Who is big bob in pleasantville

She soon realizes that change is good and that accepting it is the right thing to do. George Parker William H. Macy is the father of Bud and Mary Sue in Pleasantville. He is a father who goes to work and comes home to his wife every night. He is part of the town council that Big Bob controls. In Pleasantville George is one of the last people to change color due to his resistance to change. George is the type of character that wants things to stay the way they are.

After he changes to color he realizes that change is good and has to get used to them. Johnson Jeff Daniels is the soda shop owner in Pleasantville. He always relied on Bud to do things for him to run the soda shop before he could do anything himself. He also has a big fascination with painting and artwork. When things start to change he finds art more desirable because he can now see them in color. Johnson's character is submissive and doesn't like confirtation even when changes are being made in Pleasantville.

Again Mr. Johnson and Betty Parker have a close relationship with one another and Johnson enjoys painting her portraits. Big Bob J. Walsh is the mayor of Pleasantville. Kids are making out in the street. No one is getting their dinner. David : Hell, you could have a flood any minute! Pretty soon, the women could be going off to work, while the men stayed at home and cooked! Big Bob : That is not going to happen! Big Bob : Up until now everything around here has been, well, pleasant. Recently certain things have become unpleasant.

Now, it seems to me that the first thing we have to do is to separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant. Big Bob : Well, we're safe for now. Thank goodness we're in a bowling alley. David : Yeah, where's our lawyer? Big Bob : Oh, I think we want to keep these proceedings as pleasant as possible. Big Bob : My friends, this isn't about George's dinner. It's not about Roy's shirt. It's a question of values.

It's a question of whether we want to hold on to those values that made this place great. So, a time has come to make a decision. But when people start to accused of doing witchcraft, Abigail takes on this idea and uses it to give herself an increase in power. She starts to say that people are doing witchcraft to her and she can see who it is.

So all of a sudden there is this gain in power from both the characters of Big Bob and Abigail. Both of these people use the fear of the people below them to increase their reputations and to make sure that no-one will second guess their decisions but as we see in both of them they are brought down by one strong willed individual and their power is lost because they are too hungry for more control of those who are lower than them.

When Pleasantville is bombarded with change the citizens are placed into a situation of mass hysteria. With majority of the citizens rioting against, rejecting or being confused by change the whole community finds itself falling into anarchy. With the fall of the town occurring around him, Big Bob seizes the opportunity he has with his power and respect, to correct the situation in Pleasantville, this puts him into an even higher position of power than he originally was. With the town falling victim to mass hysteria, it was easy for Big Bob to take control over those citizens of Pleasantville.

He does so by showing the townspeople that the change occurring is wrong, scary and that they are can only do something about it by working together, under his leadership of course. Big Bob can be seen as a re-presentation of Hitler because his methods and leading style are both similar. Big Bob is a terrific speaker and gives convincing speeches as Hitler did and uses law and agreements to try and restrict the minority.

The laws Bob creates are seemingly innocent but they are repressive of the minority and try to restrict change, like a dictatorship. Initially Hitler was also not seen as a dictator because he used speech and circumstance to bring himself into power and this is like what Big Bob does in the film.

Big Bob can be compared also to the character of Reverend Parris in The Crucible because he uses the situation of hysteria and paranoia to bring himself into more power. I say more power because Parris and Bob alike both had a significant amount of power before the incidents but they use the situation of Hysteria to lead and to be looked up upon.

Also Bob could be compared to Abigail who also used hysteria to get power in The Crucible. To the citizens of Pleasantville, Big Bob basically seems like an alright guy who wants to help them out of this issue regarding change.

At the beginning of the film we see his as an authority figure when the man gives up his seat and when the black and white people in Pleasantville begin to show distaste towards colours and couloureds they begin giving Big Bob power.

This is used in In The Name of The Father when Engsland give power to the police to stop the violence, they have more opportunity to use it without being apposed. Big Bob gains power in Pleasantville once things begin to change because he provides the people with answers in the time of much uncertainly. The citizens of Pleasantville turn to him for leadership and direction because he alone seems to have answers and solutions to their new problems.

This puts Bob in a position of power and as his power escalates he begins to become more power hungry. The source of his power is the peoples loyalty to him, so he tries to control the people like a dictatorship introducing a set of rules all citizens must abide by.

As the seemingly perfect world of Pleasantville is bombarded with knowledge, the every day people in this society are swept off of their feet with shock and hysteria. Big Bob, however, does not. As the people of Pleasantville are threatened, they panic and look for answers. It is not that Big Bob increases his own power, it is that the rest of the society look up to him as a roll model, and they give him power. His power then comes from the lost society looking for answers in him, and as they are in hysteria, they are willing to believe and follow him, defining power.

The phenomenon is very similar to that seen in The Crucible. In the play, the people of Salem are left in the dark as hysteria fills them, and again, like Pleasantville, they look for answers. The girls have these answers, and because they need them, they are willing to believe them, much like the people of Pleasantville. This is the same in In The Name of the Father also.

Because of the abrupt bombings, the British people demand answers from any source. In this film, it is the police; they convict Gerry and his father to soothe the tension in society, much like Big Bob enforces anti-coloured laws to reassure the worried minds of society.

The same can be said about To Kill a Mockingbird, except white authority and people work together the marginalise the black people, which to them reassures them as they believe they are answering the questions which sweep them into worry and hysteria. This theme of given power is evident in all of the texts studied this year so far.

Bob is the only stronghold left in the city. He is the most reactionary in the town and decides that colors are indecent. Many references to Triumph of the Will are made in the closing court scene with Big Bob playing the lead.

Even he turns to color as he expresses fierce anger towards David. Pleasantville is a utopian world of sustained order and function. A day to day routine hardly varies hence the characters lack of colour and personal variety. We learn from our mistakes within reality and grow in various personal forms in due cause. We notice that once David and his sister Jennifer arrive that routine gets knocked off course and like a disease it spreads from one to the next.

Hysteria roamed but Big Bob centered the people and kept it level. He accepted the power as it was presented and he took advantage of it applying new laws and orders within the community to generate security and stability. Abigail Williams from the film The Crucible also saw this same opportunity for power. She was able to control the town with her clan of followers hiding the truth from all. However she used power in a deliberate offensive manner, While Big Bob just wanted to keep what he honestly felt dear to him as he feared the thought and sight of change himself.

Big Bob is able to gain power so easily through the people of Pleasantville breaking out into fear of change. They feared the implications of people becoming coloured, the mark others gave the coloured people, and were also afraid of becoming coloured themselves.

This fear brought out a collapse in natural logic, and they sought a leader to guide them through this with the least amount of blame towards themselves. They could blame it all on him if it turned out wrong, because Big Bob was a figure of authority that nobody could, or would, challenge. People gave Big Bob so much power because of fear of being blamed by associating with colours, and so they sided with B.

Big Bob in the town of Pleasantville was always seen as someone of power and authority over the people of Pleasantville. An example of this would have to be in the hair dressers when Big Bob enters the shop and the person getting his hair cut gets off the chair and lets Big Bob sit down.

This scene shows us who is really in authority and has the overall power. Another scene were we see Big Bob as the man with the most power, is the scene in the bowling club. You see peoples scores in the background and they are not perfect and then it shows Big Bobs scores and you see that they are all strikes. Then in both stories and movies these two characters unravel and the town starts to realise that they are not right.

You could also say that both of them really started in a court scene as well. The people of Pleasantville turn to Big Bob as their leader as the town comes under threat. Big Bob, as the head of the Congress was their leader in good times, so it was a natural progression to keep him as leader in bad times. Big Bob gains power through the fear created by change. It is natural for humans when scared, to turn to the things they trust and know, therefore not hard to see Big Bob gain power as the mass hysteria grows during the film.

When the mass hysteria broke out, the people of Salem turned to what they knew and the people that always helped them before — the church.