RE: Trailer Trash 45, pt 3

/// B for Bridging Banter section, these sections aren't finishing to 'polished-enough-for-reading' grade in order, but pt A should be up in the next few days. Spoilers for the 1998 Pleasantville movie ahead.

   The first stage of celebrations began at noon, with everyone meeting up at the Sandboro theater complex. While most of their large Team Tabitha group sat in and watched Pleasantville with Tobey Macguire and Reese Witherspoon in its final week of its theatrical run, a few who’d already seen it split off to catch a different screening. Matthew and Casey wound up shepherding Tabitha’s four cousins over to instead see Adam Sandler in The Waterboy, which, while also PG-13, seemed more appropriate for holding the boy’s attention.

   The trip out to where the rest of the birthday celebration would actually be turned out to be a long one, a destination just shy of an hour’s drive away—but thankfully Mrs. Macintire and the three teenage girls had plenty to talk about on the drive out to Florence, Kentucky.

   “Golly, It was really good!” Sandra couldn’t stop smiling. “Thought I’d hate it, because the trailers on TV made it seem so—well, you know. Artsy.”

   “Gosh darn, you’re right,” Alicia laughed. “That sure was a swell movie.”

   “The keenest!” Tabitha said.

   “Uh… gee whiz?” Elena delivered in her best gothic deadpan.

   “It was good, though,” Tabitha agreed from the passenger’s seat. “The acting was amazing and the casting was outstanding. Great cinematography, too. Color grading. But, at the same time—it’s… hmm. I don’t know.”

   “It was cool,” Alicia decided. “It was a lot of things. I thought at first the use of color and black and white would be real gimmicky, and it kinda was, but then what they actually did with it, and like, the way it told its own story just at a glance from scene to scene, that was really well done! Also just—no offense guys—white people 1960s stuff was just creepy as hell.”

   “1950s, you mean,” Mrs. Macintire laughed. “The swingin’ sixties was Kennedy, Vietnam. Hippies and flower power. Very very different eras. You’re not wrong about how creepy some of the stuff in that movie was, though! That one bit where Bud goes into the kitchen to find the mom? Like, when the dad was entertaining the mayor guy? Everything was all quiet and still and even before the Mom turns around, you can just tell something’s gone really, really wrong. Dreadful! Gave me chills!”

   “Yeah, that part was really good,” Alicia said. “Elena? What’d you think?”

   “It’s a lot to process,” Elena admitted. “I liked the mom. Like, right in that kitchen scene you’re talking about—her acting was really incredible. She was just so clearly terrified and she kept trying to force up that smile, because that’s all she knew how to do—”

   “Oh, yeah!” Tabitha chimed in. “She went from the flattest, most cardboard cutout non-entity of a character to having so much depth that I was really surprised.”

   “So, you liked it?” Mrs. Macintire beamed.

   “Yes and no,” Tabitha pursed her lips. “Pleasantville really excelled in what it was trying to do—just, it also felt like a lot of the time they were so focused on putting all the focus on a certain scene or certain allegory that they did so at the expense of… you know, the logic, the internal consistency of the story. All of the allegory was well done, but you can’t say they weren’t real heavy-handed in how thick they heaped it all on. At the expense of some of the narrative.”

   “Oh?” Alicia’s eyebrows rose.

   “Like—and this is just one example,” Tabitha twisted in her seat so she could better see the two friends behind her. “That bit where the husband gets home, closes the door, and the lights are off. Thunder rumbles menacingly. Horror movie vibes; there’s no dinner. He’s at this complete and total loss. He wanders through the empty house, calling out ‘where’s my dinner,’ louder and louder, right?”

   “Yeah?” Alicia asked.

   “Well, the whole point of that scene was that he came home and the house was empty, and they tried to just clobber you over the head with that idea,” Tabitha held up a finger. “But, think about it. The house wasn’t empty. The sister—Mary Sue—was upstairs that whole time. We even get a shot mixed in of her standing at the window, reacting to the rainfall from that same storm.

   “She should have, no, would have come down at hearing him yell, and would’ve at least tried to be in character enough to calm the guy down and talk him through things. Or thrown together a quick dinner for him out of whatever they had there. We get emotional scenes with Bud and the Mom, but then there’s this great opportunity for them to do something similar with Mary Sue and the dad, and they just—don’t. It’s baffling.”

   “Huh,” Alicia said. “You’re right, she was there, wasn’t she?”

   “Sorta,” Elena spoke up. “The sister kinda just drops out of the story partway through, and then shows back up towards the end in a oh yeah, I’m still here too sorta way.”

   “Maybe they… yeah, they probably didn’t want you to even think about her too hard,” Tabitha shrugged. “She was kind of the villain, in my eyes. Her first hooking up with the basketball captain kid? Man, that was just not okay. He had the body of an eighteen-year-old, maybe, but right from the beginning they portrayed him as having this complete childlike innocence.

   “He wasn’t real, wasn’t like a complete person, he didn’t have even concepts of sex or any of that, and that bit at Lover’s Lane where she’s first seducing him? It’s like—it was terrifying, it’s like for a bit there, there was this real fear in his eyes, there was this total alien stuff being pushed on him from levels of reality beyond his ability to process, let alone consent to, and—it was just not okay.”

   “So, is that kinda how you think about…?” Alicia probed. “You know. Dating stuff? From what we talked about on the phone the other day?”

   “Ughh, ew, ew, uggghh,” Tabitha made a disgusted face and pantomimed gagging. “Don’t even go there. Ugghhhh. God, I hope not. I just—what the hell? Not cool, ‘Licia.”

   “What?” Elena looked from Tabitha to Alicia. “Dating stuff?”

   “It’s nothing,” Tabitha blew an errant tangle of red hair out of her face with an angry puff and then combed fingers through her hair in aggravation. “I’ll tell you later. Or never. Probably never. I don’t wanna talk about it.”

   “Well,” Sandra cleared her throat and tactfully changed the subject, “I didn’t like the dad guy. The husband. They tried real hard to make you feel sympathetic to him towards the end, but it’s like—no way, nope. After the whole where’s my dinner bit, and then him trying to lay down the law for his wife and tell her how things were gonna be? Nope, lost all my sympathy there and never got it back.”

   “I’m not sure that’s completely fair,” Tabitha argued. “You have to remember—he wasn’t a complete person. Like a lot of them, he was just these surface level parts of a person, suddenly thrust into the trials and tribulations of trying to be a whole person. When he was going ‘where’s my dinner’ it wasn’t out of anger or entitlement, or not completely, he was just at this total loss. Like a fish out of water.

   “He literally had no concept of dinner, outside it being something his wife made every single night, for the entirety of his existence. He didn’t have a past, or a childhood, or other experiences to draw from. It wasn’t just him not knowing how to cook, it was him not understanding those full concepts, because they weren’t written as part of his character from the original Pleasantville show. Even if he accidentally opened the refrigerator, or the pantry when looking for food and saw the uncooked stuff or the ingredients or whatever? He might not recognize that stuff for what it was. Not without having the wife or Bud or Mary Sue explain it to him.”

   “Hmm,” Mrs. Macintire mused with a skeptical shrug. “Maybe you’re right? I didn’t see it like that. Still don’t like him though, hah. Maybe it’s just the actor they chose?”

   “I can see what you’re saying with them all starting out as characters and not real people, exactly,” Elena said. “But also, the movie didn’t treat that very consistently. Like, the whole town made the leap in logic from ‘we have no idea what fire even is’ to ‘let’s have a nazi Germany-style book-burning’ within the span of a day or two.”

   “Ooh, yeah, that was another one of those,” Tabitha nodded. “Where logic goes out the window, because they want to pile on allegory for stuff that looks cool on screen. It did all look great, though.”

   “What? No way,” Alicia said. “I thought that made sense. As the days went on in town, books and knowledge and stuff started to like, fill in to match. It showed that. So, I thought every time something new to them was introduced, it like, soaked in and then became part of their reality.”

   “Hmm,” Tabitha copied Sanda’s doubtful tone. “I dunno about that.”

   “No, it has to be like that,” Alicia insisted. “Right towards the end, even, the sign to another town appeared and a 1960s style bus just like, materialized, out of nothing but… introduced concepts? Heck, the sister chick who stayed behind was going to some college that appeared in that reality out of nowhere, apparently.”

   “I guess you’ve got a point,” Tabitha conceded. “Fine.”

   “1950s bus,” Mrs. Macintire corrected. “I was born in the late sixties, and obviously I’m still young. So, the sixties can’t have been that long ago. Right?”

   “Golly, yes!”

   “Of course, Ma’am!”

   “Oh uh—obviously. Yeah. Gee whiz?”

   “Very funny, guys,” Mrs. Macintire rolled her eyes. “Should’ve had you all ride with Karen instead, then you’d be gettin’ the real history lessons. And she’d have you listening to the Beatles the whole time—also a sixties thing. So. Count your blessings.”

   “That song at the end of the movie was actually a Beatles cover,” Tabitha pointed out. “That was definitely Across the Universe.”

   “Yep, that does it. On the ride back, I’m stickin’ you guys with Karen,” Mrs. Macintire joked. “I’m not much of a Beatles fan, if you couldn’t tell.”

   “Sooo—” Tabitha quirked her lip into an awkward smile. “You grew up in the seventies, so you’re more… what, a Bee Gees kind of girl?”

   “Pffft, Jesus Christ, kid,” Sandra snorted. “Not only no, but hell no. I’m a Led Zeppelin kinda girl, all the way. Someone roll down the window and toss Miss Tabitha outta here, we’re gonna just go to her party without bein’ weighed down with all her bad taste.”

   “No no, Led Zeppelin is great, too!” Tabitha teased. “I, honestly, I enjoy all Oldies music. I’m not particular.”

   “Oldies? Ow. Ow,” The driver pulled a hand back from the steering wheel to clutch at her heart in mock pain. “Right where it hurts. What the hell, I don’t like you when you’re around your friends. You’re mean, girl. What happened to the nice and polite Tabitha, who’s so sweet around Hannah?”

   “It’s her birthday,” Alicia explained. “So, yeah. Birthday’s like a get out of jail free card.”

   “I’m actually really curious, Mrs. Macintire,” Elena spoke up. “If Pleasantville was like the fifties, and then the sixties was like hippies and Austin Powers—how did it get from there to there in only ten years? That seems so… drastic.”

   “Look at this, now you’re all being mean to poor Sandy!” Sandra complained. “I told you, I was born in late sixties. All of that was before my time! Go ask some dinosaur like Karen, she’ll have all your answers.”

   “Pleasantville wasn’t what the fifties were like, Pleasantville was a satirical take on what fifties sitcom television was like,” Tabitha gave them a wry smile. “Clean-cut, patriotic. Anything that didn’t sing the virtues of the nuclear family might as well be commie propaganda. What we saw with Pleasantville was blatant stereotype, sprinkled with the most anachronistic-to-us 1950s set dressing they could find, for flair. The super retro kitchen appliances, the grandma hairdos, poking fun of the weird fashion stuff of the era like those pointy vintage bullet bras, all that.”

   “It was still cool to see,” Alicia added. “Cool but creepy?”

   “I think as movies go, Grease was probably a more accurate depiction of the fifties,” Tabitha concluded. “Something like the aesthetic you’d expect all the way from Elvis exploding into popularity to how things look on The Brady Bunch.”

   “Oh—so, more like Bye Bye Birdie?” Elena asked. “My mom—”

   “Whaaat?!” Mrs. Macintire jumped back into the conversation. “No way, Grease was a straight-up seventies movie, that only put in this token effort at their fifties depiction. Happy Days is closer, but still has a bunch of seventies tells. Brady Bunch is flat out a seventies show, too—Tabby, your whole estimation there is like, twenty years off the mark.”

   “No, I mean like—they’re not accurate, they’re just more accurate than Pleasantville?” Tabitha spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “Closer to the reality?”

   “So, what era is That 70s Show supposed to be set in?” Alicia joked. “Kidding! It’s actually crazy to think about though, with how much everything changes from time to time. The way everything looks, the whole cultural side of that in general. I mean, the fifties was forty eight years ago. Can you even imagine how much different from now things will be in the future, like forty-eight years from now? Huh, Tabs, huh? What do you think?”

   “I… honestly don’t like to think about it at all,” Tabitha sniffed, turning again to make a face at her friend. “But, if I did consider it—well, I can only promise that we’ll all live to see man-made horrors beyond our comprehension.”

   “It’s gonna be okay, honey,” Sandra gave her a bitter smile. “No need to be that dramatic. I feel the same way every birthday, and look at me—I’m still young!”

   “Hey, as of today I’m fourteen,” Tabitha held up her hands in defense. “As far as I know, this is exactly how dramatic a fourteen year old girl should be.”