Max's Musings

Take Five and So What

Dave Brubek and Miles Davis
Take Five and So What

I know! Jeff's challenge is called "The Soundtrack of Your Life" . That means it's supposed to be the music that plays in the background of MY life, not some dumb movie's soundtrack. Except that, sometimes, movies and their accompanying soundtracks can so perfectly enacpsulate something that they can represent personal life transitions.

We're also suppose to have one song per day, but sometimes it's the pairing of songs that matters.

Today, two songs paired in a movie, Pleasantville , come together for my personal soundtrack. One scene in the movie, in particular, is perfection.

If you're unfamiliar with the movie, it's a 1998 release starring Tobey Maguire, Reese Witherspoon, William H. Macy, Joan Allen, Don Knots (!), and Paul Walker. The movie is a kind of slipstream that sends contemporary teens, played by Maguire and Witherspoon, back to a fifties sitcom named Pleasantville. Of course, when are characters are transported to the eponymous town, the film transitions from technicolor to black and white.

The thing is, their presence in the fifities disrupts the perfect harmony of that black-and-white world. Some people start seeing--gasp!--colors. A few, when they test the social or sexual mores, even become colored, as in technicolor in a black-and-white world. Chaos and conflict ensues between those who can see colors and those who cannot.

The obvious metaphors make this sound like boring sermonizing, and indeed it could have become exactly that. But instead the script is charming, funny, even ingenious, and engages the readers in multiple character arcs that mesh together seemlessly.

In the sitcom world of the movie, everything is both perfect and shallow. All streets lead back to Pleasantville, and there's nothing outside the perfect little world of the town. Nothing substantial ever goes wrong. Firemen in Pleasantville exist for the sole purpose of rescuing cats caught in trees. When an actual fire breaks out, they are flummoxed. That is, until the Maguire character shows them what to do, after which he wins an award from from the fatuous mayor, pjlayed to perfection by J.T. Walsh in one of his final movies before his untimely death. Another scene involving the high school basketball team's practice is hilarious. The movie makes its points with gentle humor.

In Pleasantville, even the library books are blank--no words on the pages. Imagine, if you will, a library with classics like Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye on the shelves, but when you pull the books down, the pages are all blank. If you grew up in the fifties, as I did, that's actually not all that hard to imagine. Those books were in the library, and the words were on the pages, but thinking about what those words meant? That was another thing altogether. Thinking was, at best, regimented, at worst, proscribed. That is, of course, one of the points the movie is making.

But this isn't supposed to be a movie review, so I'll stop here. Instead, I want to point to one scene in the movie in particular.

In this scene, the Maguire character shows up for his job at the local ice cream bar hangout, which is kind of like Arnold's on Happy Days. The subservise beat of Dave Brubeck's Take Five provides the background. The ensuing conversation, which involves the gathered teens wonderment at discovering there are are worlds outside Pleasantville, and that the books in the library have ideas in them, perfectly encapsulates the themes of the movie. At the moment of discovery, involving Maguire explaning Huckleberry Finn, the soundtrack transitions to "So What" by Miles Davis. It's a near perfect representation of how liberating it felt to transition from the rigid and shallow fifties to the modern world. You can think at last. But so what? What's next? The musical transition from Brubek to Davis, the choice of Hucklebury Finn as the book, the acting, the cuts, all of these are genius.

The song "Take Five" invokes images of smoky New York coffee houses filled with the beatniks of the fifties--outcasts with suspiciously deviant ideas about equality and morality. The cool yet rebellious jazz of Davis anticipates the sixties. Yet the liberation we see in the movie doesn't happen in those coffee houses in New York and it's still the fifties. It happens in the pristine perfection of Pleasantville. There's wonder in that transition, but there are thorns, too, as what comes next when the community reacts. But the wonder and anticipation is what this particular scene in the ice cream parlor captures, and Take Five and So What are the prefect counterpoint to what's happening on the screen--and to what happened in real life.

I grew up in a small, rurual, Iowa town. It may as well have been named Pleasantville. Changing of the Guard, a Pulitzer-nominated novel loosely based on luminaries in the town, was so controversial you had to show your ID and sign a waiver to check it out of the library. It was that kind of town. Transitioning from then to now was both marvelous and terrifying. But the wonder of enlightenment and anticipation of discovery--those were golden. The book reading scene in Pleasantville, with "Take Five" and "So What" playing in the background, captures that personal and social nexus.

Here's a link to the scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3FE5o_67lQ

Take Five, Dave Brubek Quartet, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-q80gA7NI

So What, by Miles Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqNTltOGh5c