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Laramie Movie Scope:
The Intelligent Design of Pleasantville

What? You think Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to their wedding?

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by Robert Roten, Film Critic
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November 22, 2005 -- I bought a $1 videotape of “Pleasantville” the other day and watched it, and was struck again at what a great movie it is. True, some people complain that it focuses too much on masturbation, fornication, adultery and other forms of noble fulfillment, but they are just nit-picking. What this movie is really about is forbidden knowledge. I suddenly realized that some of those people in Pleasantville reminded me of people who think maybe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to their wedding. Those people who think all the biologists, botanists, paleontologists, astronomers, geologists and physicists in the world are wrong about the age of the earth, the universe, and about evolution. They just want all these scientists to stop saying that the genesis of humans and earth are events far too ancient to correspond with a literal interpretation of the Bible, and they are willing to use political power to shut them up. Those people have a lot in common with some members of the Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce.

Pleasantville is a lot like the Garden of Eden. It is also like stepping into a 1950s TV show like “Ozzie and Harriet.” The people don't age. They don't get angry. They don't fight. They don't have sex. They don't get sad or unfulfilled. They don't die. There is no crime. People are happy and pleasant to each other all the time. It is a kind of paradise, but it is a closed-off confining little world, a box.

Then these two kids drop in from our reality, Bud (played by Tobey Maguire of “Spider-Man”, and Mary (Reese Witherspoon of “Walk the Line”). These two kids totally disrupt the whole town. People start having sex. They start reading books. They start to change their expectations about life itself. The soda jerk, Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels of “Dumb and Dumber”) decides he doesn't want to work in the malt shop anymore. He wants to be an artist. The books in the library that all had blank pages suddenly are full of words, information about a vast world beyond Pleasantville. In one key scene in the movie, Bud's girlfriend brings him a bright red apple (everything else in Pleasantville is black, white or shades of gray) and he takes a bite of it, just like Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge.

A conflict arises between two groups of people in Pleasantville, one group who wants to learn more about themselves and the world outside the box and another group that believes this quest for knowledge is dangerous and must be outlawed. They don't want to think outside the box. The Mayor of Pleasantville, Big Bob, (the late J.T. Walsh of “Breakdown”) enforces a new set of rules. One of the new rules is the closure of the library. A mob burns books and destroys Mr. Johnson's paintings.

This is the same kind of tension that exists between those who believe in evolution and those who do not. Those who believe in evolution think there is a lot more to learn about life and about how humans and other animals evolved. Those who don't believe in evolution think they already know everything they need to know about the genesis of life. They don't want to think outside the box of their beliefs. Knowledge outside that box threatens their literal belief in the Bible's genesis story, just as Bud and Mary's knowledge of the outside world threatens the established order in Pleasantville. Learning about evolution is a dangerous thing and should be outlawed. In the movie, Bud and Mr. Johnson are tried for heresy. The trial is a lot like the famous “monkey trial” of John Scopes in Tennessee, who was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a public school. Although that trial was 80 years ago, the law against teaching evolution in Tennessee was still on the books until 1967.

When I saw Pleasantville I was also reminded of a November 18, 2005 New York Times article by By Scott M. Liell, who talked about a similar religious conflict that occurred after a great earthquake struck Massachusetts on Nov. 18, 1755. One group of people believed that this deadly earthquake represented the wrath of God striking a sinful people. The other group of people, including Benjamin Franklin, were more interested in finding out more about the natural causes and effects of earthquakes than assigning supernatural blame. Liell also talked about the religious backlash against Franklin after he invented the lightning rod, a device which has since saved millions of buildings from lightning strikes. Religious zealots argued that the lightning rod interfered with God's justice and wrath, forcing God to use earthquakes and other weapons at his disposal. Thus, many people of faith began to blame Franklin for the great earthquake of 1755. “'God shakes the earth because he is wroth,' insisted Thomas Prince of Boston's South Church in a sermon he published soon after the quake. He warned his flock that the more lightning rods were erected around Boston, the more earthquakes would afflict the city as a result,” Liell wrote. Thomas' prediction was dead wrong.

Similarly, the Rev. Pat Robertson, famous modern televangelist, directed his wrath at Dover, Pa., because voters there saw to it that school board members who promoted the teaching of intelligent design were voted out of office. Robertson said the Dover voters had voted God out of Dover, and hinted that bad things would befall that city because of the vote. Robertson is a powerful political figure in the Republican party and regularly uses his TV program to sway voters. He is a great supporter of president Bush. Robertson and other ministers like him and their followers are pushing a broad political agenda in America, opposing abortion, opposing stem cell research, opposing therapeutic cloning, opposing the teaching of evolution, opposing equal rights for homosexuals, favoring the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and virtually everything else proposed by the Bush Administration.

These people aren't just harmless wingnuts, they wield a lot of political power. Their political agenda has led to the deaths of many thousands of people and the maiming of many more. It is also leading to the suffering many poor people in this country and has benefitted the nation's wealthiest people. It has also led to a rollback of rights for millions of people in this country. It is an unholy alliance of the largest international corporations in the world with religious fundamentalists to pursue a goal of military conquest and the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich. Ask your local Wal-Mart employee how this works. If this unholy alliance isn't broken up, it could lead us into a holy war of a billion Christians against a billion Muslims, and no sane person wants that.

The current flap over the teaching of intelligent design is just the latest in a religious conflict that has been going on since the beginning of science. There are many religious people who support the search for naturalistic explanations, like evolution, to natural phenomena. They believe research reveals more about how God made the universe. There are others who oppose any any scientific theory which conflicts with their personal religious beliefs. I believe science and religion are two separate systems of beliefs. As long as they stay separate, they can coexist, but sometimes they cross paths. It is wrong, for instance, to deceptively package a religious or political belief, like intelligent design, and teach it as science in school. That causes conflicts. You can honestly teach intelligent design as philosophy, politics or religion, but it is not science.

It is also wrong to do certain types of reproductive human cloning. First of all, it isn't safe yet. Secondly, this type of cloning involves moral issues which need to be decided by society as a whole. Therapeutic cloning is another matter. It also involves moral questions that need to be decided, but on this issue there is more of a consensus that the benefits outweigh the risks and moral objections. There are many other moral issues in science, of course. The secret testing of atomic, chemical and biological weapons, for instance, exposes the public to risks without their consent or knowledge.

Science and religion are two separate things. Science is not a religion, as some claim. It is simply a system for acquiring knowledge about how the universe works. It works remarkably well in this regard. True, some scientists can be very dogmatic about their beliefs when their pet theories are questioned, but even those scientists will abandon theories that are proven false. Religious beliefs, like intelligent design, however, cannot be proven or disproven. All you can do is argue about them endlessly. They are not useful for explaining or predicting discoveries in nature. You can't prove or disprove the existence of God, for instance, just as you can't prove or disprove the existence of ghosts, angels, demons or anything else in the supernatural realm. Science, on the other hand, gives us no moral guidance whatsoever, but religion does. Science and the spiritual will remain separate realms, at least until the second coming.

The central message of “Pleasantville” is that knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is better than ignorance. Science is all about the pursuit of knowledge. In the very near future, scientists will succeed in creating the first artificial life form, a single-celled organism created from chemicals, that does not exist in nature. This will be a huge step in understanding how life works and how it came to exist in the first place. This scientific breakthrough will be very controversial and will be bitterly opposed by the Pleasantville Chamber of Commerce types. The discovery of life on planets other than earth will also be very controversial, especially if that planet is Mars and if it turns out that life originated on Mars and spread to earth, which is a possibility. Scientists can accept these facts if they are proved, but some non-scientists simply can't accept such facts.

In the biological sciences, there are splitters and lumpers. Splitters like to emphasize the tiny distinctions between species and sub-species. Lumpers like to emphasize the similarities among all living things. In political terms, conservatives are splitters, emphasizing the differences between groups of people, like blacks and whites, for instance. Liberals are lumpers, they like to emphasize the commonalities that all people and all groups share. All people are alike to liberals. All people are different to conservatives. Evolution takes this a step further, all life is one big family and we are all related. There is very little difference, genetically speaking, between a man and a mouse. Conservatives don't like this view because it weakens them. They get their power by playing on people's xenophobia. Hyping people's fear of homosexuals, communists or Muslims is how they get elected. The fear of the “other” doesn't work when the other is part of our own family.

In the climactic courtroom scene of “Pleasantville” when Bud faces down Big Bob, he wins his case by proving that he and Big Bob are the same. He forces Big Bob to face his own humanity, and when he does, Big Bob changes color. He is forced into the realization that he is just like everyone else. The big splitter has been lumped with everyone else in town. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It is a splitter's greatest fear that the soldiers on both sides of a war will come to realize that they are both on the same side. If that happens, the game is over and peace breaks out. Only by splitting people into separate groups and emphasizing their differences can we justify treating people in an inhumane manner (such as torturing them). The same goes for animals. Evolution threatens this world view. If we are all part of one big family of life shouldn't we treat everyone as brothers? Jesus said much the same thing 2,000 years ago in what is called the golden rule. The splitters have been fighting his golden rule idea ever since then.

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Copyright © 2005 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.
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Robert Roten can be reached via e-mail at my last name at lariat dot org. [Mailer button: image of letter and envelope]

(If you e-mail me with a question about this or any other movie or review, please mention the name of the movie you are asking the question about, otherwise I may have no way of knowing which film you are referring to)