Pleasantville

While Pleasantville is an idyllic town in many ways, a place where everything is pleasant and no one is ever dissatisfied, its "pleasantness" is held together by repression. The citizens of the town are satisfied precisely because they repress any desire. No one in the town has sex, no one wonders about what is beyond the limits of Pleasantville, and the books are completely without words. As David and Jennifer integrate more into the Pleasantville community, they teach the citizens to let go of their repressive impulses and to access their true desires.

The citizens of Pleasantville have to stick to a very specific script, as they are not real at all, but characters in a sitcom. The "script" refers both to the synopsis of Pleasantville the show, as well as the social scripts that people subscribe to in a small, conservative society. For instance, Bill does not know how to do his job at the soda shop without David because he has no access to his own independent thoughts, and George nearly short circuits when Betty does not have dinner ready for him on the table after he gets home from work. These scripts seem to make everything in Pleasantville pleasant, but they are also oppressive and limiting, and do not allow for individuals to make their own decisions about their destinies.