Is ‘Life the Movie’ Better Than the Real Thing?

The basic conceit of the new movie “Pleasantville” is that the chirpy world of 1950s TV sitcoms actually extended beyond its allotted half-hour time slot, existing as a full-fledged utopia. Here the inhabitants performed their daily routines and played their assigned roles unruffled by strife or ideas or art or emotion or passion--in short, by the stuff of real life. It seems too perfect, but as it turns out, citizens don’t know what they’re missing as they follow their bliss. When two contemporary teenagers are magically zapped into “Pleasantville,” they bring with them both the mess and beauty of reality, discombobulating the community but also leavening it with the richness of life.

At least that’s the movie’s premise. In truth, though, many Americans would probably find the lack of books or paintings or emotions a relatively small price to pay for the serenity “Pleasantville” offers. In fact, a good many Americans seem to be searching for ways to make their lives more closely approximate the fantasies purveyed by movies and television shows. How else to explain the popularity of Martha Stewart, who seems to have popped right out of “Pleasantville”?

In a sense, the movie has it all wrong. The problem isn’t that the Pleasantvillians have too little reality; as an increasing number of Americans see it, the problem is that we have too much.

Nearly 40 years ago, the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, in his path-breaking book “The Image,” was already lamenting that Americans lived in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality.”

What was true then has become even truer now. Having satisfied most of our material needs, we have, in true Darwinian fashion, shifted our focus to our psychological needs. We want to live well in the fullest sense. We want our lives to match our vision of the good life, itself largely a product of the media. We want to have the right clothes, the right car, the right house, the right job, the right spouse, the right children, even the right toothpaste: “right” meaning the ones that complete our self-image. In effect, we want our lives not only to resemble a movie; we want our lives to be a movie.

This phenomenon was what sociologist David Riesman was describing in his classic study “The Lonely Crowd,” when he coined the term “other-directed” to identify a new type of individual whose self-esteem derived from his ability to please others. It was also what Christopher Lasch was describing in his landmark book “The Culture of Narcissism,” when he wrote, “To the performing self the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture . . . . Life becomes a work of art.”

The reflex among social critics always has been to view this process of life performance and the attendant loss of authenticity as yet another example of the imminent decline of Western civilization. One can certainly see why. It is difficult not to agree with those who think that the transmutation of what we once called “character” into what we now call “personality,” of the life unself-consciously lived into the life calculatedly constructed, is a horrible thing that trivializes us.

As these critics see it, life is not a lark, and its end is not pleasure alone. Life is a difficult and complicated enterprise. It entails joy but also suffering, gain but also loss, hope but also despair. Yet, whatever pain these might inflict, one shouldn’t wish away the suffering, loss and despair even if one could. One needs them in order to be fully and feelingly alive. To deny them would be to deny the process of one’s humanization as well as the full range of human experience. To deny them would be to deny life itself.

It is a position that resonates in the greatest works of art, one reason why “Pleasantville” ’s books are all blank-paged. No suffering there! Nonetheless, there is weight on the other side of the argument, too--the side that argues life should be more like the movies--and it warrants examination because it is seldom discussed and when it is, is casually dismissed.

In this view, even if the “performed life” serves only as a way to bring excitement to the otherwise dull routines and patterns of our own lives, as movies temporarily do, they may perform an invaluable psychological service. Montaigne, believing in a kind of ontological unhappiness that afflicts us all, also believed that nature equipped man to relieve it “bysupplying our imagination with other and still other matters” we could use as distractions.

Creating an imaginative life for ourselves, a movie of our own devising into which we can jump the way Buster Keaton jumps into the screen in “Sherlock, Jr.,” may be the best way yet to relieve that unhappiness. “If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves, we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies,” critic Pauline Kael once wrote, without realizing that many Americans were learning how to make decent lives for themselves out of the conventions the movies had provided.

By treating life as if it were a movie, one might not only escape from it by escaping into it; one might actually impose some kind of narrative order on life that would make it less terrifying and more manageable. Indeed, the psychologist Shelley E. Taylor, after conducting a study of individuals who had successfully adapted to some traumatic event in their lives, and after surveying the general public, found that those who were most successful, most creative, most in control of their lives, most well-adjusted, above all, happiest were those who had learned to operate within what Taylor called “positive illusions.” These were not, Taylor hastened to add, delusions, which she defined as being directly contradicted by one’s experience, and they were not a form of denial. Rather, positive illusions were more like embellishments or exaggerations. They were the best spin one could put on the plot one hoped to play.

The tension between these views--between the idea of a rich, complex life and a perfect, painless one--is more than a simple difference of opinion. It may well be the central debate of the coming century, one that may define what the nation becomes. In 1900, on the threshold of the 20th century, the historian Henry Adams saw a new era in which the spiritual power of the virgin, which had governed man’s affairs for centuries, surrendered to the new industrial power of the dynamo, signaling the triumph of machine over religion. As we stand at the threshold of another century, we may be seeing a new era in which reality is surrendering to what we might call “postreality”--the fabrication of life.

The great cultural debate that looms, then, is the debate between humanness and happiness, between those who believe that a clear-eyed appreciation of the human condition is necessary to be human and those who believe that glossing reality and even transforming it into a movie are perfectly acceptable strategies if these make us happier. The controversy over Prozac and other antidepressants--could a happiness induced by pharmacology be better than a less euphoric state that was natural?--was an early skirmish in the war and a template for it.

Now, so many other deep cultural tensions in America--between art and conventional entertainment, between traditional journalism and the new news of sensationalism, between old-fashioned ward politics and the politics of “feel good,” between heroes and celebrities, between biological naturalists and genetic engineers--resolve themselves into a similar question: Is reality, as it was traditionally construed, morally, aesthetically and epistemologically preferable to postreality? Or: Is life, as traditionally construed, preferable to the movie version of life?

There are no simple answers, which is what threatens to make the debate so grueling and fierce. Either we stand on a precipice facing the end of traditional human values or we stand in a bright new dawn facing the beginning of a brave new world. Our own “Pleasantville” awaits, but what will we lose if we go?*