The Word and the Machine: On Paul Kingsnorth

In the opening scenes of Gary Ross’s 1998 film Pleasantville, the camera moves from classroom to classroom in a typical high school. In every room a teacher is telling the official story of the future to those who will have to inhabit it. It’s the usual catechism of facts and statistics; just one damned thing after another. There will be climate change; there will be no jobs; there will be famines; there will be no water; you’re probably going to be poor and die young. We are meant to understand why the movie’s protagonist spends all his free time watching episodes of an old Leave It To Beaver—type television show called Pleasantville, where none of this is true, and where, thanks to a magical remote control that sucks them into the TV, he and his sister end up living. In Pleasantville, the forecast on the radio is always the same (“70 degrees and sunny!”). Everything is perfect, so nothing ever changes. Predictably, this turns out to be the problem, and it becomes our hero’s duty to bring some color to their black-and-white world.