Summary
On a television set, we see a station featuring old television shows, including a marathon of a family values sitcom called Pleasantville, advertised as "a flashback to kinder, gentler times."
A title card reads, "Once upon a time," and we see a contemporary high school in California. David talks to a popular girl, and asks her out for a date on the weekend, when suddenly we realize that David is not actually talking to the girl; he is just looking over at her while she talks to someone else.
In a lecture hall, a teacher tells a group of students that by the time they get to college, their chances of getting a good job will have decreased, due to an economic downturn. In another class, we see a teacher telling the class their odds of dying of HIV. In another class, a teacher talks about global warming and its attendant natural disasters. "Ok, who can tell me what famine is?" the teacher asks, smiling.
At home, David watches an episode of Pleasantville. As George Parker returns home in the episode, Betty Parker hands him a martini and they discuss his work life. On the couch, David eats salty snacks and speaks the lines along with the characters.
In the next room, David's mother talks on the phone with his father, from whom she has gotten a divorce. They argue about custody as David continues to watch the idyllic Parker family.
At school the next day, one of David's friends quizzes him about plot lines in Pleasantville in preparation for the call-in trivia contest that will take place during the all-night Pleasantville marathon coming up. David is hoping to win the $1000 cash prize.
Nearby, David's twin sister, Jennifer, and her friends look piteously at David. When a popular guy starts walking towards them, Jennifer goes up to him and asks him if he's going to watch a concert on MTV that night, before telling him that her mother is going out of town.
The scene shifts to Jennifer's bedroom, where she brags about her interaction on the phone with one of her friends. She debates whether or not to wear a slutty red dress. In his room, David talks to his friend Howard about Pleasantville, and the fact that there are no homeless people there. Outside, his mother packs up the car for a trip.
Jennifer and David prepare for their respective evenings, both expecting to be able to use the house television. They fight over the remote control, and their struggle sends the remote control hurtling towards the wall and shattering to pieces. Mournfully, David tells her that the television does not work without a remote.
When the doorbell rings, Jennifer goes to answer it, assuming that it's her crush, Mark Davis. When she opens the door, however, it's not Mark, but an affable TV repairman who asks her if she needs help. Confused at how he knows the television is broken, Jennifer lets him in the house.
The repairman sits down and sets to work fixing the television saying that losing a TV is "almost like losing a friend." David is just as confused as Jennifer about the repairman's sudden appearance. As lightning and thunder starts outside, David tells the repairman that the Pleasantville marathon starts at 6:30. The repairman also loves the show and starts quizzing David, impressed by David's knowledge.
Looking in his tool bag, the repairman pulls out a different kind of remote to give to David, one that he says has a little more "oomph." When the repairman leaves, David turns on the television using the remote. He and Jennifer struggle over the remote yet again. On the television, the two young characters on Pleasantville also struggle over a book.
As their struggle reaches a peak, David and Jennifer are transported into the television. We see them on the screen nearby, wearing the clothes of the Parker children on Pleasantville.
They are disoriented as they look around the room, and George, the Parker patriarch, comes in and tells them to get to school. On the television in the Parker residence, the TV repairman appears and tells Jennifer and David that they are a miracle. He tells them that every time he has tried to find someone who had an encyclopedic knowledge about Pleasantville, he has been disappointed, but that David was special.
As the Parker matriarch, Betty, calls Jennifer and David in for breakfast, Jennifer tells the repairman that she has a date. The television shows footage of Jennifer's date arriving at her house and getting disheartened, muttering "Bitch" to himself. Jennifer screams.
David asks the repairman to get them out of there, but the repairman calls him "Bud" and tells him he belongs there. "You don't know how long I've been looking for someone like you," the repairman says, leaving abruptly.
Left alone, David and Jennifer begin to panic. Betty calls them into the kitchen, as David puts the remote control under a nearby chair. Betty refers to them as Bud and Mary Sue as the teenagers file into the kitchen.
In the kitchen, George and Betty invite them to eat a giant breakfast, even though Jennifer insists she isn't hungry. Betty piles pancakes, eggs, bacon, ham, and sausage onto the plate, as Jennifer looks at her plate in horror.
Outside, a milkman delivers milk, as Jennifer and Bud walk to school, Jennifer complaining about having to eat so much at breakfast. Jennifer insists that they are supposed to be at home, in color, as a neighbor, Mr. Simpson, greets them as Bud and Mary Sue and mentions the fact that George recently bought a Buick. David tells Jennifer that Simpson owns the hardware store.
Jennifer protests, but David insists that they have to play along until the repairman gets back. Suddenly a fire truck appears and a group of five firemen get out to get a cat out of a tree. This only upsets Jennifer more, who worries, "We're like stuck in Nerdville."
As Jennifer bemoans the fact that she was finally starting to get popular in the real world, a handsome high schooler named Skip Martin greets her. She looks over at Skip, who asks what's going on with the cat in the tree, and is visibly lovesick. When David tells Jennifer that Skip is the captain of the basketball team, she asks if Skip likes her. "As a matter of fact he does," David says.
At school, David points out Jennifer's friends, Peggy Jane, Lisa Anne, and Betty Jean. "Can we do any better?" Jennifer asks, and when David says they cannot, she walks towards her friends perkily.
In a geography class, the teacher tells the students about the geography of Main Street, as they listen attentively. Jennifer raises her hand and asks, "What's outside of Pleasantville?" Everyone looks confused as the teacher points out that "the end of Main Street is just the beginning again."
David practices with the Pleasantville Lions, the basketball team. When he goes to shoot a basket, he is very good, much to his surprise. Looking over his shoulder, he notices that everyone on the team scores every basket they shoot.
Analysis
The world of Pleasantville, a fictional black-and-white television show that protagonist David watches, is one free of drama or disaster. Its episode plots follow small-town issues and uncontroversial conflicts. The quintessential American family of the 1950s—a mother, a father, a son, a daughter—all go about their lives with relative ease, collaborating with one another to etch out a happy life for themselves, and the television announcer who advertises the show calls it "a flashback to kinder, gentler times."
These "kinder, gentler times" are contrasted with the modern world and all its attendant anxieties. When we first meet David, he is an antisocial high schooler who can barely work up the courage to ask out a popular girl, and who is bulldozed by bad news in all of his classes; one teacher talks about the economic downturn that will prevent David and his classmates from getting jobs, another talks about extreme health risks, another about environmental collapse and global warming. From the start, the simple, uncomplicated world of Pleasantville is contrasted with the anxiety of the 1990s.
Another contrast exists within David's family. While David is shy and introverted, eschewing social endeavors to stay home and memorize everything about an outdated television sitcom, his twin sister Jennifer is a gum-clicking, cigarette-smoking popular girl, who can hardly believe she's related to the shut-in. They could not be more different, with David as a sensitive nostalgist and Jennifer a bold and modern teenager.
The tone of the film is at once realistic and whimsical. While David and Jennifer inhabit a recognizable 1990s teenaged life, struggling with issues like high school popularity, their parents' divorce, and adolescent alienation, their modern existences are haunted by a kind of supernatural quality, the sense that some other forces are at play. With the arrival of the television repairman, we see that this is not another teen movie. The repairman is accompanied by an eerie and seemingly context-less thunderstorm, and he leaves them with a mysterious science fiction remote control, one that has powers beyond their wildest imaginings.
When they get transported into the world of the show, David and Jennifer find it to be both a perfect place as well as an extremely limited one. While David can score any basket he wants on the basketball court, Jennifer is confused to find that her geography class only covers the two streets in the town, Main Street and Elm Street, and that no one bothers to think about what's beyond the town's limits. Pleasantville is an idea, and as such is both idyllic and limited in what it has to offer.
