How Millennials Were Destroyed By A Movie Gen X Rejected

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

Not every movie that attempts to screenwash its audience succeeds right away. Sometimes, the agenda being pushed is so outlandish and ridiculous that it needs more time to take hold. That was the case in the late 1990s, as the powers that be began ramping up their crusade against prosperity by attacking Americans’ rosy view of the past with a clumsy, Pavlovian sledgehammer. 

So in 1998, when most studios were busy greenlighting asteroid destruction porn and CGI bug invasions, an attack on order and virtue slipped into theaters disguised as a high-concept sci-fi movie. It flopped at the box office and failed to influence the audience it targeted, but in the years since has gained acceptance among a new audience too young to see it at the time, as a cult classic.

This is the story of how Pleasantville was rejected by Generation X, only to screenwash Millennials into destroying everything they love.

No Color, No Problem

Pleasantville begins with a teenage boy who disconnects from abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents and his peers by escaping into the idyllic world of classic television. The movie ends with him accepting his crappy situation as fine, because he has no right to expect anything good, and everything just is what it is. In between those two bookends, he destroys an entire town, and the movie works hard to convince the audience it was worth it, because now they have brighter colors of red.

Tobey Maguire stars in the film as David, a teenage boy with a chaotic living situation and no social life. He’s obsessed with a classic, black-and-white 1950s television show called Pleasantville, which depicts an idyllic town where people are nice to each other, and things are going well. Basically, the opposite of his own life. 

For reasons that aren’t ever really explained, geeky David and his self-described “slut” sister Jennifer (played by Reese Witherspoon) are transported into the TV by a TV repairman (Don Knotts) and find themselves living in the black and white world of Pleasantville. 

For David, who is now called Bud by the townspeople, it’s a dream come true, and Pleasantville is every bit as pleasant as its name suggests. The basketball team never loses, and Main Street is perfect. Dad earns a living; Mom makes pot roast and takes care of her kids. The local diner only serves cheeseburgers, and dating mostly revolves around whether or not to hold hands. 

No one is ever hurt, no one suffers, it doesn’t even rain. The fire department’s job is to get cats out of trees because no one has ever seen a house fire. People are happy, and everything runs perfectly. Always. Their only problem is that the entire world is black and white, except it’s not a problem because none of the residents notice. 

The Lusty Battle Against Boredom

So Pleasantville is paradise, but for Jennifer, who everyone now thinks is a girl named Mary Sue, it’s a hellhole. It’s a hellhole because she’s a slut and the town’s virtuous residents don’t want to have sex with her, because they’re committed to saving themselves for marriage.

So Jennifer sets out to destroy it all, because she’s really horny. Seriously, that’s Jennifer’s actual motivation in this movie. 

As a movie, Pleasantville wants to be a story about repression, about how nostalgia is a lie. It wants to be about how the “good old days” weren’t that good. Safe enough, predictable enough, but BORING and BORING, as everyone was previously screenwashed to believe by movies like The Graduate, is the worst. 

So Pleasantville frames Jennifer’s dedication to her libido as the result of boredom. Jennifer hates BORING because BORING doesn’t get her laid.

Pleasantville wants you to believe the black-and-white town is dystopian, but not because it’s cruel. It’s dystopian because it’s orderly. Because roles exist. Because people behave. And no one should have to behave because that’s BORING.

As Jennifer begins seducing virgins, colors start to appear in the black and white landscape of the town. Before long, it’s clear that intense pleasure and emotion cause the black and white to give way to vibrant technicolor. 

As color spreads, so does chaos. You’d think David would try to stop it, because he loves this place and loves what it represents. But he soon joins in destroying Pleasantville, seemingly unaware that he’s just recreating the world he left and didn’t like. 

Every Bad Californian Stereotype All At Once

It wasn’t part of the cultural lexicon back then, but David is a prototype of every real-life bad-transplant stereotype. You know the one: it frames out-of-towners as locusts who flee their state to avoid crime and overregulation, only to set about turning their new state into a copycat of the place they just left. 

In Pleasantville, David does it because he likes the attention, and (just like modern-day Californians) he knows he can always go back where he came from when he messes things up. So when colorizing things turns him into Technicolor Jesus in the eyes of attractive teenage townsfolk, David embraces it and basks in the reverie of a full-blown savior complex. The movie, of course, frames this as enlightenment, and when he gets violent in service of the town’s newfound hedonism, he’s rewarded with colorization.

Pleasure Framed As Man’s Only Reason For Living

It’s Bill Johnson, the owner of the local diner, who really accelerates the process. He’s played by Jeff Daniels as an empty shell, who only comes to life when confronted with color.

As Bill contemplates his place in the universe, he asks Bud/David to explain why he should bother making cheeseburgers. Bud is somehow unable to come up with an answer, either, and the viewer, along with Bill, is left to conclude that there is no value in what he does. This is obviously preposterous, and it’s the spot where the movie most clearly tips its hand. 

Bill and Bud have somehow forgotten that Bill feeds the town, provides a local hangout for teens, and earns a living, which allows him to keep a roof over his head. The diner and his cheeseburgers are a focal point for the entire community, but Pleasantville hand-waves that away as valueless because it isn’t hedonistic.

This is a blatant example of Agenda Setting.

Agenda Setting To Shape Perception

Agenda Setting is a propaganda technique in which a communicator shapes public perception by controlling which issues, values, or considerations are treated as important, while ignoring or excluding others. By determining what topics are discussed and what reasons are considered legitimate, agenda-setting influences the conclusions audiences reach without directly arguing for them.

Using this technique, Pleasantville presents a world where only immediate self-gratification has meaning, and hard work serves no purpose. So Bill closes the diner and starts giggling over colors and banging Bud’s Mom, who has decided to start cheating on his loyal, hard-working father for no reason other than pure hedonistic pleasure. 

Eventually, it all comes to a head when Bill Johnson turns the town’s wholesome teen hangout into a pornographic display. The townspeople, who’ve politely minded their own business up til now, reasonably object to lewd images of naked residents publicly displayed on a building that used to be a safe place for kids, and then the film frames them all as monsters who hate beauty. 

Selling Hedonism With The Aesthetic Halo Effect

Pleasantville positions Bill’s lewd grooming of minors as morally righteous, and sells literally everything that happens in the movie using something called The Aesthetic Halo Effect. 

The Aesthetic Halo Effect is a cognitive bias in which the perceived beauty, style, or artistic presentation of a person, idea, or action causes observers to assume it is virtuous, truthful, or justified. Attractive visuals or pleasing design act as a moral shortcut, transferring positive judgment from appearance to substance.

In the case of Bill’s pornographic mural, it’s painted in stunning, bright technicolor in a town where everything is gray and dreary. It’s totally inappropriate, but also a beautiful display, and as a viewer, your brain automatically associates beauty with good, skipping over the fact that it’s literally adult material being thrust in the face of small children.

This works for the same reason data shows that attractive people are more likely to get good jobs and earn more money than unattractive people. It’s why you bought that pretty girl at the bar a drink last week, and didn’t buy one for her ugly friend.

So over the course of the movie, Pleasantville becomes a place of pleasure-seeking dopamine addicts, and when a few black and white residents try to slow things down through reasonable regulation, the film shames them with a courtroom scene deliberately ripped straight out of To Kill A Mockingbird, meant to frame the objectors as no better than evil racists arguing against Gregory Peck.

Pleasantville Triggers A Pavlovian Response

So, of course, the audience sides with the hedonists, because every betrayal, moral lapse, and sin committed by them results in more color on the screen. And in a theater, staring at a black-and-white world, color becomes the ultimate reward. 

This is Affective Conditioning.

Affective conditioning is a psychological process in which a neutral behavior, idea, or object is repeatedly paired with positive or negative emotional cues, causing people to develop the same emotional attitude toward it.

The most well-known example of this is Pavlov’s dog. Ivan Pavlov was a Russian Psychologist who trained dogs by ringing a bell before feeding them. After repeated pairings, the dogs began salivating at the bell alone, proving that a neutral signal can be conditioned to trigger a reflex. In the process, he discovered that it was possible to condition nearly anyone to do anything, using variations of this technique.

That’s classical conditioning. Affective Conditioning is a variation on Pavlov’s technique in which someone is conditioned to specific emotional attitudes rather than autonomic responses. By rewarding you with exceptionally beautiful imagery whenever someone commits a morally questionable act, Pleasantville conditions its audience to share in its hedonism. 

That’s why you never feel bad for Bud’s father when he’s cheated on and abandoned, because it’s the cheating betrayal of his wife that results in some of the movie’s most stunning and beautiful colors. You can’t hear the reasonable arguments of the black and white men in the bowling alley, because you crave more color, and the only way to get it is by having Bill plaster the town in nude photos.

How Reese Witherspoon’s Jennifer Affirms Hedonism As Optimal

You might think Jennifer’s character arc contradicts all of this, but it’s actually a key part of completing and affirming it. Unlike everyone else, Jennifer begins the movie as a hedonist. She then introduces sex, temptation, and emotional intensity into Pleasantville. That’s the spark that breaks the town’s rigid system and starts the color spreading.

In propaganda terms, Jennifer is the catalyst, the outsider who destabilizes the old order. Once that system collapses, the movie no longer needs her to keep pushing chaos.

So the story reframes her. She becomes intellectual, thoughtful, and studious. The message shifts from hedonism to self-actualization. The idea is that once people are “freed” from repression by pleasure seeking, they can pursue higher things: art, literature, education, and personal identity.

This solves a messaging problem. If the movie only showed sex and rebellion, the change might look shallow or destructive. By turning Jennifer into a reader who wants to go to college, the film reframes upheaval as progress toward enlightenment.

In persuasion terms, it’s a two-step structure:

• Destabilize the old culture through Jennifer’s early influence.
• Legitimize the new one as intellectually superior through Jennifer the scholar.

Jennifer isn’t rejecting the transformation of Pleasantville. She’s proof that the transformation somehow produced a better kind of person, even though that makes no sense at all in the context of what happens in the film. 

By the final act, the town is half monochrome, half Technicolor, a visual civil war. They’re all on a path toward eventual chaos and ruin, but you’re fully on the side of the colors.

How Pleasantville Influenced Millennials

Pleasantville is a beautifully made film. Its effects were groundbreaking for the time. Its performances are earnest. But it’s not neutral. It’s not just “about feelings.” It’s a manifesto about how to view the past and how to behave in the future.

Except it didn’t work, not at first. Gen X, coming into its own and swimming in the high-energy, high-ambition early days of the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, had no patience for a movie selling hedonism and chaos. Despite a slick marketing campaign and a lot of slobbering praise from critics, the movie flopped at the box office. Gen X wanted nothing to do with it.

It was Millennials, too young to see it in theaters in the 90s, who eventually embraced it. Through heavy rotation on cable and strong DVD sales in the early 2000s, they encountered Pleasantville as teenagers with underdeveloped brains. Its central visual idea, a black-and-white 1950s television town gradually turning to color as characters break social rules and express themselves, made it an easy metaphor for the individuality and rebellion against conformity that had already been planted by other forms of screenwashing. 

The movie ends with David returning home to the real world, where he finds his mother at the kitchen table, sobbing and lamenting her terrible life choices. She wants to make things better. Don’t bother David tells her, life isn’t supposed to be anything. Just accept whatever it is. 

That’s the real message of Pleasantville. Stop trying, stop striving, seek pleasure. Whatever happens happens. Roll over and take it. Expect nothing and seek only pleasure.

Congratulations, hedonist millennials, you’ve been Screenwashed.