Pleasantville, USA

When the frontier was declared finally closed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1890, the underlying idea of nation and unity solidified into the minds of 63 million Americans. Together with the fast industrialization and urbanization that followed, the nostalgic notion of a rural past grew stronger and became associated with the iconography and the perceived values of small-town Americana. In this course, we view and discuss how cinema has idealized and exploited this notion and even contributed in different ways to the numerous revivals of the small-town milieu with Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Paper Moon (1973), and Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). While many of these small-town films often downplayed the socioeconomic struggles as well as the restrictions encountered by women and minorities in many of those communities, others have used a more critical or satirical thought-provoking approach, such as Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), and Groundhog Day (1993). Our discussion analyzes the portrayal of the American small-town from different perspectives, including the dangers of the politics of nostalgia that a film like Pleasantville (1988) tried to warn us about almost 40 years ago.