Truman Show discussion

"You never had a camera in my head": 

The Truman Show

It's coincidental that both the Truman Show and Gattaca both use 1950's U.S.A. tropes. In both of the films, the dystopia could be said to be a personal dystopia for the main characters, but maybe not for everyone else. Jim Carrey plays a grotesque caricature of the overly, almost psychotically friendly role of an ultra-sterilized 1950/1960's Main Street, U.S.A., industrally-produced compulsory-positivity conformist. The film does a good job recreating a creepily fake, bright-white and pastel, flannel shirt and overcoat, vaccinated white-bread world. But being the focus of an entire TV show, inside of a gigantic metal bubble stage set, Truman never had the chance to understand what was really going on, and starts to question the whole thing after a few accidents. As the artiste director of the Truman Show says, "We believe the world we are presented with". Although I think the film ultimately seems to function in much the same way the Truman Show does, as emotional manipulation, affective and social control, and spectacle, it provides an interesting scenario in terms of dystopia. Like the director says to Truman's failed lover and liberator, "The world out there, the world you live in, is the sick world"; he believed he created a perfect world for Truman, protecting him from the chaos of the outside world. Truman was the unfortunate guinea pig unknowingly living inside a completely artificial society.  His friend tells an 'interviewer' that "nothing you see is fake, merely controlled" about the Truman Show. Strangely enough this might be the underlying truth about 21st Century U.S.A., too.  

Truman’s father ‘drowns’ right in front of him (all televised), disappearing forever from his sight until he reappears on the set 20 years later. His reappearance intensifies the series of accidents that lead to Truman totally disbelieving in the world he could only take more or less for granted up until that day. His father, though, just becomes integrated again into the spectacle that is driving Truman crazy, and which he is running from, and tells Truman nothing useful. Truman becomes determined to find the truth that first left a permanent impression in his mind, which was given to him by the woman he really loved. He can’t cross the bridges that lead off of the island because of his father’s faked death, though. The film does a good job showing how casually creepy and cruel the director is: even Truman's fears are based on an artificial incident. But it seemed to confirm the feeling that the film finally does not add up to much, when Jim Carrey at the end repeats his “And in case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night”, in what seemed to bring full-circle the fact that the Truman Show was 'only' entertainment, intending somehow to leave the audience reassured that heroes will always triumph, no matter what. The deeper ideological problem suggested here being, "You don't really have to do anything; the spectacle will take care of it for you". Which leaves the Truman Show out of the realm of a 'critical dystopia'. 

The film often uses the surveillance camera perspective to show how Truman is being unknowingly watched. The film does a good job to create a disconcerting effect of exposing the manipulative under-layer of Truman's 'reality', by sometimes zooming into a product, interspersing the artificial layer of advertising right in front of Truman's eyes. I think these things are good metaphors for the kind of dystopian world that exists now. "Something happens and it can drive you crazy ... not even worth thinking about". The distractive-brainwashing strategies used by Truman's 'best friend' seem like the ideologic imploring of consumer capitalism speaking for itself: ignore contradictions, gloss over ugly points, relax and enjoy; tomorrow will be another day. Truman rebels against all this in his kind of counter-narrative, escaping his own personal dystopia,  and enters into the real world through the exit door. In terms of a consumer-capitalist dystopian landscape, the Truman show offers many good instances of evincing the conditions of entrapment and control that forces of Power seek to instantiate through daily life, which people are often unable to see clearly or explicate; therefore, "Something happens and it can drive you crazy ... not even worth thinking about". But, I think the Truman Show fails in this (if it even is really attempting to address any of these problems), and steps only inside of the realm of entertainment, and does not seek or hope to criticize; in this way, it is uncritical, and I believe functions as just another object of 'ideological inoculation' which keeps citizens in places of passive consumerist habits. Like the final scene where the security guards don't really care about anything: "What else is on?"