The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”
On day 10,909 of The Truman Show’s run—the day the film begins—a klieg light falls from the sky. The intrusion of accident into this meticulously manufactured world leads Truman to do what his show cannot abide: to question. Is his reality … real? Is he part of an elaborate show? Truman confesses his doubts to his best friend, Marlon. Christof dictates Marlon’s response through the actor’s hidden earpiece: If Truman’s life is a show, Marlon says, then he would have to be in on the ruse. And “the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.”
For the film’s viewers, scenes like this—gaslighting by way of a flamethrower—can be difficult to watch. And yet: In the movie, people do watch. Some do so fervently, invested in the life of Truman, the human character. Others tune in because there’s nothing else on. The movie interrupts its show-within-a-show to remind us that the series has made Truman not only a subject of sanctioned voyeurism but also a superstar. We see, at various moments, a Truman-themed bar—think TGI Friday’s, crowded with kitschy Trumanabilia—where fans go to watch the show together. (I’m a Tru Believer, announces a bumper sticker pasted next to the TV.) We meet two older women seated next to couch pillows emblazoned with Truman’s face. We learn of the existence of TruTalk, a show dedicated to discussions of The Truman Show. We see the one-sided dynamics of the parasocial relationship, and the ease with which one person’s life can be repackaged as other people’s gossip. “I can’t believe he married Meryl on the rebound,” one woman tells another, her voice sharp with indignation.
Truman’s partnership with Meryl—she is named, like Truman’s best friend, for a famous actor—is another slow-moving manipulation. Hannah, the actor who plays Meryl, is unable to disguise her dislike for Truman when she’s not facing him. Their dialogue in the film consists mostly of chipper banalities; Meryl is most animated, in Truman’s presence, when she is reciting the marketing copy that allows the show to double as an endless act of product placement. For Truman, too, the film implies, his marriage is an act of concession. The woman he really loves was an extra on the show: a fellow student at his college, meant to function, primarily, as scenery. He fell for her at first sight. The producers quickly removed her from the show. Attraction is unruly, Christof knows, and Meryl has already been cast in the role of “Truman’s love interest.”
Christof is the direct agent of Truman’s abuse, but the show’s audience enables it. Captivated by the storylines, they see nothing wrong with the fact that Truman’s freedom is the cost of their fun. We learn, eventually, about a group of people who protest Christof, his show, and the general assumption that bad behavior can be justified by good TV. But those people are “a very vocal minority,” TruTalk’s host says, dismissively, as he conducts a fawning interview with Christof.
They may be, or they may not. One of the still-resonant messages of The Truman Show is that mass media has a way of making, and then simply becoming, reality. However numerous the protesters are, they are, on their own, ineffective: There Truman remains, tracked by 5,000 cameras. And there is his audience, despite it all, like a merch-laden Greek chorus. They speak across time, to the people viewing the film: Would you watch The Truman Show? Or would you be one of the people who speak out against it? (...)
Today, when works of pop culture revisit the 1990s, with all its ambient cruelties, they tend to do so with a tone of self-congratulation: Things might not be great now, they typically suggest, but look how much worse they were then. The Truman Show preemptively questioned some of that smugness. The film predicted how the louche voyeurism of that decade would settle into the muted voyeurism of this moment. It presaged the immense popularity of true crime, a genre that treats murder as a puzzle to be solved, abuses as stories waiting to be spun. It anticipated how readily we would come to see people as characters—the ease with which we would treat their lives as our entertainment.
by Megan Garber, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Paramount/Everett
