Week 6.1: The Pleasantville and the Performances of Everyday Life - NGUYEN KIM CHI (응웬김찌)
This week’s video, Analyzing Pleasantville with Sociological Dramaturgy, offered a completely new way to view the 1998 film Pleasantville. I had seen the movie before and remembered it as a clever satire about the 1950s, but I hadn’t really looked at it through a sociological lens especially not through the ideas of Erving Goffman. After watching the video and revisiting parts of the movie, I realized how powerfully it illustrates Goffman’s theory of social life as performance.
Stepping Into the Script
In Pleasantville, two modern teenagers, David and Jennifer, are magically transported into a black-and-white 1950s sitcom world where everyone follows strict social rules. Everything is pleasant, clean, polite, and predictable but also incredibly repressive. At first, the characters go along with the "script" of the town, mirroring what Goffman would call "front stage" behavior. On the front stage, people play roles that society expects: the doting mother, the hard-working father, the well-behaved teenager. In this world, everyone is performing the roles they’ve been given, and there’s no space for individuality or deviation.
But as David and Jennifer begin to act differently questioning rules, expressing real emotions, and introducing new ideas they (and the townspeople around them) begin to change. Quite literally, they start turning from black-and-white into color. This transformation is more than just visual it symbolizes people stepping out of rigid performances and into their authentic selves.
Goffman in Technicolor
The movie is full of Goffman’s concepts. For example, impression management is everywhere. Betty Parker, David’s TV mom, tries to maintain her role as the perfect housewife, even as she begins to feel and think differently. She hides her new identity her literal color with makeup, afraid of being rejected by her husband and neighbors. This reminded me of how we all sometimes hide parts of ourselves to fit in socially.
Another strong Goffmanian element is the contrast between front stage and back stage spaces. In public, people in Pleasantville are perfectly polite and proper. But behind closed doors or in private moments they begin to reveal curiosity, frustration, and desire. Jennifer, for example, has a romantic relationship that forces her to challenge the town’s unspoken rules, and in doing so, she unlocks her own intellectual side, choosing to stay behind and go to college. These are “back stage” revelations that eventually disrupt the town’s entire performance.
What’s also fascinating is how the entire community has a shared definition of the situation they all agree (or pretend to agree) on what’s normal, what’s right, and what should happen next. When that agreement begins to fall apart, the town struggles to maintain its image. There are even scenes of pushback and fear, where people try to “restore order” by banning books, targeting those who’ve turned to color, and enforcing old social codes.
From Social Control to Self-Expression
Watching Pleasantville this way made me think about how real life works the same way, just more subtly. In our everyday lives, we’re constantly navigating roles student, friend, sibling, coworker—and adjusting our behavior based on who’s watching. Goffman believed the “self” isn’t something fixed, but something we construct through interaction. That idea comes alive in the film as characters “find themselves” only when they step away from their social masks.
The movie also made me wonder about the cost of always performing. When does the performance become a cage? What happens when people don’t fit into the roles society expects—especially based on gender, race, class, or sexuality? In Pleasantville, those who turn to color face discrimination, violence, and shame very real social consequences for stepping outside the script. It reminded me that social norms can be comforting, but they can also be oppressive when they deny people the space to grow.
Why It Still Matters
Goffman wrote his ideas in the 1950s, and Pleasantville is set in that same era but both feel extremely relevant today. We still live in a world of performances, maybe more than ever thanks to social media. We carefully curate what others see, often maintaining a “front stage” version of our lives for public consumption. Just like the residents of Pleasantville, we may struggle to be real when the pressure to conform is so strong.
What I loved most about the film is that it doesn’t just critique conformity it celebrates transformation. The shift from black-and-white to color is emotional, poetic, and symbolic. It reminds us that embracing complexity, emotion, and change is what makes life vibrant and meaningful.
Final Thoughts
Pleasantville is more than a clever movie it’s a visual essay on identity, performance, and the courage it takes to break free from social expectations. Through Goffman’s lens, we can see how people shape and are shaped by the roles they perform. Watching the movie with that understanding made me appreciate it on a much deeper level and reminded me that sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is to stop acting and start living in full color.
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