Suburban Nightmares and Pathological Parodies.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Review

THE DEBUNKING of suburban life in postwar America has become something of a fixation of the cinema since the Reagan era. More accurately, that fixation appears to be the depiction of suburbia by 1950s TV. At times, the focus on this subject seems obsessive, as if the image of American society portrayed in "Leave It to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" represents a crime against post-1950s generations somewhat equivalent to child abuse, even as these same shows enjoy a campy popularity, recycled on various cable venues.

The Reagan period is cited as a starting point for this obsession since that moment seemed for many to be about throwing mass culture in reverse. With Reagan's "morning in America" rhetoric, it appeared that "Leave It to Beaver" father Ward Cleaver had made it to the White House, reassuring Americans that everything was peachy-keen, even as the previous 20 years of history, and the Vietnam War in particular, said otherwise. Films such as David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" (1986) began the trend of exposing the "underbelly of middle-class life" (a phrase repeated ad nauseum by reviewers), suggesting that behind the white picket fence is a hothouse of pathologies.

Two very disparate 1998 pictures revisit suburban territory. Garry Ross' "Pleasantville" takes viewers directly to the villainous sitcoms of the 1950s, while Todd Solondz's "Happiness" seems about postmodernity as the end product of the moralistic assumptions favored by postwar pop culture and by neoconservative advocates of retro morality.

In "Pleasantville," a disaffected teen (Tobey Maquire) tries to escape the dysfunctional 1990s by fixating on the black-and-white world of his favorite baby boom sitcom, "Pleasantville." He is about to enjoy a weekend marathon of the show on the TV Time cable channel when a row with his Generation X sister (Reese Witherspoon) results in a smashed remote control. Suddenly, a mysterious, but affable, television repair man (Golden Age TV icon Don Knotts) shows up at the front door with a space age remote that zaps the two teens into the show, where they become "Bud" and "Mary Sue," the children of an Ozzie-and-Harriet-like duo played by William Macy and Joan Allen. The rest of the film is about how the teenagers turn the black-and-white world of the show to color by teaching the cardboard characters the meaning of emotion.

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of rhyme or reason to this movie, although its elaborate computer-generated...