The+Truman+Show+Comment+3

**// The Truman Show Comment 3 07/11/98 //** Truman Burbank lives in a perfect world. Everything revolves around him. The colors are bright, the people friendly (and multicultural to a fault), the director-god benevolent. The world is perfect until Truman, the star of the show, realizes that he has no freedom. If his world is Edenic, the knowledge he acquires leads not to expulsion but to escape. A perfect world, this movie parable seems to say, is perfectly dreadful.

And yet many people, I would guess, think that the world is actually like The Truman Show. God's in his (male) heaven, all's in his hands. Christof (really), the director of the television program that chronicles Truman's life, intervenes directly in his creation's life, calls down lightening to strike him when he tries to escape, concocts events to give his life meaning. This notion of a god who is like the director of a television show, and a life like a sitcom, is the embodiment of media-mediated religion.

By now, the story told by this movie is well known. The main character, played with exquisite edginess by Jim Carrey, does not know that he is the star of a television program that is also his life. Followed relentlessly by 5,000 hidden cameras on the stage set that is his hometown of Seahaven, Truman has a perfect wife, a meaningless job, and neighbours out of the 1950s. Everyone is friendly (but in fact duplicitous). But when Truman's father, thought to have been killed in a boating accident, shows up one day, Truman begins to question his world. And rightly so. The actor who plays his father was fired--and thus eliminated in standard soap opera fashion. But he comes back to warn Truman about the hoax being played on him. Another person from Truman's past, a girlfriend (Sylvia) not destined by Christof to marry him, also wants to tell him that his life is not his own--because she loves him. She is also summarily removed from the story, taken by her father to Fiji for her mental health.

From the beginning of the movie, Truman dreams of going to Fiji--because that is where Sylvia is supposed to be. As he becomes more aware of the true circumstances of his life, Truman plots his escape. His mostly amusing efforts to leave town in order to go to Fiji form the substance of the second half of the movie. As we are taken "backstage," where Christof manipulates this world, the movie becomes more interesting, the satirical point sharper. The gradual unravelling of Truman's life in the first part of the movie is clever. We, in the audience, know immediately that this world we are watching is manipulated. We recognize the commercials.

But until the director arrives and Truman begins to struggle for his freedom, the ironies are merely implied. In one particularly effective scene, Truman has a conversation with his life-long friend Harry, who tells him meaningfully, "I would never lie to you." In fact, all of his friend's lines are being fed to him by Christof--and we are allowed to see that. We know that Truman is being manipulated. We come to see both sides of the story.

The world-wide audience that takes Truman's life to be more meaningful than their own also knows that what they are watching is not "real," and yet they are completely caught up in the story. As Truman tries to escape, we are shown sample audiences--a man in a bathtub, patrons in a bar--who cheer him on. Christof tries to drown him in a vicious storm, but Truman, who now knows that Someone is Up There, refuses to give up. He battles the storm, and Christof, and wins. We are reminded of Job, tested and riled by a capricious god.

In the end, Truman escapes his heaven on earth. Sylvia, who has been watching, runs out of her apartment to greet him as he enters the real world, where, presumably, they will be reunited happily (ever after?). The ending is trite--Truman leaves one fantasy for another--and the message delivered by this parable is unsuitably clear. Parables should leave us wondering. We are glad that Truman escapes. We do not want to believe that god is like the director of a sitcom. The bad god is vanquished, and that is satisfying.

In other words, the theological illusion that life is a sitcom is maintained by the movie. Truman does not escape at all. He is still the victim of a larger story, the movie in which he finds happiness, and another director, Peter Wier, whose skills are formidable. In the end, we are to imagine that we too are heroic god-defiers, like Truman. We can escape the bad world where suffering happens and find true love. It is bad theology but a good show.

Ken Arnold, Editor, Cross Currents []