jean-paul sartre in pleasantville
I think that the 1998 film Pleasantville is vastly underappreciated. It gave us Fiona Apple’s beautiful rendition of Across The Universe, and a racial allegory that doesn’t entirely earn its ambition, but also a wonderful analysis of the philosophy behind ideals, freedom, and bad faith. We’ve always been obsessed with ideals – right now this takes many forms, clean eating, digital detoxes, looking back on a ‘simpler time’. Sartre tells us that clinging to an ideal is a form of bad faith, a flight from the freedom of being human. Pleasantville, I think, is a Sartrean film.
Pleasantville (the town from the film) is the textbook image of a world organised around ideals. It’s sparkling clean, always predictable, its people are perfectly role-bound. Sartre would say that the townspeople live as whats and not whos, their compliance mistaken for virtue. They live in bad faith in the same way as the modern idealist, who, say, does a digital detox not because she genuinely doesn’t need her phone, but because a phoneless person is the kind of person she wants to be. Both characters are performing an ideal, not living authentically. But who is above ideals? Isn’t that what we all want? To not go on our phones just because we don’t feel the need to? To eat well just because that's how we live? Look at ‘nonchalance’, the most coveted characteristic du jour – to describe someone as nonchalant is really just to say that she embodies current ideals without having to try too hard.
On the theistic flip side, Pleasantville borrows and inverts Saint Augustine’s architecture in how the arrival of knowledge and desire at first looks like corruption, but is later reframed as liberation. Free will ultimately prevails over compliance, and this ‘fall’ is framed as good, even necessary, c’est comme ça, things are flawed, and that is how they are.
The melody of Tchaikovsky’s sixth and final symphony erupts and resolves, erupts and resolves, never reaching an ‘ideal’ state. Neither freedom nor fallenness are destinations, but rather conditions – we’re not trying to get back to Pleasantville.