Loyal readers know that a key mission of this blog is shedding light on Hollywood’s hatred of their audience. Much as A Bridge Too Far proves Pigman’s Caine-Hackman hypothesis, the1998 movie Pleasantville epitomizes Hollywood Death Cultism.
YouTuber Devon Stack, 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.
It takes a lot of lying to present the 1950's as a sexless, colorless era. If it had been, most boomers wouldn't even exist. That baby boom didn't happen all by itself, husbands and wives had to work at it.
The sexual understanding of the Death Cult is literally demonic–sex within its proper sphere and for its proper ends is either denied or sneered at ('breeders'), sex twisted out of that context or parodied is exulted.
By the end, the only things that will be considered 'perverse' and 'unacceptable' will be chastity, motherhood, and fatherhood. You can already see the assaults on all three from various angles.
The movie uses kabuki theater by swapping out the 1950s with family sitcoms that were never meant to be realistic.
It's dishonest, but the entire project is on a fundamental level.
They were counting on the audience only knowing about the era through those sitcoms. Which is as ridiculous as it is dishonest. The 50's audiences certainly didn't confuse them with real life.
Egad it sounds like "It's a Wonderful Life" in reverse.
I'm gonna have to steal that line.
The movie is satanic.
That's not an insult; that's literally what it is.
These boomers by date of birth saw this horror and hate it. It was obvious early on what their intentions were and I hate them for it.
The movie is confused and aimless, even though it isn't poorly written.
It suffers because its premise is incorrect, and the way it chooses to make its points are inherently deceptive (the entire subplot about books has aged VERY badly, as a result) and entire characters are given no characterization or thought as to why they do anything.
Then there's the ending.
The movie sets up the the world of the modern world is terrible, and things are only going to get worse. The movie ends with the past being destroyed to make way for the modern world the main character was being crushed by at the beginning of the movie. In essence, it's message is that the world is shit so just accept it being shit, because that's all it will ever be.
The kids encourage their TV Mom to cheat, even though the single parent household is what had a big part in their misery to begin with. The sister is a selfish bitch throughout the entire, and yet always gets what she wants with no repercussions as she destroys others lives. This is all presented as positive character development.
The earlier mention book subplot doesn't even make sense.
"White" people wrote books they then banned and it takes "colorized" people to read them and spread their ideas to make other people "colorized" and break "white" oppression. Why would "whites" even have a library if this was a possibility? Why didn't it happen when they were first written?
The movie is well-made garbage that has dated really poorly. I honestly think it should be taught (to older children, of course) as a example of just how badly modernism has rotted cognitive thought.
JD
Thanks. You've explained very well why I didn't understand the movie. It's like a fanfic Matrix hommage in black and white but still incoherent and confusing.
I didn't enjoy Pleasantvill because I just never got the point of the movie
xavier
I haven't even watched the movie, yet still find myself getting angry, because I recognize the insufferable sanctimony and self-satisfaction underlying it from my interaction with the Lefty-Boomers I've known. I wasn't raised in a broken home, or a home in which absent parents resorted to bribery. Dad went to work. Mom worked at home, with us. Some of my aunts worked. My other and others didn't, so my generation of the family, which is a GenX/GenY blend, and our Millenial cousins, had a mixed experience in that regard. My folks were barely teenagers during the Tet Offensive, so they're not in the cohort of Boomers who murdered Christendom and then called that murder justice. My folks never played the "The Bad Old Days" card to justify their sabotage, because they became the kinds of people the Hippie-Boomers ruined themselves rejecting. I only really learned in about some of the more difficult aspects of their childhoods when I myself became an adult.
Long story short: How dare they? How dare they leave us the smoldering ruin of a Gothic cathedral and then pretend they were defending everyone after them from the mortal peril of entering it? Does their perfidy and dishonesty know no bounds? Did these people ever actually grown up, or is it still nineteen-sixty-bloody-eight in their shriveled, dessicated hearts?
From ungodly anger, Good Lord, deliver us.
A reader
Yup it's 1968 groundhog day.
In Europe it's worst. First because the soixante guitars who rebelled pretend they were repudiating their collaborator parents. The problem was they blamed the wrong ones it wasn't the vichyois but the commies who were the collaborators rewarded for their perfidy.
Everyone,especially in France glosses over how the French communist party were enthusiastic proponents of the nazi soviet pact and Theorez the head French commie was under an in absentia death sentence in 1940. He of course was in the Soviet union at the time.
I'd be flabbergasted if the average Antifa goon or their Hippie Boomer apologists knew who Molotov and von Ribbentrop were, or that the Americommies were isolationist pacifists until Joe Stalin needed them to support the Great Crusade.
A Reader
They don't but happily repeat history.
The party orders! We obey! Long live the revolution! Either when arrested or before a firing squad.
xavier
But what good is a wholesome community if it won't let me take it up the butt?
https://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/684/058/5eb.jpgfeed%2F000%2F684%2F058%2F5eb.jpg
The worship of Prometheus and Lucifer rages on in this death cult. They shall have their hearts ripped out day after day for eternity though.
This is very timely. Memories of this movie always nagged at me, and I now understand why it stuck with me and disturbed me. I saw this movie on vacation when I was about 12. The narrative that was imprinted on my brain was that marriage was disgusting and cruel, and romance and artistic passion meant everything and were worth sacrificing for. That narrative ruined a decade of my life. In pursuit of romance and "bohemia," I ended up prey to domestic violence, abuse, and rape. I wanted to be "free," not "oppressed," because of imagery like this movie. Its satanic claws were deep. Thankfully I am now truly free, and know what love and goodness actually means.
Praise God for deliverance.
What always turned my guts, from the first time I saw this vile thing, was how it ends with the protagonist telling everyone how much he loves Big Brother. It is ultimately the story of modernity breaking a dissident so utterly that he becomes an eager participant. Fucking Sadism in the purest and most specific sense.
The symbolism was just blatant and superficial evil in my opinion, compared to that horror.
The Cult always telegraph their plans for us.