I have been presented with the ultimate intersection of Hollywood diabolism and Boomer propaganda in the 1998 movie Pleasantville.

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The header image of this post is a frame from Pleasantville wherein the female character pictured actually plucks an apple from a tree in a garden and gives it to the protagonist. This scene precipitates the chain of events leading to the whole town's irrevocable expulsion from the 1950's paradise kept and tended by benevolent patriarchs.

Now, you might call that an implicit critique of the characters' descent into fornication, adultery, and rebellion. It would be, had Pleasantville been written from a Christian point of view. It is not. The rebellious townspeople's eating of the forbidden fruit is strikingly portrayed as an unalloyed good in the visual language of film. Not only to those who partake change from dreary black and white to vibrant color, their rebellion is directly analogized to Atticus Finch's defense of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird.

The pursuit of knowledge divorced from the good is not the biblical message. No, that narrative has a far different pedigree.

That satanic monument proclaiming "Knowledge is the greatest gift" resides in the Illinois State Capitol. Its placement next to a Christmas tree perfectly represents the public mockery of America's cultural traditions perpetrated by Hollywood Boomers in the form of propaganda flicks like Pleasantville.

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I remember when Jack Black thanked Satan at some awards show or other about ten years ago. Trying to convince my friends it wasn't just a harmless bit of fun proved fruitless. If only I'd known then what I know about rhetoric now.