Regular readers will be familiar with my penchant for shining a light on Hollywood’s hatred of their audience and Boomers’ hatred of every other generation. Much as A Bridge Too Far proves Pigman’s Caine-Hackman hypothesis, I have been presented with the ultimate intersection of Hollywood diabolism and Boomer propaganda in the 1998 movie Pleasantville.
YouTuber Blackpilled, who reviews movies with a keen eye for both literary criticism and propaganda, explains this superficially innocent film’s subversive depths.
As much as the baby boomers fought to overturn and rebel against and eventually destroy the American culture that existed before them, one thing that I have always found interesting is how much the same champions of counterculture that sadistically dismembered their heritage and mocked every tradition their parents have gifted them, but at the same time romanticize this same culture they worked so hard to undo.
In the 1980s and 90s there were a flurry of television shows and movies that seemed to acknowledge a yearning for something, a not so quiet acknowledgement of a loss that nobody could quite put their finger on; a bitter regret that was much more than anything that could be explained away by the phenomenon of nostalgia.
Well, these homages to a paradise lost forever sometimes included, you know, a little bit of ridicule of their favorite boogeyman the puritanical patriarchy that always had been the thankless guardians of this now extinct culture. There did exist a recognition a deep remorse, even that these were the good old days. One of the most popular examples was even called Happy Days.
But unfortunately Pandora’s Box had already been opened. The genie could not be stuffed back into the bottle. The monster that the baby-boomers had unleashed would grow and mutate and seek to preserve itself, something it could never do if everyone was looking back and quietly asking themselves if perhaps just maybe they’d made a terrible mistake.
Fun fact: Pleasantville was written and directed by Clinton stooge Gary Ross.
After this period of longing that went on for about a decade, it wasn’t that long before these fantasies had to be distorted–something that was easier to do once those who lived through the era grew old and the memories began to fade. After a while the sadness began to turn into bitterness, and as one might expect, the yearning was replaced with mocking and ridicule, like a spurned lover who finally gets past the grief stage and as a coping mechanism has to convince themselves that there was nothing good about their ex that they once loved. They have to pervert every memory they had of their time together to fit this new narrative that they’re better off without them; that they had simply outgrown them.
But it wasn’t just important for the baby boomers to forget and smear the past they had thrown away to help them survive and get on. Although in a very real way it was about self-preservation. You see a new generation was growing up now–growing up in a completely different world—the new normal that had been created crafted by the baby boomers: a world of broken homes, of a broken society filled with broken people. They had smashed everything with the hammer of revolution without ever bothering to rebuild anything in its place, and now this new generation raised in the rubble and smoldering ashes of the baby boomers’ devastating culture war, they were looking at these images of nuclear families with attentive and loving parents, affordable schools you could pay your tuition just by having a summer job at the corner store. The corner store that didn’t have any bulletproof glass, and if you didn’t have enough money to pay your bill it was okay because everyone knew and trusted each other. They lived in communities with a shared culture and history. They knew each other by name. They didn’t even lock their front doors. What’s more, everyone was happy, and they were happy without drugs, without antidepressants, without casual sex.
What would this new generation exposed to these images, what would they think if they saw this time, this place that now seemed like some kind of mad utopia, and realized that it was gone—or more importantly—why it was gone. Imagine the terror, the panic; the baby-boomers felt standing over the corpse of this beautiful and lost culture, the murder weapon still in their hands, dripping with blood, as Generation X, dazzled by this wonderful paradise that so starkly contrasted the reality they knew, slowly pieced together what it was that had happened.
So like a deer in headlights, the baby-boomers, fearing what would happen if they didn’t, decided to hide the body.
The movie Pleasantville was just one of the many tools they used to bury the body—the campaign weaponized against Generation X. The best way to explain it is that the baby boomers acted the same way a brutal dictator might act, but instead of it being Kim Jong Il banning all Western media in North Korea and telling his people that everyone beyond their borders was in some nightmarish hellscape and that North Korea was the true utopia—something he had to do because if the people were to discover the truth they might overthrow him or worse—the boomers, using the same formula and reasoning, told Generation X that the 1940s and 50s, despite what it might look like on TV, was really a nightmarish hellscape full of misogyny, patriarchy, oppressive religion, and worst of all, whiteness.
This is where we get to the real troubling aspect of this film. If you’ve seen my videos before, you know I’m not one of these guys that gets hung up on symbolism or or pointing out, you know, secret satanic imagery. And I’m not saying that stuff doesn’t exist. It’s just not what I do. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even mentioned the concept of Satanism and in any of these videos. I’m more of an expert on storytelling and on propaganda. I dissect what the story is telling the audience and how it’s trying to inject ideas and themes into your head using propaganda techniques.
But this film, in addition to being all the things that I have discussed before, this smearing of the past; hiding the body, is literally satanic.
"Black Pill" makes for good watching. He deserves a medal for his actions on the front lines of the War on Noticing Things.
The Meritorious Medal of Noticing
I remember when this movie came out. It was pretty obvious back then what they were trying to do. Sublty is not a boomer (disclaimer:I'm a late 1950's kid who in some circles qualifies as a boomer) trait.
*nods*
I always reacted with visceral revulsion anytime Pleasantville came on TV. Now I understand why.
Brian,
Very fascinating. So it many ways, the Boomers are the western Red guard. They denounced their elders, vandalized the monuments and demolished the culture.
And the subsequent generations have to recuperate what they can from the rubble.
No wonder everonne loathes the Boomers with a chemocal purity
xavier
The Boomers are more like Trotskyites. The Millennials are the Red Guard.
Brian,
Thanks. In the end, the red guard will put an ice pick through the heads of the troskyites just like their mentor.
xavier
I remember the same thing in Peggy Sue Got Married. Bored boomer housewife goes back in time and spreads very modern ideas to "fix" the past, even has an affair. They're trying to be nostalgic but can't quite get over the fact that what they had then really was better.
It looks as if the Boomers went in hard on this starting in the 80s because I can't find any examples before then of demonizing their parents' generation and trying to prop up the shitty present as acceptable.
The funny part is that the present is depicted as a hellscape in Pleasantville. It doesn't even hide that fact. It merely uses whataboutism as squidink to point at their parents for being worse.
The moral ends up being that the past is bad, the present is also bad, therefore the future will be bad. So just sit back and let it happen because there's nothing you can do. Just enjoy the ride, man.
I used to wonder why Gen X turned out the way they did, but not anymore.
"I remember the same thing in Peggy Sue Got Married."
Yep. Another Boomer nostalgia porn flick that always seemed to be on TV in the 80s that I absolutely hate.
"I can't find any examples before then of demonizing their parents' generation"
Boomers demonized their parents as fascist squares–until they died and gave the Boomers all their stuff, which made them the Greatest Generation.
"The funny part is that the present is depicted as a hellscape in Pleasantville. It doesn't even hide that fact. It merely uses whataboutism as squidink to point at their parents for being worse."
Thank you for concisely summing up this film's most glaring piece of thematic dissonance. It was unavoidable given a) That the rules of storytelling require establishing the protagonist's motivation, and b) Pleasantville's main thesis is a lie.
That logical inconsistency is probably why the movie never fooled me. It worked wonders on the more rhetorically vulnerable, though.
I suspect that, given the brazen contradictions between Pleasantville's now-outdated Leftist positions–freeze peach, pre-PoundMeToo feminism, homosex still implied to be abnormal, etc.–this movie might actually serve as a useful counter-propaganda tool.
I thought I liked the movie at the time until I rewatched it. That's when I caught what it was doing. I was fooled by the TV show aspect–not so much the demonization of the past material. I do wonder how many people who watched it even really caught the message. Preying on the younger generations and the hunger for better days is easily the most upsetting part of the project.
The book subplot in the movie has dated the worst, and didn't even make sense at the time. The freeze peach gang is the one banning books, creating committees and groups to censor writers, and are the generation that actively buried scores of authors and novels in the 80s and 90s. No one in the 40s and 50s were banning books at anywhere near this rate. They were busy reading Weird Tales and The Argosy. In fact people read less now than they ever had before in history, and they have more readily available to them.
The problem with the quest to destroy the past is that the boomers have taught their children it is okay to do. There is nothing stopping said children to tip the cart and reversing all they did when they are gone. I'm increasingly being convinced that it will happen.
This is how a Dark Age happens.
Christian Bale won a Golden Globe for portraying Dick Cheny in Vice.
What did he do? Thank Satan.
Bale: Thank you to that geezer, Adam. He said I’ve got to find somebody who can be absolutely charisma-free and reviled by everybody, so he went, oh, it’s gotta be Bale in it. Thank you. And for all the competition I will be cornering the market on charisma-free [assholes]. What do you think, Mitch McConnell next, that could be good, couldn't it? Thank you to Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.
When someone says something like this, we need to believe them.
They say it in a joking manner, except that it's not a joke, it's "ha ha only serious". They want people to focus on the humor part and take it seriously. They mean it seriously.
I remember when Jack Black thanked Satan at some awards show or other about ten years ago. Trying to convince my friends it wasn't just a harmless bit of fun proved fruitless. If only I'd known then what I know about rhetoric now.
I remember talking to a friend when the movie was in theaters and he said he didn't get the movie because in the TV world the people are all mindlessly pleasant no matter what happens. With that in mind, how are they even capable of reacting with such violence and reenacting the worst aspects of the civil rights movement when everything starts getting colorized?
Your friend is among the 10% of the population that's primarily convinced by dialectic.
That was my primary disappointment with the film. It was an interesting concept, but they broke their own rules.
Yes, they did. And not in the service of fun, but in service to lies.
Pleasantville was half good movie, half terrible. Now I know why.
I'm relieved that you, a representative of Gen Y, is not anti-knowledge. It's perfectly reasonable to temper knowledge with the Godly good.
Gen X is too small to matter compared to the Boomers (who will never die), and the Millennials who are so blinded by Boomer propaganda. Based on the timing of when Boomers finally all die and hand over power, it's going to be Gen Y and Millennials who inherit it.
Remember these lessons well, and keep the knowledge alive.
Speaking of "neighborhood too white": no such thing. It's in no way PTSD, but whenever confronted with stupid ghetto behavior, my fight or flight kicks in in an extreme way.
"I'm relieved that you, a representative of Gen Y, is not anti-knowledge."
There but for the grace of God…
The Satanists are peddling an equivocation–perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps deliberately. The forbidden fruit didn't grant knowledge at all. Instead it stripped Adam and Eve of the preternatural infused knowledge they had by virtue of their creation in a state of original grace.It also dimmed their intellects and made them more susceptible to error. The tree gave "knowledge" of good and evil in a sense similar to "unlawful carnal knowledge".
I hold with Augustine that no knowledge is in itself evil, because knowledge implies truth. Fallen beings can misuse knowledge, though, as a locksmith might abuse the honest skills of his trade to commit burglary.
As for the generational succession, it does appear that Gen X will be entirely skipped over. Whereas they are outnumbered, Gen Y missed the 50s nostalgia and grew up immersed in the false "the Good Old Days are right now!" narrative. At least one college professor told me that word for word. Ys are too bewildered by the sudden collapse of that lie to be much use against the Millennials, I'm afraid.
Yet with the fracturing of our worldview has come clarity. We are raising our Gen Z children with the knowledge of how their birthright was stolen. And we have no time to teach them pretty lies or instill them with white guilt.
Mr. Niemeier, would you be so kind as to expand upon these ideas:
"As for the generational succession, it does appear that Gen X will be entirely skipped over. Whereas they are outnumbered, Gen Y missed the 50s nostalgia and grew up immersed in the false "the Good Old Days are right now!" narrative. At least one college professor told me that word for word."
I am not entirely certain what you mean, but I would like to be. In what sense do you use the phrase 'generational succession?'
Thank you.
Gen X was supposed to take over for the Boomers, but the Boomers never retired and have instead held onto power beyond their expiration date. By the time they are all gone Gen X will be the same age younger Boomers are now. It'll be too late to do anything.
But I also don't know about Gen Y. Gen Y's weakness is the desire for normality above all else. We are the "plug your ears and shut your eyes" generation because we don't want to accept that the normality we worship no longer exists. That's the hardest bridge to cross with my generation and aside from a wide-scale very public event of some kind I'm afraid Gen Y will sleep their way through the troubles ahead.
A Reader,
JD is dead on. I'm living prooff of this. As Gen Xer I lost 10 years of employability and marries 10-20 years later than I should have.All because the boomers didn't retire in the 90s like they should've to make way for my generation.
In fact, I had to live my country to get a better job.
I'd like to return to my home country but given my age it's going to be tough.
The country I live in is goverened by authoritarian rootless globalists who ruthlessly opress the domestic population and heap nothing but contempt since independence towards their own citizens.
xavier
JD has it. Gen X will be the first American generation never to get their turn in the driver's seat.
Y will be skipped as well–which is probably for the best. But the real crisis will come when the Boomers finally cede power to the Millennials. Imagine what will happen when a generation defined by their total dependence on the Boomers is suddenly left to fend for themselves. Picture a whole cohort who can't change a tire trying to direct U.S. fiscal policy.
"Gen Y's weakness is the desire for normality above all else. We are the 'plug your ears and shut your eyes' generation because we don't want to accept that the normality we worship no longer exists."
*nods* The Ys' generational vice is less obvious than than Boomer narcissism or Xer cynicism, but it's no less detrimental.
I describe my generation's affliction as Siddhartha Syndrome. The Buddha's parents went to extreme lengths to keep him ignorant of human suffering. Now, imagine if the prince had lived that way until around age ten, at which point his seemingly wealthy parents split, and it was revealed that their palace was mortgaged to the hilt.
Unlike Siddhartha, Ys didn't sneak out beyond the palace walls to get a glimpse of the real world. Instead, the walls came crashing down around us one day, and the fallen world's full cruelty besieged us en masse.
This formative experience differs from the Xers, who got to live briefly in the twilight of paradise; not the fungineered remake erected by Boomer guilt and notalgia. Gen X watched bitterly as the last vestiges of real America slipped away. We emerged from the Logan's Run dome to find only ruins.
The difference between Gen Y and the Millennials is that we still stand dumbstruck in the wreckage while they revel in it.
Brian,
Yup. I saw the destruction unfold in real time and was owerless to stop it. Had the boomers retired when they shouled've a lot of the rot could've been slowed down. But no. Damned narcissists.
We're cynical because the boomers actively blocked us from entering into society and were mightily successful at that. They compeltely froze us out.
So much so, that our generation was the first to suffer acedia.
xavier
Thank you all. That makes a great deal of sense. Depending on the Boomers in question, they add insult to injury because have the unmitigated gall to be proud of the dog's breakfast they have made of American society! No fault divorce, sexual revolution, prenatal genocide to out-Stalin Stalin, social programs as moral imperative, et cetera ad nauseam. They've smashed or ruined everything they can get their hands on, and expect to be lauded to the skies for their treachery and subversion. The Republic is dead, because they decided that it had to die in the name of 'progress'.
Speaking as an American Gen X milbrat, Left-wing Boomers disgust me.
They say a healthy disgust threshold is what distinguishes the Right from the Left.
RE: "the Good Old Days are right now!"
I constantly remember my first year of high school and overhearing another student jokingly say: "If these are the best days of my life I might as well get it over with now."
I don't find it so funny anymore.
Watched the Black Pill video. Recall hating "Pleasantville" in a visceral way, without really knowing why.
Now, I know why.
Would sign Boomer Generation Death Warrant in a heartbeat.
Consuela down at the nursing home may beat you to it.
"Imagine what will happen when a generation defined by their total dependence on the Boomers is suddenly left to fend for themselves. Picture a whole cohort who can't change a tire trying to direct U.S. fiscal policy."
Gen Xers keep dropping like flies. In the end, maybe they got out while the getting was good.
"This formative experience differs from the Xers, who got to live briefly in the twilight of paradise; not the fungineered remake erected by Boomer guilt and notalgia. Gen X watched bitterly as the last vestiges of real America slipped away. We emerged from the Logan's Run dome to find only ruins."
The twilight included watching small towns get destroyed by those "hard working Mexicans" and getting beat up by black kids in those wonderful integrated schools. Go on, tell me how awful poor Conseula and her two anchor babies had it, and how they're just here for a better life. Watch my sympathy meter not move one inch.
The twilight also included pockets of major metropolitan areas where you could leave a back door unlocked for visitors. I wish more of y'all had that. I hope our great grandchildren have that again.
Few CivNat shibboleths are as contemptible as the "They're just here for a better life!" canard.
First, it acknowledges that the places these invaders come from are shitholes but purposefully ignores the obvious question of why.
Even worse, it glosses over the fact that the people coming here are rootless mercenaries who willingly left the graves of their fathers for easy money instead of trying to make their own nations better.
Why should that convince anyone we need people like that here?
@ Heian, Re: Gen Xer’s dying off, I’ve not looked it up, but is Gen X the hardest hit by the opiate crisis?
And getting beat up by gangs of black kids, I grew up in a black neighborhood followed by a Latino one before we finally moved to a white enclave in the late 1980’s. Getting ganged up and beat on for having white skin was a common occurrence for me. Those of us who experienced such have been well acquainted with the gifts of diversity.
@Durandel
My first guess was that no, GenX is NOT hit hardest by the opiate crisis. My guess was the 18-25 set.
Then I found this graph: https://www.riskmanagementmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CDC-deaths-1-560×348.png
Thankfully, it looks like the young really aren't dying in droves, they're just getting the most press (for good reason!)
In 2016, Gen Jones, X, and Y all had deaths spike. I guess the end of Western Civilization hit everyone hard, except the Boomers.
I haven't known anyone who's ODed, but a lot of Xers are dying of cancer and suicide.
Gen Y's ostrich behavior can't last forever. Unfortunately this is the route many of us take to keep it going.
Thanks for the link. Quite eye-opening.
Thanks for the link as well
I disliked this movie when I saw it in high school. I didn’t see the Satanic in it then as I do now. My only memory of it was that I wanted to punch Toby McGuire’s face in, because it looked oh so punchable.
Anyway, Devin Stack’s movie breakdowns are great.
Someone should do a study on what makes faces punchable.
Very inspiring to discover this blog and apparent gathering of awakened souls. A near 10-year conspiracy hunt led me to abandon my (unwitting, benign-seeming) luciferian ways and convert to Bible-based Christianity then Catholicism then Latin mass traditional Catholicism (aka "real Christianity"). As Cardinal Newman said, "To know history is to cease to be Protestant."
In any case, we can all be part of the quest serving Our Lord and Our Lady and end the reign of satan by daily holy hours and penances, crossing ourselves everytime we eat in public, and talking openly about Christ and the evils of abortion et al. Nightly examinations of conscience, root out all vices like weeds, recover perfect chastity. In short, embody heroic virtue. That's how you get demons to go from devouring you to despising you to dreading you. Once you start advancing on the path of perfection, they can't touch you, and it feels stupendous.
Welcome. Praise God for the grace of conversion!
I can testify to the effectiveness of the commenter's suggestions.