Pleasantville

The other day while over a friend’s house we started watching the movie Pleasantville. At first I thought it looked terrible and was actually about to leave when I realized that the whole movie was based on the functionalist perspective of sociology. The movie was about a brother and sister from the 90’s who get zapped into the 50’s television show Pleasantville where everything is perfect and nothing ever goes wrong. Throughout the movie …

…Pleasantville, as ridiculous as it was, demonstrated a functionalist point of view. It showed that things like anger, sex and fire, however terrible they may seem, actually serve a function. Although I would not recommend the movie, it was an interesting idea and has some good special effects along with funny scenes. Applying the functionalist view to the movie made it more interesting and had me thinking about what the function of certain things are.