Pleasantville is a funny, subtle little film that grapples with a Big Message, and it could end up being an epoch-marking cultural event.

It tells the saga of a brother and sister transported via a magic TV remote from the 1990s back into the world of a 1950s Ozzie and Harriet-like sitcom, Pleasantville. Once there, they transform the sitcom's universe from black-and-white to color in more ways than one.

As someone who enjoyed the 1950s immensely, I went expecting to be annoyed, but I was not. It turns out that both eras had things to offer. In the end, inhabitants of both find themselves looking ahead to an unknown future -- unafraid.

This is a radically new message for a public accustomed to being psychologically prepared for immolation by volcanoes or Armageddon by asteroid. In the safety of their homes, they're confronted by news reports that they'll soon be boiled by global warming, if they haven't first been incinerated by terrorists with The Bomb.

The movie's message, moreover, is congruent with that of a new book by journalist Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies, which postulates that the most important division is not left vs. right. Instead, it's the one separating those who are afraid of the future -- "stasists," in her terminology -- and the "dynamists" who aren't.

Postrel, like the creators of Pleasantville, sides with the dynamists, who think we can prevail if we're willing to try lots of different things in a process that may be messy, unpredictable and imperfect -- but which works.

She is scornful of the stasists who either cling to some rose-tinged vision of the past, or believe that technocrats can find "one best way" for society to advance in well-ordered ranks toward a certain future.

Postrel delights in showing how stasists of all political stripes -- Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, the Unabomber and many environmentalists -- instinctively team up to restrict immigration and oppose global trade agreements, which she sees as quintessential examples of future fear.

These strange bedfellows, she says, make up the "Enemies of the Future," who think that unless we can get things under tight control fast, all hell is going to break loose.

On the other side is a very loose array of thinkers and -- more importantly -- doers, who believe things are going along pretty well, and, one way or another, will probably continue to do so.

Postrel relishes rattling off situations in which people, left to their own devices, have crafted effective solutions that would never have crossed the minds of technocratic planners or reactionary thinkers.

For example, social scientists have been wringing their hands over the absence of meeting places where increasingly isolated suburbanites could gather for the kind of social exchange that fosters what has come to be called "social capital."

None of those social scientists ever thought that an answer might be coffee bars -- but Starbucks did.

Similarly, no government planner would ever have thought that making doughnuts would be the way that Cambodian immigrants might gain an economic foothold in America. Yet Cambodians now own 70 percent of the doughnut shops in California, largely because an early arrival discovered that this was an underfilled niche.

As Postrel herself recognizes, you can take this vision only so far. She thinks it's OK for dynamists to support things like a safety net of government aid for the poor, as well as certain commonsense forms of government paternalism, including seatbelt laws or antismoking regulations.

And it's all right -- even essential -- for dynamists to be vociferously critical of things they don't like in society, whether its creeping litigiousness or the mindlessness of TV programming.

But her message is a bracing one in a society in which people are so risk-averse they can be reduced to quivering angst on hearing of trace amounts of contaminants in Perrier, or whose worldview can be exploded by learning that increased speed limits have not produced more highway deaths.

I can only reflect that Philadelphia -- and Pennsylvania -- constitute hotbeds of stasism, filled with inhabitants who are often pathologically afraid of change.

A shot of dynamism may be just what we need.

David Boldt's column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. His e-mail address is dboldt@compuserve.com

© Copyright 1998, Philadelphia Inquirer. Reprinted with permission of the author.