but a "feel-good" movie that makes us proud of the progress that has been made in the last half century.
The film itself is not extraordinarily fitting of the Uranus archetype; it is a safe, comfortable look at the revolution of the 1960's without being too provocative or at all edgy. It is more of a family movie in the vein of Back to the Future. Rebel without a Cause or Blackboard Jungle, made when the first rumblings of a societal earthquake were felt, were much more edgy and confrontational—and thus, Uranian. However, the creative solution that this film offers is to look at the sexual, cultural, and political revolution of the 1960's in reverse, through traveling back in time.
Protagonist teenagers Tobey Macguire and Reese Witherspoon inadvertently enter into the pre-1960's universe of Pleasantville, a perfectly ordered, shamefully innocent television town that is held up by artifice and nauseatingly polite discourse a la Leave it to Beaver and Father's Knows Best. Over time, Macguire and Reese become liberators and social emancipators for the town, shattering the ordered conventions through ushering in creativity, eroticism, and awakening impulses for freedom and independence. Pleasantville stirs from its dogmatic black-and-white slumbers and, literally, wakes up to a world of color. The structured, polite, dull and limited world of the town is exchanged for one of vitality, sexuality, awareness, and unpredictability.
Gary Ross, writer and director of the film, was experiencing the generational transit of Uranus opposing his natal Uranus during the filming and release of the film. (see chart; solar only) The generational Uranus opposition occurs in everyone's life around the ages of 38 to 42 and acts as a rejuvenating impulse in which one feels the inner need for redefining themselves or shaking loose confining structures. At the same time, transiting Uranus was squaring Ross's natal Sun and Moon. As the Sun and Moon are the constituents of the natal chart comprising one's core identity, the filming of Pleasantville, it can be assumed, must have been a time in which Ross was fully identifying with the creative and liberating impulses of the Uranus archetype.
Given the emphasis of Uranus in this time of his life, it follows that Ross was attracted to create a film about the decade of liberation, awakening, and rebellion of the last century, the 1960's. Ross recreates the countercultural rumblings of the era with an enthusiasm and freshness that evokes nostalgia for those that experienced that time and stimulates curiosity for those too young to have undergone that particular cultural awakening. However, for Ross, everything that is liberated from the collective unconscious in this movie is "good." Uranus's urging for societal change is not always as pleasant as the one that took place in Pleasantville. The 1960's was as confusing, tense, riotous as it was colorful, creative, and liberating. Similarly, the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality of the French Revolution—our first truly modern Uranian Revolution—were immediately followed by the Reign of Terror. The revolutions and awakenings that Uranus is notorious for are two-sided: the liberation presents us with more existential choice and anxiety; the creative impulse is accompanied by fear, risk, rejection, and knowledge; and increasing consciousness assumes more responsibility and pain.
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