarked that

    “[Director] Gary Ross is clearly telling a story of how America's obsession with 1950s post-war idealism (a notion that often surges up in right-wing circles) is misplaced. It's nostalgia for a time when repression and passionless lives were the words of the day …

    "‘Pleasantville,’ by no means, says that everything was fixed by the 1960s, but it does chide audiences for idealizing the 1950s, and urges people to grow out of it. Just as black-and-white TV gave way to color, so too should black-and-white thinking become more vivid.”

And this all goes to show that not every movie that gets a reappraisal actually deserves one.

I don't have to sit with this movie for long for its foundational disparities to dig at me. The movie, for example, links the black-and-white photography of earlier media with an oversimplified worldview that surely America of a certain generation must have embraced. The forward momentum of the movie is the victory lap of seeing these two 90s kids bringing literal color into a black and white universe. They are literally teaching this universe how to embrace a world that is full of contradictions and complexities.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

    But I might wonder, for example, what the team behind this film would make of the film noir movement that was absolutely popular during this exact same period of American history. Those movies with their dire endings and morally compromised protagonists were also famously rendered in black and white.

    And mind you, film was a little more willing to wade through challenging waters than television was during this time. From Here to Eternity, for example, came out in 1953. Still, for a film that prides itself on rejecting a binary worldview of simple rights and wrongs, the conclusions that Pleasantville lands on could not be more reductive or basic. 

The movie’s attitude toward the 1950s and the television programs of the day sort of mirrors the attitudes that I occasionally see displayed toward something like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. But that movie and its discourse are all built around a very specific controversy which requires some unpacking. The grumbling around something like The Donna Reed Show isn’t so much about a specific narrative event (i.e. dudes kidnapping the local girls to be their brides) so much as the image it sustains. “What a backwards show it is, telling us that all women should just be happy as housewives while the men go out into the world to be doctors.” 

    And Pleasantville wasn’t commercially successful enough during its day for me to confidently say that it was the originator of contemporary presentist attitudes so much as a summary of all that. The rising generation will probably always be keen to the idea that the world in all its rigidity has just been waiting for their special brand of rebellion to thaw it out. That was true in the ‘90s. That’s true here in the 2020s.

But in trying to understand what it means to live in a world of multi-culturalism, even those "backwards" television programs of the black and white era are actually much more useful than Gary Ross’ film would want you to think.

 

 

Pleasantville Explained

The film sees two siblings living in the then contemporary 1990s, David and Jennifer. David loves an old television program called “Pleasantville,” an old series from the ‘50s following the goings-on of a smalltown community and a nuclear family, and Jennifer thinks he is a dork for loving this show. But a mysterious cable repairman who shares David’s affinity for this show offers him a special remote, which David and Jennifer discover launches them into the universe of Pleasantville. 

David cautions Jennifer not to do anything that will upset the natural order of this universe, but Jennifer wastes no time doing just that. After she has sex with one of the basketball stars, color starts appearing in this black and white world. And what’s more, people start questioning the status quo and asking David about what’s outside the town.

As Jennifer and David continue to make waves, more and more of Pleasantville starts to be filled with color. But the town’s powerholders start to rebel against this new wave of change. David and Jennifer help the town stand up for itself, and the city council relents while Pleasantville embraces a world of color. While Jennifer elects to stay in Pleasantville, David returns home where he turns off the Pleasantville marathon and he has a grown-up conversation with his mother about how there is no such thing as a “perfect life.”

The conversation around the movie spurred a lot of thoughts from me, but the movie itself … isn’t really that interesting to talk about. I had over half of my total goal wordcount met before I did any focused viewings of the film during development of this essay. I had spent most of that reserve writing about the film’s surrounding territory—the programs the film was referencing, as well as the social context for both those shows as well as Pleasantville.

There just isn’t a lot to dig into with this film because there’s no subtext. The movie’s just so darn proud of itself that it leaves nothing unsaid, nothing for the audience to discover. Neither is there any of the catharsis of something like WandaVision, which has many comparable elements, in large part because neither David nor Jennifer are remarkably deep characters.

When I tried describing this movie to my editing circle, who had not seen the film, they asked me something a lot like, "So, is the whole movie just about sex then?" And I had to answer, "Not technically ... but basically, yes."

And by that I mean that, yes, the community in this movie develops a larger sense of independence as they start to display questioning behavior when they go against the tides of power, and especially as they develop a curiosity for things like books. This a large part of David's arc.

    But the first time we literally see color in this world is after Jennifer has sex with Skip. And this intercourse doesn’t really coincide with any kind of personal growth for either of them. She’s not helping him learn to not always ask for mother’s approval or anything. She's not learning to go for a more sensitive kind of guy. This does not portend some larger development for either character. It's just a ritual one has to undergo in order to level-up into a thinking human being. Carnal knowledge is a prerequisite for all other forms of knowledge.

For David, part of his instinct for reversion comes from wanting to retreat from the consequences facing an uncertain adulthood, and another part of this is him wanting to bury his feelings about his parents’ divorce. There’s a budding conversation about him learning to face his fears and not just withdraw into television as a coping mechanism. But it goes about communicating this arc in the most condescending way possible.     

    The movie positions David as this Pleasantville devotee, as though he is representing some underserved segment of 90s teens who were super into The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. This doesn’t really connect with what we know about the cycle of teenage angst, or how eager teens even are to watch anything made before 1977.

The conceit of Pleasantville would work at least a little better if it were somehow an adult character who was being shot back into that time zone. Perhaps the mother character we see at the beginning of the film wishing her home life was as perfect as The Donna Reed Show only to discover something about the restrictions of the time. Adults, particularly adults who have retired to the small town scene to settle down and raise their kids, are more fossilized in their worldviews and would have believably put up resistance to the societal change that the movie calls for. But the movie zeroes in on the interests of the teens because that is the audience it is trying to earn favor with.

         But the movie fails as any kind of commentary because its reflection of both 1950s America and old television is not totally honest--in a way that can't really be just explained away by "parody."

Parody

    The irony of parody is that more often than not, you have to love the thing you are lampooning in order to make any meaningful comment on it. If you start from a place of believing that the people who love X-thing just don’t know any better, well, you stand the honest chance of your parody failing because you haven’t afforded it the necessary consideration to understand the mechanics. (It’s for this reason, for example, that I probably couldn’t write a very effective parody of something like Armageddon. Instead, I just expose how that movie is an utter failure next to something like Guardians of the Galaxy.)

    And what I mean by that is that, yes, something like Shrek, which dumps over the Disney fairy-tale image, can make buckets of money, win the first ever Oscar for Best Animated Picture, spawn a network of franchise installments including a stage musical, and burrow itself into the caverns of meme culture. Shrek can be very successful. A lot of people like Shrek. But telling your audience something they're already wanting to believe isn't necessarily the same as adding to the conversation.

    Without even investigating the assumptions it makes about the territory it's reporting on, calling Shrek's parody some kind of victory over Disney fairy-tales, which were very much drowning at this time, ignores a lot of factors. Cultural gatekeepers had been suspicious of the Disney mythology for a while, and the Walt Disney company faced certain creative upheavals in the mid-90s which affected their creative output. Among those was the expulsion of co-chair, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who would go on to form Dreamworks Animation. You know? The studio that would go on to make Shrek in the first place? In this case, the parody did not cause or precipitate Disney fairy-tales falling out of fashion. The stumbling came first, and then came Shrek.

    But I'm not here to trash Shrek today. I'll even throw Dreamworks a bone by saying that Megamind is a hilarious charade of superhero mythology that reveals something about the way the world types people as heroes or villains, winners or losers. It trampolines off of a lot of shorthand from stories like Superman, but its directives have very little to do with exposing some system error in the genre. That movie didn't land with nearly as much acclaim as Shrek did nearly ten years earlier, but because the film is so brilliant, that didn't stop it from finding its own following in the years after. When you love something, you’ve spent enough time with it to know which parts you can exaggerate in order to say something clever and amusing.

         Parodies are allowed to invoke a certain measure of distortion and absurdity. I have some of the same experiences, for example, watching Blazing Saddles that I have watching Pleasantville. That movie is a great big send-up to old westerns which imagines a settlement in the old west where a Black man is made sheriff as a joke only to become just what this town needs.

    I’ve heard some people give credit to the movie killing the genre as a whole by exposing its systemic failings (ignoring how westerns were already running low on fuel long before Mel Brooks touched the genre, see: my essay on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). But the movie doesn’t do much to comment on, say, the treatment of Native Americans in the genre, which is a much more central item of conversation than its treatment of Black characters specifically. Really, the western backdrop is almost incidental, except perhaps to provide the film some background to make a general comment about American history neglecting Black heroes. It plays in execution much more like Mel Brooks enjoyed the absurdity of getting a bunch of dudes in cowboy drag to pass gas uncontrollably around a campfire.

         Yet when the film does comment on the genre it is spoofing, it actually finds strong links to its source material—much moreso than Pleasantville does with its subject. One of the best jokes in the film is Gene Wilder, legendary gunmen, growing so bored with winning every draw that he met his match in a six-year-old whom he underestimated. And so the movie winds up being a lot more coherent and a lot more enjoyable.

         Enchanted does many of the same things. Disney Princess courtships lasting literally a day or two is born more out of pop culture-ism than anything actually in old Disney movies. Cinderella 1950 never actually comments on how much time elapses between our heroine reclaiming her slipper and walking down the aisle with Prince Charming.

    Still, we know what ideas Enchanted is invoking by having Edward declare that he and Giselle shall married be right after she drops from the sky onto his horse. And it uses that scenario to say something useful about opening your heart to fairy-tales and faith. And where Shrek was sort of following a trend that was already in place, Enchanted laid the groundwork for the Disney fairy-tale making a comeback in the approaching decade, as I explored in my tribute to Tangled. Both Enchanted and Blazing Saddles indulge in caricature and exaggeration. But you can still absolutely see the connections to the genres they are referencing. The same can’t be said for Pleasantville.

The entire movie springboards off a specific observation that has basis in truth: family comedies were all the rage during the early days of television, and these were essential tools in purveying a specific idea that America wanted to believe about itself and the world during this time. Nina C. Leibman observed in Living Room Lectures,

“The successful family was portrayed as a group which understood the importance of gender-proscribed behaviors and practices, which saw itself as a self-operating unit, and which mirrored societal norms and promoted pro-social behavior.

“In a way, then, the entire construct of 1950’s domestic melodrama functioned as regulatory ideal. Within the text the family represented the ultimate in rule-making and legitimate expectations of obedience. Outside the text, the regulatory elements of the film and television industries developed and reinforced rules which ensured that the fictional constructs of American life supported the capitalist status quo.”

The trouble is, Pleasantville filters this through so many half-truths and self-affirming biases that it winds up revealing more about the state of America in the 1990s than it did during the times that these programs were being aired. The movie’s comments on social conformity and rigid morality wind up having little to do with the motivations of post-WWII’s obsession with the suburban ideal. Like, imagine in 2057, some studio drops a movie parodying 2010s workplace comedies where the main character is asking all these millennials why they use mental health as an excuse to sabotage their workplace and alienate their parents, and you can imagine how unhelpful something like Pleasantville winds up being.

 

The 50s vs the 90s

    A fan letter addressed to Barbara Billingsley, who played the family matriarch in Leave it to Beaver, described, “Our family, consisting of our eight children, my wife, and myself consistently watch this interesting and thought stimulating program. As you may well know, there are fewer programs each season that are suitable for under-teens and young teenage families. Your ‘Leave it to Beaver’ program is not only suitable for family viewing, but it is refreshingly pleasant to watch … [You] are to be congratulated … in helping continue the high moral tone that can be accomplished in telecasting”

         So, these programs were obviously key in affirming a very placid presentation of American life at this time, which is exactly what much of America wanted. Thus, it becomes easy for a text like Pleasantville to throw darts at this era of television for imposing a vision where everything falls along a preordained design. In Pleasantville, both the black and white style and the suburban setting are meant to connote innocence, a people who just don’t know any different. And this is what gives Reese Witherspoon the confidence and authority to impose her own kind of morality onto a blank landscape. 

The film takes it for granted, for example, that for the characters in this universe, it’s not just that they don’t talk about or participate in sex when the camera is on them. They have no sexual education whatsoever. And by that, I literally mean that even the adults in Pleasantville don't know where babies come from. Reese Witherspoon gets to teach her mother about masturbation (doing what every teenager has wanted to do but never been brave enough to do …) as part of her effort to bring color into this world. This has root in the fact that television was subject to many of the same restrictions that movies were under the Hays Code (that thing we talked about when studying From Here to Eternity).

         Even so, if 1950s tv families really don’t know what sex is, then it begs certain questions. Why are you so bothered, Harriet, that Ozzie is entertaining the flirtations of the attractive secretary at the dentist’s office? I know it’s not because you’re worried he’s gonna buy her ice cream.

Let me take a moment and circle some common ground between me and this film: the homecore aesthetic of 1950s America was a facade. It was a draping used to conceal real anxieties under the pretense of wholesomeness.

         But America following WWII was not “innocent,” no matter how hard it tried to convince itself it was. This was an America that had learned what atrocities both it and the world at large were capable of. History Rise described the state of the American consciousness of the time saying,

Oppenheimer (2023)

"The atomic anxiety of the 1950s represented more than just fear of a potential enemy attack. It reflected a fundamental shift in how Americans understood their place in the world and their vulnerability to forces beyond their control. For the first time in the nation’s history, the continental United States faced the realistic possibility of devastating attack from a foreign power. This realization shattered the sense of geographic invulnerability that had long characterized American strategic thinking and forced citizens to confront uncomfortable questions about survival, preparedness, and the future of civilization itself."

         Pleasantville comes desperately close to arriving at these very conclusions—that the devotion to the white picket ideal at the time was a self-generated illusion that kept them from thinking about weightier things. But the film is aggressively averse to expressing anything like sympathy for this time or this people. Nobody has to have a conversation with the town councilmen about how, “Yes, buddy, we’re all scared of the atom bomb, but Louise can be a lawyer if she wants to.”

        The Iron Giant, which came out only a year after Pleasantville and targets a younger audience, pulls off this kind of commentary much better. The film’s 1950s setting captures the spirit of a society that is trying to have a picnic under the shadow of nuclear warfare. The Iron Giant is not only more coherent and more enjoyable as a film, it does a significantly better job at capturing and personifying just how fragile America's sense of security was during this time. The technically dangerous but still benevolent giant is a much better target for the hostility of 1950s’ paranoia than horny teenagers. 

Much of the film’s critique falls on the cyclical nature of television storytelling at the time. There was generally very little variation in the life circumstances of the characters between episodes or seasons. The design of the television format just didn’t lend itself to things changing from week to week because, “What if Marge had an emergency PTA meeting Thursday evening and wasn’t around to see that Mary and Stuart broke up?” The most significant plot developments were basically all spurred by an actor’s contract running out. And the film draws a direct link between that repetitiveness and the conformist standards it is rejecting. In this way, Pleasantville also supposes that the episode arcs of those old shows had no complications or frustrations.

    But really, the chaotic agents were always what made the show interesting, whether that was Lucy Ricardo as the kooky housewife or Beaver as the neighbor kid who couldn’t help but turn every school assignment into a town hall meeting. Each episode saw some minor cataclysm threatening the status quo only for the cast to resolve the issue in some novel way. This said something about the integrity of the family unit being tested–and also the clowns that made this game so fun.

It represents part of the truth that a piece of that devotion to security saw the status quo display a rigid resistance toward anything that might threaten that peace—and these included such things as civil rights and women’s liberation. And this is not to excuse any resistance this time period may have displayed toward things like social progress. But it is essential to understand how that rigidity incubates. The moment you diagnose all human error as just bad programming, you stop looking for the environmental causes of these things in the present landscape--or in yourself.

         Both the 90s and the 50s were stuck in their own kind of stasis, but they emerged out of very different circumstances and covered very different discrepancies. The 1950s was bellied by debilitating anxiety, conditioned by the likes of a Great Depression and two world wars. And so to convince itself that the bad times were all in the past, America baptized itself in imagery that was comforting and reassuring: the suburban ideal and the nuclear family.

    But the era of “Ozzie and Harriet” also saw something like Rebel Without a Cause, which was absolutely embraced by the teens of the day. The kids of the 50s would grow up to reject the traditions of their parents and crack the façade and enforce real change. Real gains were made during this time, but amid the turbulence and noise that comes with revolution, the powerholders responded by feeding the masses all sorts of narratives about the noise and chaos that inevitably emerged when a society tried to enact internal changes. By the end of the ‘70s, America was really exhausted and sort of slid back into lethargy, the missions of the ‘60s only partially completed.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

         Thus, the 1980s tries to wash out the chaos of the decades prior by throwing itself into displays of American invincibility and leisure. And this time period saw another boom of domestic sitcoms reinforcing ideas that all was well in America. We’re largely back to where we were in the 1950s where it is the ambition of white middle-class America to inundate themselves with imagery that reassures them of their security, and this continued into the next decade.

    But where the 1950s represented a sort of anxiety over the intrusion of interest in social issues, the 1980s and 90s saw a society that had contemplated these directives and then rejected them. And in the wake of something like the 2024 U.S. election, one of these time periods feels more interesting to me than the other. 

Home Alone (1990)

         Thus, Pleasantville sees the 1990s lecturing the 1950s about the dangers of squareness, which is sort of like the pot calling the kettle square. It’s hard to give a lot of credit toward this time period because watching basically any 90s media here in the 2020s, you see the framework of an America that hadn’t reckoned with such harsh realities as 9/11, a global shutdown, government sanctioned violence, and so on. From this far out, the 1990s honestly seem a lot more “innocent” than the 1950s ever did.  

         Which wouldn’t be so annoying if the 90s just hadn’t been so darn smug about it all.   

 

Turning on the Black and White TV

         I actually did not grow up on a lot of old television. We filled a lot of car rides with Gilligan’s Island, and my grandparents gave me entry-level exposure to the likes of Scooby-Doo and The Flintstones, but these aren’t really the programs that Pleasantville is referring to. I came to most of the tv classics only in the last few years.

So, my expertise in this is obviously fledgling, but this also means that I’m not particularly nostalgic for these programs. And so my observations here represent my honest response to their strengths and weaknesses. It’s difficult to make broad statements about such a large body of work—literally hundreds of hours of television—but some patterns do rise to the surface.    

   Something like The Donna Reed Show can become a poster for old-fashioned constructs of gender roles. The series features and reaffirms a very nuclear picture of the family structure, with Donna Reed championed as a housewife next to her breadwinner husband and her two dutiful children. This kind of thing also emerged during a time when the powerholders of the day were actively trying to figure out ways to lure women out of the workforce after enjoying more autonomy in the wake of all the men going overseas to fight in the war.

         But I think we’re taking a few things for granted here. Women just have it hard no matter what choice they’re making. Working moms get judged for one reason, stay-at-home moms for another. And there is something to be said, even in the present landscape, for a program that insists that, yes, the day-to-day livings of a housewife were interesting enough to merit a proper television program–that this was something the whole family could be and should be interested in. Lloyd Farley wrote for Collider,      

“The role was a statement by Reed, who hated the fact that female characters were always inadequate, and unable to offer anything of value. She cleverly turned the lowly image of the homemaker into something more — a strong, independent woman who makes the choices for the family, the one who takes charge, a housewife by name but decidedly not by nature.”

         So eight seasons of Donna Reed being a domestic goddess, that was a form of feminism. That was a way of giving visibility to women. There’s an episode in the second season where Donna really takes this to task when a radio show host makes a thoughtless comment about her task load being easy because she is “just a housewife.” After Donna tallies just some of what a housewife is expected to pull off, she gets a nice monologue where she asserts, “I’m just trying to say that every housewife has a personality. We’re not part of a herd. We’re not ‘just housewives’ … Every woman you call ‘just a housewife’ is a nurse, a psychologist, a diplomat, and a philosopher.”

         One very valid observation about the programs of this day is that there was basically no presence of non-white characters. I can’t off the top of my head remember whether or not there’s a single named Black character in the 240 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show.

         But here’s the thing. I could say the exact same thing about Pleasantville, which premiered in a post “Cosby Show” post “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” landscape. The film even overtly references The Civil Rights movement in the way the townsfolk block out certain civil services from “the coloreds,” but the highest billed non-white actor in Pleasantville is Denise Dowse in the role of "health teacher." And so the film only winds up exposing its own lack of conviction or curiosity toward oppressed groups. In the end, this film’s only concern is about white kids getting to have blameless sex whenever they want.

         A lot of these older works had blindspots, sometimes significant ones, but Pleasantville imagines that it’s bibbidi-bobbidi-booing these ideas about progressivism onto a desolate landscape, which isn't giving credit to the subterranean transformations taking place during this time. In addition to something like the deceptively complex politics of The Donna Reed Show, early television also saw things like I Love Lucy, where our title character is married to a Cuban immigrant who speaks in a thick accent and whose heritage is frequently mentioned within the show.

         But the program I was most thinking of as I developed this essay was The Andy Griffith Show. The series follows Sheriff Andy Taylor as he presides over the town of Maybury. The joke is that real crimes are rare in this little dumplin’ of smalltown America. And so, Andy spends most of his time as a kind of steadying hand for the various antics that unfold around the community, or else imparting essential truths to his young son. There are small indicators that the series is set in contemporary times relative to when it first aired, but the cast and crew have detailed that the design and atmosphere of the show was very much meant to invoke pre-WWII America—think of this, if you will, as basically the Stranger Things of black and white television.

The series first aired in 1960, slightly ahead of most of the programs that Pleasantville is ribbing, but the conceit of the series is very, very similar. And this show does have a specific link to Pleasantville in that Don Knotts, who headlined the series alongside Andy Griffith for most of the show, features in the movie as the tv repairman who launches David and Jennifer into Pleasantville (in a cameo that stings almost as much as Jodi Benson and company lending their voice talents to the princess segment in Ralph Breaks the Internet). And moreover, it’s actually the Don Knotts connection that reveals to me the advantage something like The Andy Griffith Show had over the television programs that sprouted up in the wake of Pleasantville.

         Knotts’ character, Barney Fife, is kind of a dum-dum, and most of the show’s antics come from him making a mess through his social awkwardness or wildly misplaced instincts. A typical episode might have Barney accidentally let the bank robbers get away and feel really bad about it. But after Andy gives him a pep talk, Barney head off to intercept the bank robbers in the mountains and provide the exact kind of distraction Andy needs to capture the bad guys after all, proving that even if he is kind of a klutz, his good heart qualifies him to be a genuine protector for the town that he loves.

    The show never really lets Barney overcome his various eccentricities, but again, the nature of television in those days didn’t really let the characters have large character arcs. And despite his hardwired inefficiency, both Andy and the show at large displayed a special interest in letting someone like Barney still maintain a healthy sense of self. Barney always makes enough of a fool out of himself that his community is never asked to dogpile on what is kind of an easy target.

         One episode has Andy and his girlfriend getting stuck in a cave-in, which naturally causes Barney to have a panic and race back to town to start up rescue parties. Andy and his girlfriend actually wind up escaping on their own just fine, but after Andy realizes that Barney has literally rounded up the entire town for the rescue effort, they both sneak back into the cave so they can be there when Barney rescues them so he won’t look like a fool in front of the entire town. The Andy Griffith Show recognizes that the Barneys of the world are still deserving of basic human kindness and respect. It recognizes that in a world of men with ill-designs, there are a lot worse things you can be than a benevolent idiot. And who knows? His awkwardness might also portend ingenuity. 

        Barney Fife was an early ancestor to a type of character that continues to emerge in popular television decades later. A good modern analogue might be someone like Charles from Brooklyn 99. He and series lead, Jake, have a similar kind of relationship—they are also best friends who happen to be law enforcement. But where both Charles and Barney are kinda dopes whose incompetence forms the bedrock of much of the show’s comedy, Charles is also played as being largely oblivious to how his peers perceive him.

Unlike Barney, Charles does not really understand when everyone else is laughing at him. He doesn’t understand that the joke is on him when he smugly tells his coworkers, “Tell that to me in an hour when I’ve had sex 28 times.” Even in a cast full of clowns, the only main characters in the show who are shown to be less self-aware than him are desk potatoes, Hitchcock and Scully, who are not framed as aspirational. Charles’ benevolence connotes a sort of maladaptation to the adult systems that everyone else is integrated into.

And this is not to discount all that is clever or forward-thinking about something like Brooklyn 99, but I also think it is worth reflecting on what it says about a society where a slacker like Jake can be seen as ahead of the curve while someone like Charles has a head full of styrofoam. (This is similar to what we discussed with Edward G Robinson and the plight of supporting men.) And within the context of larger culture, Charles is still framed fairly benevolently. Other shows will extend far less grace to their Barnies. 

    Your millennial tv starter pack includes such media as Arrested Development, 30 Rock, The Office, and Community—all comedies that derive most of their humor from zeroing in on the stupidity and awkwardness of human behavior, and what it’s like to be surrounded by all that. These shows generally centered on one character who is framed as being the smartest person in the room, a character for whom ingratiating all these other dum-dums in their family or work force is made out to be the height of human tragedy. 

And so they take their victory by rolling their eyes, or else staring directly into the camera slyly, as everyone else makes fools of themselves around them. They do not share the “Andy Griffith” observation that other people are just trying their best too, so we might as well learn how to get along. Even the more altruistic descendants of these shows—like Parks & Recreation, The Good Place, or Ted Lasso—didn’t start sprouting up until a few years after, and I still wouldn’t say they have the lion’s share of the media sphere. 

And even old programs still engaged in this to an extent. There’s nary a scene in I Love Lucy that doesn’t have Ethel and Fred finding some creative way to roast one another to the sound of a live audience laughing. But Ethel and Fred are also played as pretty level with one another. They’re both just as likely as the other to do the roasting. “We’re not bickering. That’s how we show love.” A truly benevolent idiot who is still deserving of kind regard makes way less sense in the modern mediascape. Extending grace to someone who probably holds up the line at the DMV can start to feel like a relic from a more “innocent” or even “outdated” time. 

        And so honestly, yes, I genuinely feel something a lot like nostalgia for the scene painted by The Andy Griffith Show. It’s a comfort show much in the same way that Gilmore Girls is a comfort show for me. It’s the same kind of thing that makes something like Silver Linings Playbook such a rarity in this field, and also what makes it one of my favorite movies. Shows about people being nice to one another, what can I say? They win me over. Ryan Vandergriff wrote about The Andy Griffith Show for “TV Over Mind,”

“The characters seemed to exist outside of the tumultuous 1960s era in which it was produced, and indeed harkened back to a simpler time in a post-World War Two era when no one in your town was a stranger and everyone pulled together to find a solution to a problem. Heck, thinking about the words I’ve just typed, perhaps the America represented in The Andy Griffith Show never quite existed. Maybe the brilliance of the show is that it displays in a fun house mirror style a lovely distorted view of an America as it might have once been in a fever dream as imagined by some beautiful dreamer and as it might still be today if only we could get our collective acts together and find a clarity to make it manifest.”

 

Show Credits

Parody and satire can be powerful tools to expose discrepancies or project retribution when done with some curiosity. But when the goal is just to flatter an audience—as most modern parody does—the end results are bland. And worse, it leaves its audiences ill-prepared to enact real change upon the systems they are being tasked with correcting.

But there is a dearth of media exploring the experience of learning to navigate material with complicated ideologies–at least, exploring it well. And so the population is often served a very presentist worldview that isolates them from older generations.

The Crowd (1928)

         I don’t have quite the same incentive for preserving classic television that I do for classic cinema. I'm not privy to the same conversations and can't say for certain whether they have the same kinds of champions. But I’d imagine that the arguments are much the same. Classical programs like these represent a part of our cultural history.

    That doesn’t grant them total immunity, but there are multiple ways to engage with a piece of media, and there are multiple benefits from doing so. I know that becoming fluent in the contributions by Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, Lucille Ball, Donna Reed, and so on has helped refine my appreciation for the television scene of today. I take a lot of delight in seeing culture play out as one large story. 

Port of Shadows (1938)

And that’s why I can’t help but kind of despise texts that permeate this really condescending idea that we have somehow outgrown older media, that black-and-white storytelling was for "a simpler people." Films like Pleasantville like to frame themselves as tenacious or daring. But all I really see is incuriosity. I see an unwillingness to cultivate complex, nuanced assessments of something that might challenge them, which is kind of funny for a piece of media so deeply rooted in the idea that life isn’t just black and white. 

We should obviously be constantly examining the stories we tell ourselves, and have told ourselves, about what an average slice of American life even looks like. There’s a lot more about multiculturalism that is more widely understood today than in the days of early television, and we should design our stories around that. But maybe our reserve for understanding these things runs a little deeper than we'd supposed.

                    --The Professor