In Pleasantville
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sylvia Lawson
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Sylvia Lawson's biography and other articles by this writer
Sitting on the step
The accent gave her away. I asked: "How long have you been here?" Twenty years, she said, an English-Australian who always feels divided. "My children grew up here and they don't want to go back. They've been over there, they hated London."
"That's OK for them. What do you want now for yourself?"
Standard feminist question. The Saturday party was some hours old, in a big house not too far from town, but still a place with backyard and big verandas, vegetable garden, pumpkin vine running wild, and the park, more like a paddock, stretching away beyond the back fence. We watched small kids rioting round, yelling and chasing, safe enough with dog and tricycles.
Back in the kitchen, through the previous hour, there'd been a lot of talk and some wry laughter about a certain quixotic young person's attempt to organise a freedom ride to an outback detention centre. The authorities had given her very short shrift. It was never going to happen; and, of course, she'd planned to shoot video film inside the razor wire.
The house belongs to an Irish friend who describes himself as ex-Christian and ex-anarchist; some say he's still both, incurably. He gives indefinite houseroom to anyone he finds who needs it. There was a quiet Afghani poet there that day, one who knew very well what things were like inside the wire; he didn't talk much, but offered copies of his poems. There were a few other former inmates who, technically, should have been somewhere else. And there was the young American nomad who, seeking a place where sometimes people got it right, was about to move on to New Zealand. Having found that Australia was after all part of the ordinary evil world, he gave us the benefit of his disillusion, loudly and at length.
He looked a bit aggressively at middle-aged, seemingly respectable people like us as though we'd need challenging, need telling. Not quite in so many words, he wanted us to know that Guantanamo Bay and the Australian gulags were closer than we thought; here, just outside the window. The Cornelia Rau case was around that week, out loud in the headlines. Someone said: "Good thing. It's all going to blow, big time."
The American said: "But like, it won't blow, that's the trouble. Like everyone here just goes surfing and does their barbecue. You talked about the politicians being deadheads, but what about the people? They're all asleep, like dead to the world. Like, y'ever see that movie called Pleasantville, where the folks didn't know there was the world out there?"
I remembered seeing it in 1999 with a friend who, as it happened, was about to leave Australia for a job in California. We'd enjoyed the film's balancing acts; small towns and small minds were at once spoofed, condemned and forgiven. In Pleasantville, life was ordered, life was invincibly nice, and nothing existed beyond the mild horizon: a picture of the supposedly "kinder, gentler times" of a 1950s soap. The young people of the 1990s, magically transported back through their TV set, performed a kind of ethical rescue on Pleasantville: they brought colour and sex and disturbance, dangerous notions from wider future worlds.
Benign, liberal satire from the Clinton years? Maybe, but for us, sitting in John Howard's Australia, the bite was sharp and satisfying. Four years later, with the war on and George W. Bush in the saddle, my friend wrote from San Diego: "You remember Pleasantville? I don't know if they'd get away with it now. For God's sake, that's what they're supposed to be defending. And did you know there's a real place named Pleasantville in New Jersey? It's the place they produce Reader's Digest."
Now the American boy's exasperation surged up: "Like, God, the things your government's been doing to people. How can you guys live here?"
It was an accusation, a small explosion, but by common consent we let it dissipate. Nobody in my Irish friend's house was going to say, "Well, how about your USA?" He was welcome, he could hang out around them as long as he wanted.
On the veranda, we heard floating talk about anti-war blogs and websites, useful digital esoterica, and a passing debate about vegetarian and vegan.
What did she want for herself? "Not a bad question," she said. "I meant to stay here. But ..."
There was a great weight hanging from the But. We watched the kids for a while, and I was going to say conciliatory things about the hope I felt in younger generations. Then she said: "This is not the Australia I came to. It's not the country I came for."
She had passed several childhood years in this country while her father had a job here; fifteen years later she came back, doing the great overland journey with a busload of young fellow adventurers. Later again, she came to stay.
I told her I'd heard other stories like that, stories of people coming early in their lives and then being drawn to return, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes to return for good.
"You know what it is?" she said. "It's the light. Over there, you look back at it. It makes you think this is a more open place, a better country. I kept looking back and seeing it."
She laughed, as though to fend off too much seriousness. "I'm not saying I thought it was Arcadia. But you know, 20 years ago ..."
I did know; 20 years ago was another country.
The talk changed then, as though we were moving around underwater. Hard to remember who said what; we were both old enough to remember being children in wartime, growing up knowing something – even if not enough, never enough – about the Holocaust; seeing film images of the camps. What she was saying to me and what we were saying together was that nobody now living could be outside the scope of that knowledge. Some remember, all inherit. The children wouldn't know, but its shadow fell over them. And, she said, since they and we all know, how can they and we let it even begin to happen again?
The American boy came and sat beside us, and began apologising for whatever he'd said in the kitchen. Before we could reassure him, there were sudden yells from the kids, and a long demanding wail. The three-year-old, immensely proud of her steering, had swerved, crashed the trike into a gate and skinned her knee. My companion, as it happened, was her grandmother. Somebody had to know where the band-aids were.
That's the thing about kids, they really take over.