Summary
At Lover's Lane, Margaret asks David what it's like outside Pleasantville. He tells her it's a lot more dangerous, and she tells him that some teenagers went skinny dipping there the other night, before offering him some blueberries she picked.
Running to a tree nearby, she picks an apple and brings it to him. Back at the house, Skip throws pebbles at Jennifer's window and tells her that it's 6:30 and they had plans to have sex. She tells him she can't because she's busy studying and closes the window.
When George arrives home that evening, there is thunder outside and Betty is nowhere to be found. The scene shifts to the soda shop, where Bill is painting Betty. She gets up to observe the thunderstorm, then sees the painting he's made of her, shocked.
At Lover's Lane, it begins to rain very hard and Margaret gets frightened. They run to a small gazebo for shelter, where the other teenagers are huddled in fright. David goes out into the rain to show them that it's okay.
Meanwhile, George wanders around the house looking for Betty and his dinner. "Where's my dinner?" he says impatiently, before wandering out into the rain, miffed.
At the bowling alley, the mayor is surprised to see George wandering in, completely soaked and upset. He tells the men that when he got home, his wife wasn't there and his dinner wasn't ready. The men gasp at this news and they all resolve to fight back against whatever is happening in the town, lest all their wives begin to neglect their meal prep duties. "Something is happening to our town, and I think we can all see where it's coming from," Big Bob says, before inviting a man named Roy to show the men a burn from an iron on the back of his shirt. This mark signifies that his wife has been slacking at her domestic tasks, and the men gasp at the sight.
"It's a question of whether we want to hold on to those values that made this place great," the mayor says, and invites the men to fight together to regain their control of the women in the town. They begin chanting "Together!" As thunder crashes, we see flashes of the teenagers in the gazebo and of Betty kissing Bill in the soda shop.
The next morning, a rainbow hangs over Pleasantville. Bill and Betty wake up in the soda shop, both having turned colorful. The camera pans to reveal that the whole soda shop is now colorful. We then see Jennifer in her bed, also colorful. Margaret wakes up at Lover's Lane and is colorful, but when she looks over, David is still in black-and-white.
A sign in town announces a town meeting to be held that night at eight at the town hall. At home, Betty tells George that she was caught in the storm the night before and when George urges her to come to the town meeting, she tells him she's not going. He tries to reassure her that her color will go away, but she insists that she doesn't want it to. When he tells her that she has to come to the meeting and always be home at six when he gets home with dinner ready, she refuses. She tells him she made him a meatloaf and instructs him how to put it in the oven and then heat up a pie for dessert, before telling him she also made him a number of lunches for the coming days. "I'm going to go now," she says, leaving the house.
David gives his colorful girlfriend, Margaret, a new umbrella, a prop from the school play. As he does, Whitey drives up and asks David why he isn't at the town meeting. They tell him they are in charge of letting people know the meeting is going on, before making fun of Margaret for being colorful, laughing derisively.
At the meeting, the mayor addresses people's concerns about the rise in color in town. He proposes that they need to decide what is pleasant and what is not pleasant.
At the soda shop, Bill scrapes his mural off the window, before noticing that Betty is coming towards him with a suitcase. The next morning, the sky is blue over the town. A sign on a store reads, "No coloreds."
As a paperboy drives past the soda shop, he crashes his bicycle when he notices a mural on the window, a nude painting of Betty that Bill did. "That's Betty Parker, isn't it?" a woman asks, and a crowd gathers around the painting. David runs away from the crowd, and as he passes a television store, the repairman appears on the screen and calls him inside.
"You know, you don't deserve this place," the repairman says, scolding him for all the change that has taken place in the town. He tells David he has to bring him back to his real life, but David refuses and runs away from the store. As he leaves, he sees a group of high school boys surrounding Betty and heckling her. As they corner her, Whitey walks up to her, but David comes up and punches him in the face, a streak of red blood spilling out of Whitey's mouth. The boys disperse and Betty notices suddenly that David has turned colorful. They hug.
At the mural, a crowd is shouting angrily. Suddenly, one of the men of the town throws a rock through the window, shattering it, and the crowds cheer. Two other men come by and smash the windows and glass with a bench. Inside the soda shop, they destroy Bill's other paintings and raid the store. Watching from nearby, David assures a frightened Betty that Bill is no longer in the store. When he spots a frightened Margaret running down the street, he hugs her and assures her he'll take care of her.
That night, the conservative faction of the town burn the books in the town. Jennifer struggles with Skip, who wants to burn her D.H. Lawrence book. She snatches it out of his hands and makes a run for it, running into David, Margaret, and Betty on the way. They all go to the soda shop and observe the wreckage. All of them go into the soda shop, where Bill is tidying up. The teenagers and Betty set to work fixing up the soda shop.
Analysis
In Pleasantville, David and Jennifer seem almost to switch identities. While David becomes more socially involved and begins dating someone for the first time, Jennifer slowly begins to drift away from her sexual curiosity and become more interested in books and studying. In this way, Pleasantville teaches the two teenagers to explore new sides of themselves; just as the teenagers of Pleasantville learn that there is more than just the two streets of the town, Jennifer and David learn that they each have more to offer within the bounds of this fictional oasis.
With the changing morays of Pleasantville comes a backlash from the patriarchal structures that rule the town. In a rather comical turn of events, George realizes that he has lost control of his life once and for all when he returns home and finds no dinner on the table. The film satirizes male expectation of female servitude by making the most controversial event in the film the moment when a working man is not provided with dinner by a doting wife. The autonomy of a woman—more than the colorful objects, teenaged sex, and books—is the event most offensive to the group of men who run the town, and is what begins leads to real conflict.
After her night with Bill, Betty begins to feel more assured in her rebellion against the constraints of being a housewife. She returns home in full color, remorseless, and insists to her husband, George, that she will no longer be fulfilling her wifely duties just because he tells her to. Additionally, she tells him that she doesn't want to go back to black-and-white, and is proud of her colorfulness.
The town meeting separates the people who want to maintain the status quo and those who are choosing to go along with the changes that are occurring. While the terms of this division are fantastical in nature, based on whether or not people have become "colored" or not, the division can easily be read as a political allegory for the timeless struggle between conservative governance and progressive platforms. Those who embrace the color and curiosity of the changing town stand in for a forward-thinking political camp, one that encourages sexual experimentation, art-making, education, and women's liberation, while those who prefer the black-and-white existence represent the faction that fights to maintain the old order, a conservative and patriarchal vision for the world.
When Bill paints a nude mural of Betty on the window of the soda shop, violence breaks out for the first time in Pleasantville. The image, a simple rendering of the beauty of the female form, completely disrupts the town's central values. High-school boys corner Betty with an entitled sexual attitude, and screaming throngs destroy the mural. In this moment, we see that the conservative values of Pleasantville are not just about preserving the status quo, but also about hindering expression and keeping female sexuality at bay.
