Leaving the World of “The Truman Show”

“Where’s the TV Guide?” – last line of the film

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Introduction

Truman Burbank exits the only world he knows.

We – the television audience in the film, as well as The Truman Show (1998) audience – root for his discovering what has been done to him and that he will have the sense to get out. He does. We should feel joy, as much as the members of the television audience who belong to the “Free Truman” group do. We have gotten what we desired.1

However, no longer do we have the joy of watching the show or the movie. How could the experience of watching “The Truman Show” be replicated? Another show, for the television audience, cannot live up to the previous experience. For the movie audience, we could hope for a sequel, to complete the next phase of Truman’s life, in the “real world” – our world! Only there hasn’t been a sequel, not even the hint of one.

Truman’s triumph has the flavor of dissatisfaction.

The Unknown

Truman enters the unknown. It’s the world not-Seahaven. A great paradox arises: his televised life had less conscious television influence than the life he’ll eventually live. Literally inside the television bubble, sort of an essence of Television, it seems less permeated by television culture. Truman enters a world obsessed with television entertainment. He had a favorite television but his hours in front of the television would be much less than those watching “the Truman Show.” Nor would he have experience with entertainment hysteria, which has infiltrated all elements of life outside the Seahaven dome. He might be able to deal with this, ideally by ignoring it, only there’s a bigger problem.

We can speculate that his life would be difficult. First, his learning to unlearn his previous 30 years: a learning process complicated by his trying to understand how much television has permeated modern life. But has it occurred to anyone that Truman might be considered a fool, a joke, a constant object of pity in his new world? Albeit, there will be moments with Sylvia, a reunion of sorts, but is there enough to sustain a relationship? Could she love Truman for himself and not for being the victim of Christof’s (Ed Harris) reality show? A film sequel could be over-the-top mawkish. Would he become the world’s leading Luddite? Wouldn’t he, and like-minded followers, be justified in attempting to destroy television sets? Or would he be too late? The world of streaming is on the horizon. At every turn, media technology could defeat him. Here’s another Kaspar Hauser, who didn’t fare well in Herzog’s film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) when he was released from his prison.

The Allegory

One also sees a relation to Plato’s allegory of the cave. How far does this take us with the film? Truman discovers the world is not how he perceives it. Like those in the cave, he is held to a particular view of reality, although he subsequently happens on chinks in this reality.2

The meaning of the allegory is similar for our situation. Are we not, like Truman, living in a world of manufactured illusions that we understand or comprehend as reality? The cause of Truman’s illusions are not quite our own. He’s grown up in an inherently false world, whereas we have the opportunity to self-consciously develop skepticism about the world we have been born into, not to say the world isn’t false.3 We can forcefully relate to Truman’s predicament and, applying it to our own circumstances, can legitimately believe we are being similarly manipulated. We can relate to his longing to be released from the illusory bonds of his desires.

The allegory can be reconfigured as follows: Truman is tied to the post and faces a wall of images. Everything he believes derives from this wall. The images represent the television simulacra. Television itself represents what Heidegger calls “the essence of technology.”4

Truman’s technological Eden becomes for the show’s viewers a trap of desires that cannot be fulfilled or satisfactory for long. Like Truman’s, our world slowly, inevitably deprives us our humanity. We have become uneasy in our technological Eden, become chronically uneasier with the life around us, more suspicious of the genuineness of our reality.

While I subscribe to an allegorical reading, I would be more specific regarding the nature of the film. The world of shadows (the world of the television show) that Truman can’t quite fathom by his 30th year is one that manipulates and controls his desires and actions (imperfectly). His struggle with this world is similar to our struggles, frustrations, desires in our technologically saturated society.

We watch Truman, even identify with him, when he struggles to know the truth about his life. His struggle is framed in a way that, by discovering the truth of his circumstances, he could reject these circumstances. A discovery means that he has found the way out. Offered the alternative of being the star of a television show, he rejects it.

He can leave. He’s beaten the system. He’s left us behind.

No Return

Another word about the allegory. In Plato’s story, the man who escaped the cave and discovered the bright truth of the Sun proceeds to return to the cave and inform the others of the truth. Plato poses two situations:

1. A prisoner is freed but on going outside finds the sun too bright and painful to his eyes. He wants to return to the comfortable light of the cave.
2. Another prisoner is forced to go outside, gets used to the painful light, and begins to believe this world is superior. Returning to the cave, he is blinded again. The other prisoners believe going outside the cave harmed the man and conclude they would not want to do the same. Indeed, they would kill anyone who attempted to force them out of the cave.

These situations have relevance to Truman’s in several ways that will be explored later. What we should note (when using the allegory) is that when Truman leaves Seahaven, he wouldn’t have anyone to return to. He was the only one blinded by the television fires. There’s no one to return to. Truman might return to Seahaven but find it empty. Worse, ‘The Truman Show’ has been canceled.

We participate in Truman’s self-discovery. His existential moment takes place under bogus conditions. Does this make his actions intrinsically inauthentic – not being the “True Man” – because he is incapable of comprehending the truth? Can he be true in a false world? Truman may discover what has been done to him, but we never see how he responds to this. Can anyone survive the revelation that one’s life has played out so falsely?5 When he steps through the door, should he be put on suicide watch?

False Horizons

How does Truman process his wife’s breakdown and his father’s reappearance? The security inherent in maintaining social mores and contacts and expectations is slipping away. He soon camps out in the basement. A ruse, in case he is being watched – and at this juncture he seems sure. He wants to escape or thinks he can escape. Maybe he believes he can achieve some security that centers on his own desires, ungoverned desires (e.g., distancing himself from his mother, his job, his best friend). His escape centers on sailing away from Seahaven. He has broken a mental chain developed by the Christof script: he overcomes his fear of water and the sea. He also desires to be with Sylvia, whom he believes is in Fiji. He had tried to get a plane ticket through a travel agency. Sailing toward a false horizon, Truman encounters the forces of nature, stirred by Christof, to prevent Truman from discovering the truth. Even if it means killing him.

Truman reaches the false horizon wall. Christof speaks and offers him a chance to continue the illusion. He tells Truman that he’s a television star, something someone not-Truman might desire severely. Christof can’t imagine anyone turning down the offer. The moment echoes the Nietzschean concept of the conscious illusion. In other words, could a reality show exist with the conscious notion that the game is not being played straight? Professional wrestling gets away with it. Hollywood Squares did well. Perhaps every reality show!

True in a False World

I want to confront the philosophical implications of Truman’s life before dealing with intrinsic technological issues. The film develops an existential experiment, a cold and distant one. Why so cold? Truman himself cannot examine the nature of his own existence because his world prevents him from doing this. A person watching television continuously would be in an analogous situation (there might be many of these folk in “The Truman Show”-watching world). At best, he questions his world when disturbances and anomalies occur: the falling light fixture representing a star or seeing people in a room when the elevator doors open.6 His search for truth is limited to a world operating under bogus conditions. Does this make him intrinsically inauthentic – not really the “True Man”? Can one be true in a false world? This is why we’re left picking the existential threads as the problematic elements of his world are transferred to us, the movie viewer, bypassing the television audience, because the latter have been absorbed into the television ethos.

We know why and how Truman’s world is false. It’s a television show; worse, a reality show purporting to show people (one person) in real or natural circumstances. Over 33 years, the audience of the show believes in the reality as authentic. The premise of the program is hidden in plain sight. We, the movie viewers, understand better Truman’s circumstances and see its inherent injustice. However, we soon get caught up in the process of his finding out the truth and how he will react to it. His crisis becomes a greater entertainment.

Before recognizing what our feelings mean in relation to Truman’s situation, we should take a look at the audience of “the Show” in the film. They are a group we might identify with, except that we can’t help feeling superior to their living and breathing and emoting with his every action. As if WE never have done this: never rooted for a professional or college sports team, or watched the last episodes of M*A*S*H, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, or Seinfeld!

A Girardian Discourse on Desire

1. The dissatisfaction comes from not completely understanding WHY WE ARE WATCHING.
2. A desire to watch is stimulated. As long as we can watch, or don’t tire of watching, we feel satisfaction.
3. The show ends, we go on to the next show.
4. Caught up in our desire to watch, to satisfy this desire over and over, we enter the phenomenon of “binge watching.” Here, reaching the end of the shows streaming, causes some anguish.
5. This is similar to reading a book quickly and swiftly reaching the end.
6. Think of children who quickly tire of Christmas and birthday toys. Getting them was the important thing.
7. I remember buying 45 rpm records and playing them over and over the first day. In a short time, the records recede as other records get my interest.

World Out of Balance

There are several meanings for the Hopi Indian word “koyaanisqatsi”: life out of balance, crazy life, and (my favorite) a state of life that calls for another way of living. The last conforms to Godfrey Reggio’s above-stated theme. His film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) means to awaken its viewers to a revelation.

If you take the world of Seahaven as representing our world (and, for the moment, not the televised world within our world), the actors become real people who live and work around Truman Burbank. Truman knows only these people and a little of the outside world that the television producers allow him to know.

Essentially, it is the exact world depicted, analyzed, and critiqued in Koyaanisqatsi. Seahaven is the television equivalent of a technologically monolithic society. All values in this world are dictated by television. Writer Leopold Kohr, mentioned at the end of Koyaanisqatsi, focused on the crisis of bigness. This referred to the more and more centralized (and subsequently bigger) governments of modern nations, as well as the growing number of very big corporations. He believed organizations and economies have optimal size and subsequently become stultifying and limiting the greater they grow.

Christof refers to his television creation being larger than many of the economies of nations. To support this large economic entity, the show uses product placement. At every turn of Truman’s day, a product is being sold by word of mouth or by strategic placement of actors in a shot near a billboard or sign. This television world doesn’t differ much from the world “outside” it.

In Seahaven, thousands of cameras record Truman’s every move. The template of surveillance in our own society approaches Seahaven’s. Everywhere we turn, a hat, shirt, headband, highway, and stadium promote some product or business. Selling is an unrelenting, 24/7 activity in our world. It’s inescapable, such that we take it for granted and stop noticing it. Likewise, we are no longer conscious of technology’s presence.

Nor do we reflect on the saturation of advertising in our society unless we fetishize it when we rate the Super Bowl’s commercials.

Similarly, the world of national politics is subsumed by television. Presidential campaigns are perpetually perpetuated by news-hungry organizations. The news in political campaigns is often about campaign advertising, the funding (PACs) for such advertising, and how the news media cover the campaigns. And the campaigns are watched specifically for errors in the way candidates misspeak on the news or generally lie and distort facts.

Returning to Seahaven. Truman’s world, for Christof, represents an ideal, a utopia, which has filtered out the problems of the real world. One of these, by virtue of its absence in “The Truman Show,” is politics. Another is religion. Obvious points for antagonism, arguments, and intolerance.

Seahaven trades these sources of conflict for phoniness and irreality.

Christof and his actors might counter-argue that everything that happens in the show is real. It’s the common if not compelling attraction for audiences: their desire to experience something “real.” But the film (not Christof) seems to be saying that the world depicted in Seahaven IS the world we live in and everything in it is canned and preplanned and lacking any spontaneity (or suppresses attempts to be spontaneous).

Taking this a step farther. The television audience in our world seeks the “real” partly to satisfy a desire for something that seems to be lacking generally in our world. Seahaven-as-our-world scenario suggests that this desire itself falsifies the world even more.

The Delusion

Joel Gold, who is on the psychiatric faculty of New York’s Bellevue Hospital and serves as a clinical assistant professional of psychiatry at New York University’s School of Medicine, first began to see the symptoms dubbed “Truman Show delusion” in 2002 with patients at Bellevue Hospital. He initially treated five white male patients with middle-class upbringing and education, all of whom likened themselves to actors on reality TV shows. They specifically referenced the movie The Truman Show, giving rise to the disorder’s name. In an interview with WebMD, Gold says, “The Truman Show delusion encompasses a patient’s entire life. They believe their family, friends, and co-workers are all reading from scripts and their home, workplace, and hospital are all sets. They believe they are being filmed for the whole world to see.” An interesting aspect of this delusion is the possibility, offered by Gold and others, that the delusion is conscious! The conscious illusion has reached a level that only people living in a television bubble, but not in the Seahaven bubble, could manufacture apparent lunacy. What separates them from Truman himself is that his paranoia doesn’t include being in a television show. Gold mentions that the delusion is tied to an excited ego: a personal belief one’s life is worth watching. Truman has little ego and few delusions.7

Past the Satire

The Truman Show establishes a template for our dissatisfaction with our circumstances: the dominance of technology, propaganda, commercialism, and television. Like Truman, we are deprived of being who we truly are. Albeit, “being who you are” is a tricky concept. The film suggests, due to his name, that Truman is a “true man,” but only glimmers of his true self come through: for example, when he stands before the bathroom mirrors and draws an alien figure and then says: “I hereby proclaim this planet Trumania of the Burbank Galaxy.” You may feel that you are not being true to yourself, even that life is false, and can partly identify the causes for this, causes outside ourselves like SOCIETY. This is why the film serves as a way to understand our predicament. First, we must look past its satire of reality television (but not forgetting it) and see how Truman’s life – his marriage, job, parents, friends – starkly displays our everyday lives.

How does Truman represent us? Through the stages of his daily routine we see him

1. Going to work: Truman goes to work, first running into his neighbor. They exchange hellos while the neighbor’s dog jumps on Truman. The humor of the episode dissolves when, later when the townspeople search for Truman, the neighbor eggs on his dog to become a vicious tracker that could tear Truman to pieces.
2. In a marriage: He has married a college sweetheart, although we learn quickly (through a television flashback) that she was not his first choice. This fact contains the seeds of his marriage troubles.
3. Family pressures: His mother exerts family pressure to prompt Truman to father a child. The absolute cynicism of the television producers doesn’t get clearer: they want to have a live filmed conception. Perhaps worse, a child of Truman would become a fellow detainee in the Seahaven television prison.
4. His job itself and office life: Truman’s job, an insurance salesman, provides him time to daydream in his cubicle as he’s kept minimally busy.
5. His favorite TV show: Perhaps no relationship is more pernicious in Truman’s life – worse than that with his wife or mother – than his near-20-year friendship with Marlon. Marlon serves to keep Truman from breaking through the television reality. One can’t help wondering about the nature of friendship and what exactly friends are for.
6. His desire for travel and adventure: His life in Seahaven, reaching into his house, is inundated with product placement. The show survives through advertising and selling Truman Show–based items to the television audience. Commercialism on this scale (the “bigness” factor) becomes an integral reality in itself, to the point where there’s no separation of the two. Commercialism takes over the world.8 The apotheosis of commercial intrusion occurs while Truman and Merle are having a complete marital breakdown when she stares at the kitchen clock and says: “How can anyone expect me to carry on under these conditions? It’s unprofessional!”9

American suburban life is not directly being satirized. Within the larger framework of the televised world being portrayed on the show, we are being told that our world is not much different. The Seahaven television world is equated with a small country: “People forget it takes the population of an entire country to keep the show running.” Maintaining such a large, growing economy over 30 years manages to make something unnatural (a show about one person who doesn’t know he’s on television) very natural (a small country). Truman exits, the show ends, and we sit and wait. Like the garage attendants at the end of the film, we look for a TV guide, something that takes us further away from reality or a chance to deal with reality. We start our exit from the television ethos, from the show (any show), tying us to this ethos, as a search for more real entertainment, just as likely to be disguised as increased unreal entertainment. This entails a surfeit of special effects (CGI) that create doomsday scenarios. We can only become excited into forgetfulness by enveloping ourselves in extreme scenarios.

Christof explains the show’s success this way:

We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.

The key word is “genuine.” Truman personifies this genuineness. Yet I wonder how a television show can provide this. If one goes to the Truman Show looking for this, it suggests that the world itself isn’t genuine. There is general dissatisfaction with our world. When has this not been true, now or a century ago? The level of the genuine has ebbed and initiated a desire to put it behind us. Assuming Christof understands his creation, the show, that is.

No Exit

Again, the allegory. We can extend it to Truman’s predicament. How can he respond to a world he trusts less and less? Desperately, he tries to escape being monitored and followed; accidentally, he discovers an exit. In a sense, he leaves at the very moment he has the chance to leave. Our individual predicament is that we can’t perceive that moment. What chance can one have when society refuses to take a leap beyond the technological horizon? That is, we’re not given, cannot hope to be given, an alternative. All exits have disappeared.

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All images are screenshots from the film.