1998

Director: Peter Weir

Genre: Sci-fi Comedy

The world is fake.

We persist through life not because of our own desires and dreams, but by what society tells us we should want. We talk to others using selective words and often hiding ay form of real truth. We cannot read the minds of others, so we will never be able to accurately express what’s going on in our head. And is that even real?

Look around you. Everyone is an actor playing a part. The man who walks in a store. The couple talking on their phones. The girl going for a jog. None of these people have to be here. They don’t have to exist in this space. They chose to come here, and therefore chose to play a part.

There are overseers in life. People at the top who look down on all the actors and make decisions. They control the layout of the city, the design of the buildings, and who gets to be inside those buildings. And for the most part, these overseers are concerned with making money. Because they are actors themselves.

The Truman Show is a comedy about a man who discovers his whole life is a television show and everyone around him is in on it. It’s my favorite type of comedy where if you start to really think about it, you realize how dark and disturbing these situations are.

Much like The Matrix, or Dark City, this movie is basically a retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave. Where a prisoner discovers that his world is not real. However, unlike both of those movies, the unreality of the world is not because of some nefarious alien plan. The Truman Show was created to make money. They sell everything on the show to people in real life. It is watched constantly. And Truman himself is a corporate product.

Now the movie itself is presented in a very light manner. But that just makes it more disturbing for me, because it’s exactly how a corporation would present their product. The darker moments are shoved away for a light and emotionally powerful narrative.

I think the ideas presented in this movie are timeless, but some of the actual execution I found a little strange. While it is played for comedy, it is a little odd that Truman’s wife, despite living her whole life as a surgeon, has not taken the time to actually learn how to practice surgery. Or that no one knows how to drive a boat just because they’re actors.

Basically, the world they have created for Truman is too easy to see as not real. This is because it’s a comedy movie and not an episode of Black Mirror, although it does lessen the creator’s speech at the end about how the show is better than reality. But that is not to this film’s detriment. This is a movie about escaping a false reality.

But I think the ultimate question is, if all our actions, thoughts, ideals, and past experiences were falsified, how can we be truly sure any decision we make is real? Did Truman Escape? Or was it a carefully constructed narrative end to a television show?

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