Informal Writing Assignment on the motion picture, "Pleasantville"

Originally Written: 18 September 2008
“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety” (Napier). As suggested by Abraham Maslow, a PhD in psychology, you can either take a journey and try something new, or you can remain in your box, figuratively speaking. This is the issue that the residents in the movie, Pleasantville, are confronted with in the end. The filmmakers are perhaps suggesting that a lack of predictability is preferable to a lack of anticipation of what will come in the future. I would have to disagree, although many would say that life is boring without any variation to stir things up. However, I would argue that people would be better off and altogether more content, if the world were not such a volatile place. There is a reason that the common phrase, “ignorance is bliss”, exists. If people are ignorant to the fact that they are missing out on something, they won’t realize that they don’t have it, and thus there is no harm done. The residents of Pleasantville are delightfully unaware of the fact that their lives are so full of monotony. But isn’t this what makes Pleasantville so pleasant? People are so content with their lives due to the fact that they are unaware of all of the strife and variation in day-to-day activities that they could be ‘enjoying’, if one wishes to call it that. The main element to my argument is that we have grown up in a world where certainty is absent. We never know what may come at us the next day, or ten years from now. So the idea of “Pleasantville” seems strange, abstract, and boring to some. But the citizens of Pleasantville don’t think so! Imagine being born into that society, one would have no idea that life could be any different. Their life is the one to which they have become accustomed, and thus there is no harm, no foul done. One would be completely content within such a society, so full of stability. Is the lack of security really a risk worth taking, as the prompt asks? No! If you could be raised in a society full of certainty, you wouldn’t know the difference. In fact, would the concept of boredom even exist? Most likely not, because people are so used to doing the same thing, day after day, it becomes a routine. This is not to say that people couldn’t engage in different activities, but I am saying that people would be more satisfied with life in general, because of the stability and predictability within that kind of society. The devil is in the details! One must realize that we can’t judge other societies or their inhabitants based on our own ideals or present state. Other societies’ citizens think differently, behave differently, and are assimilated differently. If security is the price of growth, I’ll keep my security, and forego the growth that most certainly keeps people from leading what the blissfully ignorant see as fulfilling lives. The cost of this approach is ignorance, albeit unrecognized, and the chance to experience variability and variety. But as I’ve already argued, what people don’t know can’t hurt them.



Works Cited
Napier, Eric. 2008. Quotes about Security. Quotation Collection. Retrieved September 17, 2008, from http://www.quotationcollection.com/tag/security/quotes