The Truman Show (Exegesis)

The Truman Show (1998, PG)
Directed by Peter Weir
Written by Andrew Niccol
With Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich


If we are to render The Truman Show’s Baudrillard-esque hyperreality into the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the nature, and even the validity, of the Tree is called into question. A hyperreality, a “reality” TV show where the “protagonist” does not even know he is the star of the most popular and successful play/show/film in history – does such an outlandish but all too imaginable world even lend itself to the Tree’s notions of horizontal dualistic balance and vertical hierarchal (or subversive) influence?

Jim Carrey plays Truman, an amiable and likeable young man who is married to a beautiful blonde woman and lives in a picture perfect suburban town where everybody smiles and there is absolutely no crime or unhappiness. Before the true nature of his environment is revealed (I might ask if we could even call it “true”), there is a feeling of a 50s sitcom parody – everybody speaks in giddy tones and canned phrases. Every day is like every other day – literally. Each morning when Truman leaves his house for work, he greets with the same expression his jovial neighbor who is always in the same spot, and who’s dog always jumps on Truman, who always pretends to be surprised at the dog’s forwardness, and so on and so on. There is the token best friend who always seems to show up at the right time, without fail. Downtown, Truman always bumps into the same acquaintences at the same corners. Everybody in Truman’s world is participating in a ritual-like procession through the day; it has never been any other way.

Since its release in the late 90s, there have been several movies sharing The Truman Show’s motifs of artificiality, disguised appearances, and suburban hypocrisy rooted in 1950s middle class society. Watching it again in 2007, one cannot help but initially comparing it to such films as American Beauty, Pleasantville, Donnie Darko, all of which (Truman Show included) owe at least some debt to the revolutionary depiction of suburban dystopia in David Lynch’s 1986 surrealist noir Blue Velvet. The images that come to mind are: white picket fences, impossibly vibrant flowers, manicured lawns, and neighbourhoods where you comfortably wave to everyone but fear to enter their respective abodes. However, the world of Truman differs both descriptively and analytically. Unlike the afore-mentioned films, The Truman Show is not concerned with the skeletons in the closets, the decay beneath the perfume, the hypocrisy lacing artificial beauty and communication. I think such notions are, in 2007,moot points and facts taken for granted by Generation Y and its cynicism (of cynicism).

It is no secret to the reader, I will presume, that the beginning of “The Truman Show” was Truman’s birth; since then the show has been broadcasted 24/7 worldwide. He lives in a dome near Hollywood, and has never stepped foot outside of it; everybody around him are high-paid actors, and the biggest events in Truman’s life were influenced and staged by writers, namely his creator Christof (Ed Harris). The trajectory of the movie follows Truman as he first slowly becomes suspicious of his environment, then challenges it as a child tests the waters of his/her household, then rebels against conformity and external control, then briefly relapses due to fear of the unknown, and finally decides to break free from it in a kind of biblical exodus – rather than being exiled into the desert, Truman undergoes a self-exile into the “vast” waters that he has a childhood-fear towards. With the entire world watching, Truman triumphs over the stormy wrath of his creator, avoiding near death; he reaches the edge of the dome, on which the sky is revealed to be painted, and goes through the required and trite archetypal scene where Creation meets Creator…Frankenstein and Prometheus, Parent and Child, God and Adam/Eve/Moses/Job. Truman supercedes his creator in strength and will, and walks out into the “real world”, and so the film ends.

Funny at the beginning. Sad in the middle. The ending is intended to be liberating and joyful, but I found it extremely troubling…not because the events themselves are disturbing, but because of the way they are presented – or more accurately, not presented. The movie falls victim to the hyperreal contrivance it seems to earlier condemn in the “show” itself.

What exactly is the point of this movie? As I’ve said, it is not an unveiling of the ugliness beneath the fake beauty of the world, for the world in The Truman Show is not the world for us, only for Truman. And from his perspective, that which he discovers within his environment is not some sort of evil or darkness or perversity. Christof is right when in an interview and also in his dialogue with Truman that there is absolutely no badness in the Truman’s world. The people are actors, and are aware of themselves and their relationships as performative illusions. And even more interestingly, they are not trying to deceive the millions of TV-viewers into believing they are genuine persons. Although a “reality show”, the viewer knows that the characters are still acting. The characters in American Beauty do engage in deception but the actors in the Truman “show” don’t engage in deception towards their neighbours (i.e. the viewers) but towards ONE SINGULAR PERSON.

So then, is the movie saying that not everything is what it seems? Such a juvenile and simple theme is not, I hope, what underlies the film. I might say that everything IS what it seems. THAT IS THE POINT OF REALITY TELEVISION, POST MODERN MEDIA, AND THE TRUMAN SHOW MOVIE ITSELF. Truman happily lived a good 25 or so years in a completely fabricated world. Was it, then, fabricated during those 25 years, or a comfortable and accepted reality? Even the TV Viewers began to see the entire life of Truman as a real life; of course Truman is a real person, and of course what happens to him is reality! Does it matter that his best friend is an actor being fed lines through a mic? Maybe, maybe not. It certainly doesn’t matter for the TV Viewers, and until the timeframe of the movie it didn’t matter for Truman either. Politicians speak from script; God speaks through script; Prophets and priests speak through script(ure).

The Kabbalistic Tree is God, because God is all. But God is not a tree. The Tree of Life is essentially an unbounded circle. I do not wish to degrade all of the present discussion by regressing into a silly concordance of Sephirah and characters, such as saying that Christof is Kether, Truman is Malkkuth or perhaps even Shekhinah in exile…They could very well be these things, but stating them will not help our understanding. Continuing that metaphor would unfortunately lead to the insignificance of Kether /the Creator in the formation of the world (Truman’s exit from the dome), etc etc.

So what is at the heart of the film?
1. The fear of the actors when Truman changes what the script calls for. Their identity and very existence dissolves in such instances, and the only option available is to physically charge into Truman to block him – think of the hospital scene when, to prevent Truman from looking into a surgery which is not meant to be an actual surgery, a random goggle of handicapped old men frantically wheel themselves into Truman’s path. There is an extreme anxiety in everybody, as though they will die – as characters, as jobs, as egos - if Truman escapes.
2. The lack of any shot of the outside world that is not of people watching the Truman Show. Just as Baudrillard predicted, and just as we’re already seeing in youth, the importance of “illusion” and “media” breaks through the barrier of the screen and invades the territory of reality. The movie is called The Truman Show not because its about the show but because the movie is the show.
3. The staircase at the edge of the dome leading to a doorway in the sky – Jacob’s ladder, the ascension of Enoch into Metatron, death, renewal, and all of the above.
4. Why do we feel it is a happy ending? In the context of the movie, we really do not know what it is outside the dome, the doorway leads only into blackness, Truman has lost his God and his family and his community, and he has also left himself. For if he leaves, he is no longer Truman.

The mistake of the filmmakers is ignoring number 4, and shrinking from the disturbing implications in Truman’s self-exile. They avoid what I feel is an unavoidable parallel to theology and myth – and to acknowledge such does not necessitate the belief in God at all.

In a future essay, I will expound on Baudrillard’s notion of the “hyperreality”. The hyperreality is hinted at in this film, but does not come to our full attention. Why? Because the movie suffers from hyperreality!
Am I going in loops? Am I losing logic in this review? The answer is yes, and it’s the movie’s fault.

Many people don’t seem to remember the very last scene in the movie. It is this scene that makes me want to burn every reel of the film for its dishonesty, cowardice, stupidity, and…yes, effectiveness as a liberating and concluding joke. I am not going to say what it is said in hope that the re-reader and destroyer of my review will feel the desire the emanate into the film itself rather than using some nameless hunter of Shekhinah’s pseudo-review of a pseudo-honest movie.