- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 1998
- Country/ies:
- US
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Author(s)/Director(s):
- Gary ROSS
- Best Performance(s):
- Joan ALLEN
- Reese WITHERSPOON
- Premiss:
- A perfect town full of perfect White people - apparently there is no escape, except via Technicolor.
- Theme(s):
- Alienation
- Original Sin
- Personal change
- Political Correctness
- Self-expression
- Sexual Repression
- White culture
- White guilt
- White supremacy
- Similar (in Plot, Theme or Style) to:
- Fahrenheit 451
- Matter of Life & Death
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Truman Show
- Wizard of Oz
- Review Format:
- DVD
Fun film, with acting and wit that saves the day.
However, this a a poorly-thought-through comedy about the peculiarly-insular nature of White culture in its ever-present need to bolster White supremacy by pretending that they are above mere mortals. They do this by not mentioning any issue that could conceivably make them look like mere humans. These are the usual orificial suspects of sexual pleasure, urination & defecation, which also includes the belief that there is nothing outside their culture that, is worth knowing about. The visual analogue to all this is the fact that much of this movie is rendered in Black & White; appropriately conveying an overall social grayness and drabness on the proceedings. The most telling aspect is the fact that books in the local library have blank pages and the special effects become more of the story than they should be to compensate for the thin characterization.
Where this film inevitably fails is in not developing its theme so that the White near-panphobia is clearly understood as a requirement of White supremacy. Without this, a colorfully-diverse approach to life would place Whites on an equality with other cultures - just one ethnicity among many - a blow to the White ego that is shown here but not dramatically explored.
This failure is compounded by the fact that people who have no experience of something would find some difficulty labeling or doing it. Yet, oddly, colors are correctly labeled by people who have only ever seen black, white or gray; sex is performed despite the lack of need (along with the non-existence of toilets: Proving genitals do not exist); &, rain being known-of despite it never having rained before (& the peculiar presence of umbrellas in such a world).
Whites are suggesting that they live in a culture from which they must escape - does this explain why they have so many self-created social problems? Are they really so scared of living an emotional life that may take them to places undreamed of? Or to places their coevals would disapprove of? This movie resoundingly says 'Yes' to the cultural trap Whites have gotten themselves into! For Whites, paradise is a world without any suspect emotions that could possibly lead them astray to live a non-robot life. One is very much reminded of the White book-burning of the 1930s given that the fireman here are more concerned to burn the works of Salinger, Lawrence & Twain than they are to actually put out fires.
Copyright © 2014 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute this posting in any format; provided mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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