DeConick A.D

K
CHAPTER TEN
Pleasantville Religions
Betty Parker
Betty Parker lives in black-and-white, a standard suburban mom starring
in the rerun of the 1950s Pleasantville series (figure 10.1). She moves from
room to room in her black-and-white house, her face smiling, and her
voice calling her children to the table with promises of hot breakfasts—
blueberry pancakes “just the way you like them.” Betty’s banal husband,
George, comes home from work every night announcing, “Honey, I’m
home. Where’s my dinner?” And they pleasantly sit down to their family
meal together.
David, a teenager living in 1996, is enthralled with Pleasantville . His
own life is chaotic, his mother and sister attentive to their new boyfriends,
leaving him alone and isolated. To deal with the chaos and isolation, David
has withdrawn into himself and into the TV world of Pleasantville .
He eats Doritos curled up on the couch and watches the show again and
again.
It isn’t long into Gary Ross’s film Pleasantville that an unannounced
TV repairman shows up at David’s home and gives David and his sister,
Jennifer, an alien remote control. It operates by sucking the two of them
into the TV, and into the world of Pleasantville.
On the surface, Pleasantville is a classic plot about David and Jennifer
growing up, becoming responsible adults, learning to negotiate the adult
world and their place in it. But beneath the surface runs another plot, the
awakening of the Gnostic to the reality and the power of the self to alter,