A little life update: since my last post here, I have been admitted into Wake Forest School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I am working towards earning a Master of Divinity. I definitely can go into detail at a later date about what grad school has been like thus far, and I know that I have definitely slacked in keeping up with this blog. Although I am pretty busy writing constantly for school, it is a personal goal to get back into writing for pleasure, namely for this blog. In the mean time, I wanted to share an essay I wrote for extra credit in my Old Testament course that I recently completed. I felt like it was fitting to share, since even though I wrote it for school, I did genuinely enjoy writing it. I would also like to note that I refer to God interchangeably as “he” and “she,” as I personally hold the belief that God is of all genders and also of no gender all at once.
The most compelling facet of the movie Pleasantville is the role that color plays in the story. In the film, Pleasantville is the name of a fictional black and white television show, where everything always seems to work out smoothly by the end of each episode, much like Leave It to Beaver or The Andy Griffith show. Siblings David and Jennifer, played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon respectively, who hail from the modern era of the 1990s, inexplicably plummet into the world of Pleasantville through a television in their home. It is not long before their modern day-inspired antics cause both the characters and scenery in the world of Pleasantville (the television show) to transform into technicolor, while they sink deeper into their adopted roles of siblings Bud and Mary Sue. As more of this universe becomes covered in bright colors, David and Jennifer experience pushback from some of the conservative counterparts of Pleasantville, who see the changes in colors as a threat to their livelihood and the amity they attribute to the more familiar shades of black, white, and gray. Observed as a cinematic analogy for the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation and subsequent exile from the garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, the role that color plays in Pleasantville can bring theological enlightenment upon the theme of innocence lost in exchange for existential self-knowledge, that both enriches and plagues human existence.
In Pleasantville, the mayor and the conservative townspeople who remain in black and white consider the arrival of real colors to be a threat to their way of life. What they do not seem to realize however, is that the colors themselves are not the cause of the unrest in the town. Although never mentioned in the script, the colors are actually a reaction to a phenomenon that is never actually identified in the film. There is no indication that the producer of the colors is magical, divine, or even simply a bored television producer from an outside realm. The people of Pleasantville only seem to be preoccupied with the transformation of their world to technicolor, and not at all with where the colors actually came from. The air of mystery of who or what produced the change in colors lays heavily across the entire plot, similar to how God’s presence is felt throughout the second and third chapters of Genesis, even when He doesn’t seem to be directly involved in the action of the other figures in the text. It seems then that the omnipotent presences in Pleasantville and in the garden of Eden also hold an omniscience that their human counterparts have an ability to “know” that the humans are not even aware of themselves at the beginning of the stories. It is only a matter of time until the people in Pleasantville and in the garden of Eden become cognizant of the knowledge that can transform their realities, that was in front of them all along.
In the second half of the film, after much of Pleasantville has already transformed into technicolor, a group of teenagers still in black and white harass Bud’s and Mary Sue’s mother, Betty, by making fun of her brightly colored dress by saying, “That’s a lovely shade of blue.” At this point in the film, many characters and aspects of the scenery are in technicolor, while other people and settings remain in black and white. The observation can be made that when something becomes technicolor in Pleasantville, somehow, everyone can see the new color; not just the people who are in technicolor themselves. It is curious that those individuals in black and white can see colors, even if they are morally opposed to it and what it represents, and do not want to take on the color themselves. This suggests that the ability to become colorful and the ability to see color are not connected, and that perhaps even the ability to see color was innate all along, even before there was any color visible in Pleasantville, prior to the arrival of David and Jennifer. It begs the question, why would the creator of Pleasantville give their characters the ability to see colors that are not initially there? A similar question can be asked for God’s motives and Her placement of the tree of knowledge in the garden. If God did not want humans to have wisdom, why did He even give the option of having the tree in the garden in the first place? Would it not be better to have never created a tree at all? The Scripture says that God placed Adam in the garden of Eden “to till it and tend it (Genesis 2:15). It seems odd, and perhaps, arguably, also unfair to expect Adam to tend to the tree of knowledge along with the rest of the garden, and not expect him to reap the benefits of his agricultural care by eating the fruit. Both the Pleasantville characters’ ability to see real colors regardless of their own color status and God’s placement of the tree of knowledge in the garden (with comically easy access to the fruit) suggests that in both worlds, the potential to wield divine-like wisdom was placed in a way that it could become accessible, whether or not the creators expressed explicit consent for their human counterparts to do so.
Early after David and Jennifer arrive in Pleasantville, Jennifer points out to David that things in the television show’s world cannot catch on fire, when she complains about not being able to light a cigarette. Later on, Betty’s private moment of self-awareness in the bathtub presumably seems to cause the tree outside to spontaneously combust (or at the very least, they very poetically happen at the same time). The flames are in technicolor. Passerby stand in wonderment, and David has to alert the fire department of the danger, and also explain to them how to put it out. There is little knowledge in Pleasantville at this point of fire and how it works. However, when the townspeople who are still in black and white gather to burn books in the streets, it seems at this point in the plot that both the concept and wielding of fire has become very familiar to them. They know how to light it, how to use it, and even more interestingly, the fire itself is no longer in technicolor. It glows in shades of white and gray, in the same palette as those who conjured it. This is analogous for the story in Genesis in how the wisdom derived from the tree of knowledge becomes worldly once in Adam and Eve’s possession, and loses its original divine luster after humanity acquires it. By this point in the biblical story, Adam and Eve have knowledge, know they have this knowledge, but have also lost the innocence they held beforehand of being naked without shame, and more broadly, of not knowing what is good and bad. The fire in Pleasantville has lost its stunning shades of red, orange, and yellow, and the knowledge held by humanity has come at the price of innocence. As the divides between the people in technicolor and those in black and white in Pleasantville become even deeper, it becomes apparent that with knowledge, for both sides, comes conflict. The more everyone comes to know, the more there is to disagree and argue about, which even leads to the town’s first judicial trial. The analogy for conflict in the biblical text is that Adam and Eve are exiled from the garden of Eden and in turn must suffer (for Eve in childbirth, and for Adam, in tilling the soil). They do not even have the option to return to their paradise, and must now live with their hard-earned knowledge and loss of innocence, much like the people of Pleasantville ultimately accept the changes that come with living in a fully technicolor world. But all hope is not lost! Knowledge, although indeed a burden and paid for in loss of innocence, is also a gift and a source of power. In everything humanity loses in being exiled from the garden of Eden, we have gained knowledge and wisdom that makes us “like divine beings who know good and bad” (Genesis 3:5). Whether or not God wanted us to have this knowledge is, arguably, neither here nor there, because She knew that the potential for it to be so was always there. Indeed, in Genesis 2:16 God says, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it…” It is important to note that God did not say they could not, but rather, they must not. The choice to obey or disobey was always there, but the ability itself to eat was never a question. Likewise, in Pleasantville, the individual characters decide for themselves what to do with their knowledge of technicolor’s power and the existence of worlds beyond Pleasantville. Jennifer decides to stay in the Pleasantville universe and go to college, and David decides to go back home to the modern day. Regardless of whether the powers that be desired it, the people of Pleasantville, and Adam and Eve, set forth with their knowledge to create lives for themselves that are no longer dictated by the divine forces surrounding them. They may have lost their innocence, and perhaps also the some of trust of their divine counterparts, at least for a time, but they now have a power within themselves to influence the lives they live henceforth.
Sankofa Virgo 