The Truman Show by Peter Weir (1998)

@Screenshot from the movie The Truman Show

REVIEW – “To have an audience, to think of an audience, is to live in a lie. » Milan Kundera 

The Truman Showis a 1998 American film by Australian director Peter Weir starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank and Ed Harris as Christof. The screenplay is by Andrew Niccol, who is also the New Zealand director of Gattaca(1997), S1m0ne(2002), and Lord of War(2006). It is inspired, without saying so by name, by one of the novelsLe Temps désarticulé by the famous science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? adapted for the cinema by Ridley Scott under the title ofBlade Runner) from which it takes the initial idea. The film is a dystopian work: the theme of an ideal world transforming into a nightmare. In this respect, it is a variation of the novelsBrave New Worldby Aldous Huxley or1984by George Orwell (totally controlled world), a legacy from the stories of the Renaissance (The City of the Sun by Campanella,Utopiaby Thomas More,The New Atlantisby Francis Bacon). 

All these references converge towards the loss of the human, the indistinction of dream and reality, or the questioning of the status of man's identity in the world (side of the allegory of the cave inThe Republicby Plato). Novels (Don Quixoteby Cervantes or Life is a Dreamby Calderón) or films likeEyes Wide Shutby Stanley Kubrick orBelle de jourby Luis Buñuel approached the same theme from different angles. This is the major subject ofThe Truman Showwhose contribution is to place it in the sanitized universe of globalized media.  

The film takes place in a particular context. The 1920s and 1930s saw the growing influence of the media (radio, cinema), then after the Second World War, television took over. It is symptomatic that this influence of the media goes hand in hand with the emergence of totalitarianism and the enlistment of the subject in agglutinating masses. Totalitarian ideologies (Stalinism, Nazism) immediately understood the impact that these media, through technology and speed of propagation, had on consciences. With the emergence of what has been called the consumer society, and that of marketing and advertising based on the emancipation of the individual, liberal democracy has extended its hold on people by renouncing authoritarianism, but by promoting a new type of individual through reality TV, entertainment, a cheerful and smiling climate. 

This is the climate in which the film takes place at the beginning of the 21st century. It evokes the existence of Truman (an insurance executive married to a nurse named Meryl) in a comedic tone, an angle in keeping with the quiet lifestyle represented by the small American seaside town named Seahaven, in fact an island, a gigantic geodesic dome, a mix between an amusement park and a concentration camp. Weir's staging and Peter Biziou's “clean” photography with its harmonious and bright framing, its classic editing, play on this aspect. Everything seems relaxed. The weather is beautiful, artificially beautiful. The staging, logically, must not be “fragmented” (handheld camera), but on the contrary merge, as a representation, with this idyllic imagery of the ancestral myth of paradise as indicated by the name of the island.  

If the machine gradually seizes up and if the heavenly representation is ruined by another representation, that of the film itself, intrinsically dynamiting the process it implements, the filmmaker never plays on any suspense concerning Truman's life. From the beginning, in an alternate montage, he shows people who address us as if we were viewers! An obvious and terrible mise en abyme concerning the spectator in front of Peter Weir's film. It also talks about the loss of the boundary between private and public life (founding theme of the film) and Meryl (Truman's wife) is delighted! 

The height of it all is that everything works in the open and that this world agrees to take a human being as a guinea pig to the point that a director has made his life a fiction for the 24/7 development of a reality TV show on a planetary scale. Since his birth, his existence has been nothing but a gigantic film set. He alone is unaware of it. All his relatives, his mother, his wife, his work colleagues, his best friend Marlon are actors playing a role. It is therefore normal that Truman is the only one not to be aware, because in the game, he must be “sincere” as Christof wanted. Everyone knows that as soon as a person is aware of being filmed, they overact or play a role. 

The Truman Showshows us from the outset the emotional and psychological manipulation that Truman is subjected to, a logical system in a society that has made transparency its ultimate ideal. This is what Christof says at the very beginning: “We have grown tired of seeing actors simulate emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. If the world in which he lives is, in some respects, artificial, Truman, himself, does not pretend. No script, no cards. It is not Shakespeare, but it is authentic. It is a life.“. The supreme manipulation is to make believe that we are showing real life when it is a television show that hides it while simulating it. The product now is you or me, human interiority in the fact that it can be shaped without our knowledge to make us admit what we are without having chosen it. 

Truman leads his quiet and happy little life, leaves his house, neighbors smile at him and say hello, he buys his newspaper and goes to work… A cycle repeated every morning. He is observed, scrutinized, monitored by a whole bunch of cameras that he does not see: in his car, at home, in his basement, in his strictest privacy. Nowhere can he escape the relentless surveillance. His private life is destroyed. What we ourselves are losing in the age of the internet and social networks as an episode of Mr. Robot (season 4, episode 2) succinctly shows. Because if this surveillance and control are already frightening, it is not this aspect that is the most reprehensible. The most terrifying thing is that everyone participates and is transformed into a consumer of the lives of others and that this process is internalized to the point of being accepted and legitimized, becoming a sort of human algorithm on a planetary scale. 

A series of incidents will undermine this lifted representation of the world. First, an HMI projector that falls from the immaculate sky. Truman believes he sees his father as a tramp, a traumatic and fictional episode that is a flaw in his identity, but voluntary in the development of the scenario. This father was supposed to have drowned in a boating accident when Truman was a boy. He is taken away by strangers although Truman tries to catch him. 

Then, in Truman's life, meticulously elaborated as a fiction, but also very real for him, another flaw is the woman he coveted, Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), but whom the script deliberately left out to designate Meryl (Laura Linney), less rebellious, whom Truman had to marry. Sylvia wants to make him realize that his life is based on a decoy. It is the scene where he escapes with her on the beach before she is taken away by her supposed father who makes her out to be crazy. There, she reveals everything to him, that her life is fictitious and that everything around her is a theater set. The artificiality of her marriage is revealed when Truman tries to reconstruct Sylvia's face with mannequin figures torn from magazines that he buys every day at the newsstand. 

As each of us has experienced in our own lives, Truman does not immediately realize the deception. First, his car radio tunes into a stage manager organizing the shoot. Truman understands and does not go to work. He takes a full circle around the entrance and comes out again. He looks at the world around him as if he understands the game of deception. That all these people are just extras! He nearly gets run over, but realizes that he is in no danger. Almighty. He enters a building and discovers that there is a set behind an elevator. He tries to make his friend Marlon understand the problem. Although the actors try to dissuade him, he decides to explore the world outside Seahaven. In particular, he wants to go to the Fiji Islands where his old girlfriend Sylvia lives.  

Truman cannot leave the island and everything is done to make him stay there. He has been instilled with a fear of dogs and water following his father's drowning. When he wants to buy a ticket to Fiji, the hostess tells him that there will be no room for a month. He then wants to take a bus to Chicago: it breaks down. Truman tells his “wife” about his doubts: “We'll see a lady on a bicycle, a man with flowers, then a dented Beetle“ he says, suspecting that “reality” is repeating itself in a strange mechanical cycle. He then takes his wife to Atlantic City in a fit of madness: a huge traffic jam is created. He heads to New Orleans: a fire is started and then his route is blocked because of a leak at the power plant. An agent recognizes him and Truman flees into a forest before being arrested and brought home. His wife tells him she is going to make him a bowl of Mococoa and he asks her who she is talking to. Under threat, she shouts: “Do something!» Truman thinks she's in on it. That's when his friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) steps in. They go to a highway under construction and talk. A key scene. 

The ultimate subversion is the emotional and intimate anchoring that Truman is subjected to, especially with his best friend Marlon who replies: “I've been your best friend since I was 7 years old.“. How could he lie since Marlon did go to school with Truman? In an eloquent scene, Marlon says with calm cynicism: “I would throw myself under a car for you, Truman. And I would never lie to you. Realize… If everyone is in cahoots… then so am I» at the moment when Christof, like in the theater, whispers to him what he should say. 

The confusion between reality and fiction reaches its peak when one denounces the lie and lies openly at the same time. The complete lie. It is not only Truman who is a fiction. His relatives are one except that they know it. Like all melodramatic fiction, Marlon has found Truman's father (a fault of the film which does not mention him again). Ultimate subversion after the friend. Existential anchoring is the best way to silence critical consciousness provided that it is redistributed in the form of a light representation that will phagocytize the real world. 

Everyone is caught up in their own game in the scene where Truman sees his father again. Even though they are aware of the manipulation, technicians and viewers alike are “moved” and have tears in their eyes by the reunion. However, they know perfectly well that everything is just decor or that Truman's father is a manifest fake. This is to say that the seduction of kitsch has a considerable force to the point of mystifying the one who promotes it or those who witness it, by managing to substitute the real world with a manufactured world while the process takes place before their very eyes. The simulation reaches its ultimate point.  

The second part sets up Christof's omniscient world at the moment when Truman is faltering. Furthermore, Christoff can be seen as an allusion to the “almighty God”, but this God exists, and he is a television director. Christof has all the power over Truman, whose intimate aspects of his life he has organized. His puppet is not made of wood, but of flesh and blood. He is not the most odious character. It is the viewers who have abandoned their own intimate lives, conforming and clinging to Truman's adventures, which they consciously delight in. 

The director speaks as a god would, through a voice that descends from the sky and reveals reality to him (the shot of the cloudy “sky” where the sun's rays pierce is explicit). Christof triggers lightning, makes the wind and storm blow, unleashes the elements, orders the day to dawn. In short, he controls Nature. Like God, Christof, through technology, sees everything and knows everything. If we can easily extend the metaphor of the relationship to divinity, the film subtly shifts Nietzsche's “God is dead” to a simple human being, a way of saying that, historically, superstitions have not disappeared, but have simply moved onto the human being himself whose ego is managed to entertain him with nonsense: a TV game show and the illusion of paradise in the 21st century. From then on, each man, locked in his subjectivity, is in turn like a small omnipotent God, aggressively demanding his share of games and amusements to forget life, reality (like illness and death), in order to escape the human condition. New religion. 

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Under the reign of total entertainment, the old God had to give way to a new God. The God of the world before has become a postmodern God who, supreme subtlety, no longer has the appearance of the old God in order to erase his previous bloody traces. He has become close, smiling and relaxed like a Steve Jobs who spreads entertainment like a sandman over the entire planet. Christof, the new God, therefore reigns masterfully to the point of having sucked in the real world. He has not only had sets built and embarked a film crew (5000 cameras), but also the lives of hundreds of human beings (like Truman's friend) who must accompany the life of his guinea pig, day after day, night after night, having to intervene at any moment.

Of course, it also involves those who watch television around the world. In a few shots, we see the audience who spend their entire lives watching Truman's fake one: the man in his bath (he falls asleep when Truman falls asleep), the two old ladies, the customers in the bar, etc., and even people from other cultures (like the Japanese) who have no roots. The system reaches its peak, because in the end, this audience lives nothing more than what Truman lives, sucked in as much as it is by a fictitious life that lightens its own. Our current world. 

This sequence describes the immense deception orchestrated for thisshow: Christof reveals that Truman was the first child adopted by a production. Theshowgenerated huge profits. The equivalent of the GNP of a small country where everything is for sale. Of course, advertising plays an important role in Truman's life. The machine doesn't work just for him, but to make an audience, to sell products inserted into this manufactured “reality”, in everyday life… for the viewers. His relatives regularly address him using advertising slogans. The omnipresence of cameras and the presence of actors make the atmosphere as sanitized as it is stifling. Beyond this fictional world, a certain reality (a commercial world and its annexes) continues to produce itself as a decoy. 

Christof will say: “Everyone accepts the reality of the world they are confronted with“, a terrifying but true sentence. All you have to do is simulate a real world and immerse the viewer in it so that he adopts it with his whole being. That is why the ideology works so well. Sylvia intervenes in the interview and declares that the whole process is monstrous. Christof responds that he has offered Truman a normal life and that “Seahaven is the world as it should be“. The kitsch world as it is not. The ideal city. “What saddens you, he adds, in reality… is that in the end… he prefers his prison, as you call it. ». He is right again. This is what Etienne de la Boétie, Montaigne's friend, wrote in his book On Voluntary Servitude. Most people accept a fake world that makes them dream rather than the real world that must be understood in order to be free. Especially in the era of globalization.  

The mass production of human beings no longer has the sinister aspect of a dictatorship, but of a democratic world that the majority mediocrity has elected and which allows it to shed the burden of existing. This playful, luminous and sparkling paradise hides its dark side (shadow become transparent and advertising light). Their blue eyes, their soft and smooth face, their sparkling smile and their slicked back hair hide only the voracity of the vampire when their carnal puppet escapes their meticulous surveillance. They then transform themselves into a compact, snarling and lynching mass, launched into a merciless manhunt, with a barking dog in the lead, to bring Truman back to their childhood amusement park. They organize a hunt in the middle of the night. Future manhunt allowed and citizen? Truman has become the scapegoat (really victim) of theBrave New World.This is the real world that awaits Truman from now on. It has nothing to envySeahaven. 

Like any puppet, like Pinocchio, this one comes to life and “rebels”. And that takes us to the last part. From then on, Truman's liberation becomes ambiguous. If the film also seems to deal with the total control of individuals in the age of media that scan and list their actions, a frightening world from which it is impossible to escape, it does not play the easy game of recognizing the real world and the unreal world as easily identifiable.  

Truman takes Christof at his own game, reverses the process and acts as a decoy to escape the gentle and relentless surveillance of his master. He decides to leave his city on a boat. Christoff notices this and tries everything to bring his puppet back to his fake paradise. He then triggers lightning, storms, waves, violent winds to the point that he is ready to kill it in front of hundreds of cameras. And he is not far from succeeding, but Truman resists. Ancestral fight of man against his creator. But his resistance does not lead him to freedom, but to join the real world which is only a copy ofSeahavenas we will see. 

Truman realizes that he is “locked in”, and that the sky on the horizon is in fact a wall painted blue. It is not Ulysses who, on his ship, discovers the land, but runs into a setting! He finds a door to leave the immense studio that he believed to be the world. This ambiguity becomes more and more evident in the main scene at the end. Let us recall what Christof says when he tries to persuade Truman to stay: “There is no more truth behind this door than in the world I created for you. Same lies… same deception. But, in my world… you have nothing to fear. ». 

The Happy End is bitter. Truman will leave a false and illusory world for a fake real world where people have become ghosts in their lives just as fictional and fictional as Truman. The film becomes “pessimistic”. The final shot sets up the disappointment of two parking attendants opposite the end of the show. The fabricated world and the “real world” have merged. « We're changing ? Where is the program ?“, says a supervisor (last words) who has forgotten what he has just experienced, having transformed Truman's life into an object of consumption (he will be swept away by a new program), and his own into an idealized and advertising life. The problem is not only the transformation of one world by another, but the dream secretly elaborated to substitute reality for itself. This world, like any ideal dream where reality is falsified, can only exclude, sign petitions to banish everything that bothers. If before the dream was easy and reality so cruel, it was necessary to transform reality into a giant smile.Perfect crime where reality can no longer be identified with its original, but with its copy… 

The film metaphorically destroys any kitsch vision of reality that we could have. What if everything was a fiction ? What if we were playing a role without even realizing it ? The film, simply, asks an ancestral question about the truth of our condition as human beings. How to construct a reality that is not a fiction given that the human being can only be social ? How to really be with one's desires and dreams without it being an illusion ? Truman is a false man, a fictional man in this reality entirely shaped by the media for a TV game show. Isn't “Truman” a contraction of “true man” which means in English “the true man” or “the real man”? The term reality TV is only a monumental fake, the two terms TV and reality, antinomic in essence, are found side by side, symbolizing the lie become reality. 

The titleThe Truman Showsums up the paradox of the film by itself: “the true man staged“. The spectators are even more false than him in a mise en abyme, because they know it without knowing it, like most people in life. They think they are watching their real life, when it is only a reflection of their pitiful existence that they take for real. They have abdicated their singular life to contemplate a show while illusorily believing that they are outside it when they are indeed immersed in it. Our current world with social networks. This is why we are no longer in a world of alienation, but in a world of emancipation and exhibition. Especially since everything is explicit, put before the eyes of the entire planet and the film is unambiguous in this regard. As Jean Baudrillard wrote: “Today, we must definitely fight against everything that wants us well.”. 

The film, in a metaphor of scathing sweetness, sends the viewer of the Truman show and the spectator of the film back to its founding existential unreality. Its strength is to have doubled the real Old World with a fake world to the point that the second replaces the first to become everyday life itself. We are in the typical case of the painter who would draw what is called a trompe-l'oeil and who would see the spectator take the painted canvas for reality, and therefore forget what was really real, so to speak. In a dialogue, facing a sunset on the sea, does not Truman's friend say: “Look at this sunset. Perfection. He is the Great Manitou. He has a hell of a brushstroke.””. Another scene represents the artificiality of the world when Christof, faced with Truman's disappearance, suspends the smallest actions of the extras, breaking the ideal mechanism of the repetition of everyday life. 

The contribution ofThe Truman Showis to situate its plot in the age of globalization, of the generalized exhibition of individuals through reality TV (which is badly named, but heralds social networks like Facebook), in short in an era of increased surveillance by new technologies and the large-scale circulation of information. A totalitarian empiresoftandcoolthat disguises its hold by resorting to games, to entertainment in place of critical thinking. At this point, theBig Brotherby George Orwell is no longer a single, cruel, oppressive political power that monitors and sees everything, but the friendly and moist multitude of everyone, a sticky and omnipresent mass, locked up in its subjectivity to the point where this (psychological and affective) is the very negation of the subject. Big Brother is you!At the time of the end of revolutions, the new utopia is the technical realization of the world, where life is simulated, but has really disappeared. Life that no longer exists except through the screens of the world where it is a question of capturing everyone and formatting them in the same way. So that no one escapes it and there is not a single absentee. 

Only Peter Weir's film representation lays bare the mechanism of this playful and local totalitarianism, unmasking the lifted representation of reality, using the same tools of reality TV, camera and viewing angles, technicians and operators, control room (as Truman glimpses at one point), he unmasks through a fiction all the lining, dynamites all the processes. The art of showing reality through artifice while returning the artificial to its ultimate lie. 

The problem is therefore well beyondSeahaven, by Christof, advertising, but in the human capacity to create mirages that distort reality. So what about the individual (his identity, his status, his personality) in reality in the face of this new globalized media age ? What is a Truman ? What is reality ? What we see, is it really real in this new age that is opening up to man ? Truman's escape is in a way what the individual must accomplish viscerally to be himself. There is no lucidity without separation. So when we look at reality, what do we really see ? 

“We are all in danger,” said Pier Paolo Pasolini TRIBUNE – The communist poet, writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was assassinated on the night of November 1, 1975 near the beach of Ostia, near Rome. On ig… October 22, 2022 – 1:05 PM Opinions

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