Summary
As the tree lights on fire outside the house, David notices and runs to inspect it. Frightened, he runs to the fire station yelling "Fire!" but the firemen are in the conference room sitting idly and reading the newspaper. At first, they do not respond to the word fire, but when David says "cat" instead, they rush to help.
When they arrive at the house, the firemen stare in awe at the fire, unaware of what to do. David puts the hoses in their hands and teaches them how to put out the fire.
The scene shifts to David being given a special medal for his heroism in putting out the fire. The townspeople clap as the mayor awards him. On his way home from the ceremony, a girl from school, Margaret, comes up to Bud and offers him some oatmeal cookies she made. David tries to correct her based on his knowledge of the television show, telling her that she actually baked the cookies for Whitey, but she insists that she baked them for him. When she becomes more insistent, David eventually accepts the cookies.
Walking into the soda shop, David sees a couple kissing out front, and both of them are completely colorful now—their skin, their clothes, everything. Inside, Dave Brubeck is playing on the jukebox and a number of the teenagers are colorful. They all go silent as David comes in, and Jennifer walks over to tell her brother that the Pleasantville kids want to ask him a question.
They ask David how he knew how to put out the fire, and he tells them, "Where I used to live, that's just what firemen did." They ask him where he lived, and he tells them he lived outside of Pleasantville, which causes a stir.
After David assures them that it doesn't matter, Margaret steps forward and asks, "What's outside of Pleasantville?" After a moment, David begins to tell them about other places, saying, "There are some places where the road keeps going." One of the teenagers pulls out a copy of Huckleberry Finn, and refers to the fact that in it, there is the mighty Mississippi River. "I thought the books were blank," David says, confused.
Jennifer steps forward and tells David that while she was recounting the plot of the novel to the other teenagers, the pages of the book filled in, "but only up until the part with the raft, because that's as far as [she] read." The teens ask David to tell them how the novel ends, and he tells them. As he does, the pages fill in. Another teenager brings him Catcher in the Rye, and he begins to describe its plot.
A group of men in the barbershop, all still black-and-white, look out at the teenagers who have now become colorful. "Going up to the lake is one thing, but going to a library? What's next?" one of them asks, worried.
The mayor goes to visit George to talk to him about the changes that have taken place in town. He alludes to the fact that Bill Miller's wife wants to get a full-sized bed for them to share, a piece of gossip that shocks George. He then tells him that someone who works at the grocery store quit. "If you love a place, you can't just sit back and watch this kind of thing happen, now, can you?" the mayor asks, before inviting George to become a member of the Pleasantville chamber of commerce. George is flattered and agrees.
When the mayor asks to try some of Betty's pineapple kabobs, George calls to her, but she does not answer. David comes out of the kitchen and offers to get her. Betty is at the sink, seemingly upset, and when David goes to ask her what's wrong, she turns to reveal that she is now colorful. "What am I going to do?" she asks, frightened.
As she sobs, David asks if she has makeup, before applying some to her face. As he does, she goes back to black-and-white. George keeps calling, and Betty brings out the kabobs.
The next day at the soda shop, David arrives early and gives Bill an art book. Bill opens it, marveling at the nude paintings, and stopping on a Titian painting, then a Van Gogh, then a Picasso, and various others.
After looking at the book, Bill is sad, telling David that he will never be able to paint like that, since he will never see colors like the painters in the book did. "I'll bet they don't know how lucky they are," he says.
Later, David goes to Margaret and asks her out. When she says yes, he is ecstatic, jumping over fences and hooting with joy. Arriving home, David is surprised to see the television repairman on the TV screen. The repairman tells him he is willing to reconsider David's request to return to his real life, then expresses his concern about the ways that the show has been diverging from the script. Anxiously, David turns off the television.
Upstairs, David goes to Jennifer in her room, where he is surprised to find her reading D.H. Lawrence. "How come I'm still in black-and-white?" she asks him, adding, "I've had 10 times as much sex as the rest of these girls, and I still look like this." David suggests that perhaps it's not just the sex.
David and Margaret drive to Lover's Lane, as "At Last" by Etta James plays on the radio. While they are in black and white, the petals from the trees surrounding them are a beautiful pale pink and they are falling into the car. At Lover's Lane, nearly everything and everyone are colorful, and most couples are reading to one another.
The scene shifts, and we see Betty walking through town, before noticing a large painting on the window of the soda shop. It's a cubist rendering of Santa Claus, evidently done by Bill. Betty comes into the shop, where she finds Bill painting. He invites her in to look at his paintings, and then shows her some of the paintings from the book David gave him. His favorite is Picasso's "Weeping Woman."
When Betty notes that the woman in the painting is crying, she cries as well, and wipes away some of her makeup by accident. She starts to flee the soda shop, but Bill stops her and wants to look at her color. He wipes more of it away.
At home, Jennifer reads more of her book and puts on a sweater when a breeze comes in through the window. As she reads more, she is surprised to realize that she needs glasses.
Analysis
David and Jennifer's presence in Pleasantville slowly chips away at the standards and strictures of the conventional little community. By virtue of having their own thoughts that are not dictated by the script of the show, David and Jennifer are inherently disruptive to "business as usual." After Jennifer tells her "mother," Betty, about masturbation, the thrill of Betty's sexual pleasure leads to a nearby tree going up in flames, which in turn leads to David teaching the fire station how to properly put fires out. As they become more integrated in the community, we see that the modern teenagers' presence in Pleasantville has the potential to start both literal and figurative fires, to completely rearrange the community's sense of propriety and appropriateness.
The imagery of this disruption to the Pleasantville community—the change from black-and-white to color—makes literal the changes that are happening. The image of a fire burning bright orange in the midst of a black-and-white world, with townspeople crowded around it in awe, serves as a symbolic centerpiece for the shifts taking place in town. As desire and erotic energy bubble up among the people of Pleasantville, color bursts forth, unable to hide itself or simply blend in as it once did.
As life changes more and more in Pleasantville, David and Jennifer find that with erotic and sexual awakenings come other kinds of awakenings, such as a sense of life outside of Pleasantville, and an interest in literature and the arts. One day, David comes into the soda shop to find all of the Pleasantville teenagers curious about hearing the end of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, whose pages have magically filled in after Jennifer recounted what she remembered of the first half. In the magical logic of the film, the bodily liberation that the teenagers in Pleasantville feel is linked to the liberation of their minds and the development of novel curiosities about what lies beyond the picket fences and picture-perfect world of Pleasantville.
The sense that there is a world outside Pleasantville causes excitement for some, but for others it becomes a source of stress. When she turns colorful, Betty Parker is ashamed and enlists David to help her cover up her colorful skin with makeup. Then, when David gives the soda shop manager Bill a book about art history, he is mournful about the fact that he will never see the same kinds of colors that the artists in the book did. Awareness of a world larger than Pleasantville also has the effect of making certain characters realize that Pleasantville is too small to contain their desires and ambitions, a realization that causes them some shame and dismay.
Just as David is beginning to feel more used to his life in Pleasantville, and excited about the fact that he is changing people's perspectives in the town, he is visited by the television repairman. The repairman warns him not to veer too far off-script, as it is changing the plots of the reruns that are appearing on television, and offers to reconsider David's request to return to his modern life. However, Pleasantville has begun to pay off for David and Jennifer—David's gifts are getting recognized by his classmates, and Jennifer is becoming a more curious, introspective person—so neither of them wants to return to the 1990s anymore.
