Pleasantville: The Suburb as World
Pleasantville: The Suburb as World
The first chapter examines how Gary Ross’ 1998 blockbuster film Pleasantville presents the nature of the suburb’s fictional world. Each film or television programme postulates its own fictional world, which in turn delineates the possibilities for, and limitations of, the plot. The fictional world of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, for instance, allows for very different plot developments than the fictional world of Sense and Sensibility. In the former, plots may come to include wizards, elves, and hobbits, resurrections and afterlives, whereas no such creations can ever populate the story world of Jane Austen. This chapter explores the kind of world the cinematic suburb might be: what are its natural laws, what is its internal logic, what can and cannot happen there? Paying close attention at the relationships between temporality, spatiality, genre and the various stylistic registers employed and drawing on the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it is argued that Pleasantville, the film’s eponymous suburb, is characterised by an intrinsic ontological instability that renders narrative and style per definition unpredictable, contradictory, and essentially open ended.
Keywords: Pleasantville, Fictional world, Temporality, Spatiality, Genre, Giorgio Agamben
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