Pleasantville

"Pleasantville" is an American movie from 1998 that has eeriely wound its way through my thoughts every so often during the years of the conglomerate's insane, sex-crazed tyranny.  I saw it in the theater and remember thinking, at the time, that although some of it was interesting the movie wasn't entirely convincing.

For people who haven't seen or heard of the movie, here's a synopsis:  contemporary, teenage siblings are transported into a black-and-white, 1950s television show and have to live in it.  They teach everyone in town about having feelings, mostly sexual feelings, being angry or doing everything that you feel like doing when you feel like doing it.  You know when someone has joined the club because he or she stops being black and white and turns Technicolor.  This turns the town upside down, but then everyone decides that it's more fun.

The male sibling, whose favorite show "Pleasantville" was, goes home to the 1990s.  He finally had a girlfriend, in the television show where he felt safe and was smarter than everyone else, so, you know, he's now ready for reality.  His sister decides to stay in the 1950s because she's "done the slut thing" in the 1990s, discovered studying exclusively white, male literature while in Pleasantville, has a bad grade point average in her former life, and thinks she'd be happier wearing girdles and poodle skirts.  There is no discussion of why she thinks that her former life is unsalvageable.

What I'm thinking about this morning is how little has changed since the 1950s.  Everything is still fine in the United States, in the entertainment industry, the media and everything that is media-driven.  Sexual harassment? It's fine.  Pedophilia? It's fine.  A subculture, which is actually the dominant culture, in which there can be hundreds of victims for years before something is done and even then the crisis continues?  It's fine.  We know who the villains are now; they're ugly, B-listers or gay, so that's fine.

There is no star of the entertainment industry who does not know that I am telling the truth about the voyeurism that is criminally victimizing unsuspecting people in Massachusetts every day: not one.  There are probably few people who are anywhere near the top levels of power in that industry who don't know that I'm telling the truth.

The media, with the exception of some journalists and publications who did what they could not to acquiesce, was a driving force behind the promotion of sexual crime from 2010 until 2017.  Its deafening silence about the issues of voyeurism, involuntary pornography, and the extent to which regular people have NO electronic privacy, is not a coincidence.  Many media sources are participating in these crimes.

Anyone who can hack the signals from the hidden cameras can have a live, video feed from those cameras.

One last thing about Pleasantville, the 1998 movie: then, as now, female sexuality is portrayed as being HILARIOUS, the funniest thing in the movie.