The Truman Show Analysis

It is an important text to consider with respect to those other difficult questions we all seem to either explore or avoid: Who am I? Why am I here? What’s it all about? Am I living in a counterfeit world where my choices ultimately bear no significance? If so, is a meaningful life even possible? These are crucial questions that pertain to humanity, ones that The Truman Show seeks not necessarily to answer directly but rather explore through speculation, inquiry and character/plot subtext.

They are also questions that lead us to consider how Truman’s awakening into “the real” is a type of our own awakening, and why opting for reality over appearance is something worth striving for. The great difficulty of the film regards the term “reality”—1). What it means in context of Truman’s world, 2). Christof’s world, 3). The audience-within-the-film’s world, 4). The spectators who watch the film’s world, and 5). The overall statement Weir is making about reality in general. That is five different realities, each which carry delicate nuances about its semantically complex nature.

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Indeed, spectators are left to question like Truman does when he discovers the fabrication of his existence, “Was nothing real? ” Well, what is real in The Truman Show? Who or what social forces construct his/our reality? Weir seems to intentionally leave open gaps in answers to these types of questions to involve spectators more in the process of constructing the film’s textual meaning. He also seems to posit a “real world” of some sort beyond Truman’s manufactured one, but is unclear as to what that “real” one is and why Truman/spectators should want it.

The ambiguous challenge of the film therefore inevitably forces us to dive into the precarious realm of metaphysics—the realm where we ponder what reality is like. It is in this realm where Weir asks us to become metaphysicians in order to explore what this nebulous term “reality” even means. One film theoretician whose ideas can help dissect the subtle nuances of how reality is played with in The Truman Show is Nick Browne. To provide a brief caveat on Browne’s theories, it is pertinent to understand that he explores the ways in which film form (camera angle, mis-en-scene, dialogue, etc. ) relates to film content (theme, moral order, etc. . He views the director as a narrator who invites the spectator into the text to partake of a certain relationship not only between the characters and their beliefs, but also the director and his beliefs.

According to Browne, certain narrators have been known to override the traditional meaning of filmic codes (e. g. IMR) by using formal methods to make a statement about the film’s moral order. In what he calls “the power of the gaze,” the narrator demonstrates that the person who holds the most powerful point-of-view—or gaze—over another character, according to the traditional codes is, in fact, wrong in his/her judgment.

Browne therefore emphasizes the narrator’s role as using the conventional language of film “against itself” in order to make a provocative statement about the film’s content (13). Peter Weir plays the role of what Browne calls the “narrator-in-the-text,” one who has invited us to ascertain the “moral order” of the film. The moral order of The Truman Show pertains to the five aforementioned levels of reality and how spectators are to interpret them.

Using Browne’s updated version of formalism, the essay will argue how “Weir” steps into the text using dialogue and camera angle to present the great moral order of the film—the issue of what it means to see reality truly. Aspects of Browne’s “power of the gaze” will be useful to bolster the fact that although spectators identify with Truman throughout the film, their identification with him cannot help but be predominantly filtered through Christof’s all-powerful, watch-tower gaze; a perspective that Weir-as-narrator-in-the-text is ultimately going to argue, using neo-formalism (e. g. specifically camera angle), as being wrong in judgment.

In particular, the essay will provide concrete examples from the film of how Weir uses shifting camera perspectives of how spectators view Truman, whether through Christof’s autocratic gaze (what I will argue as the “despotic perspective”) or through the omniscient perspective that frees Truman from Christof’s “intricate network of hidden cameras” (TS). The shifting camera perspectives will create what Browne labels “the plural subject”—the notion that forces/leads/or guides spectators not only to identify with certain characters, but also “to be at two places at once, where the camera is and ‘with’ the depicted person” (127).

As applied and will be argued in this paper, the filmic spectator is the “plural subject” that is consistently sutured or locked between the “despotic” and “omniscient” perspective when viewing Truman, thereby creating a “double structure of viewer/viewed” (127). These structures inevitably challenge spectators to wrestle with how reality is portrayed in The Truman Show and how the varying lenses of representation regarding “reality” carry certain implications under the despotic perspective, and likewise under the omniscient one.

Understanding how “Weir” uses these ambiguous camera perspectives (i. e. structures) will help us further see how reality operates according to the film’s five aforementioned realities. They will also help clarify what Browne means when he says “such structures, which in shaping and presenting the action prompt a manner and indeed a path of reading, convey and are closely allied to the guiding moral commentary of the film” (131-132).

Certainly The Truman Show is complex and ambivalent, one that demands a sensitive read. We will therefore begin with a brief plot synopsis of the film, move towards the evidence that shows how Browne’s neo-formalist theories of the “power of the gaze” and “plural subject” relate to Weir’s use of “despotic” and “omniscient” camera perspectives, and overall tie-in how these ideas pertain to the five levels of reality in the film.

The Truman Show depicts the life of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), the first child legally adopted by a corporation for the purposes of filming his entire life “recorded on an intricate network of hidden cameras, and broadcast live and unedited twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to an audience around the globe” (TS). Christof (Ed Harris), the show’s creator, lives in a reality governed by “television ratings” and media hype. He convinces Truman that he inhabits a benign and ordinary world, but little oes he know that everything he does is monitored, controlled and manufactured under the totalitarian gaze of Christof.

While the world he occupies is virtually counterfeit and full of actors—even his wife Meryl (Laura Linney) and best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich)—Truman is unaware that his life is being used to entertain humanity in a non-stop reality program. Audiences within the film glue themselves anxiously to the screen wondering “How will it end? ”—a slogan captured on buttons, T-shirts and posters purchased by fans of the show.

Their reality revolves around watching Truman live out his happy cliched existence in the idyllic hometown of Seahaven until gradually certain events cause him to question the perception of his alleged reality: camera lights fall from the sky, actors fail to follow their cues, backstage set dressings are exposed, etc. These curious events begin to awaken Truman to the constructs that have sought to blind him his entire life. He realizes that something is wrong and goes to great lengths to break free from his contrived world that was invented by Christof and the scheming media.

At the climactic end of the film, Truman reaches towards an open door that will lead him into another world, but is cautioned by his Creator not to leave for fear that he will “not like what [he] finds” (TS). In the end, Truman rejects his counterfeit heaven and chooses an authentic, although unknown and presumably difficult, life as substitute. Using certain aspects from Browne’s theories, let us now consider how Weir-as-narrator-in-the-text carefully crafts the meaning of Truman’s, Christof’s, the audience-within-the-film, and the audience outside the film’s reality.

The film opens with Christof talking directly to the camera in Brechtian style to the spectators in the theater. He admits that while Truman’s world “is in some respects counterfeit,” he assures us that “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” (TS). Christof suggests here that while Truman has been duped to believe he is living a “real life” he has chosen for himself, the life he has given Truman is better than what he later calls the “sick real world”—the one outside Truman’s studio.

Paradoxically, he claims that there is “nothing fake about Truman himself” yet in the same breath admits that the reality he occupies is counterfeit. For the Marxist critic, Christof’s philosophy might beg the question of how a person can be “authentic” or “real” if human identity is nothing more than a product of the economic environment he/she lives in. In fact, Marx’s statement that “man’s social existence determines his consciousness” seems to expose the very flaw of Christof’s viewpoint that Truman is somehow a true-man despite living a social sham.

Nevertheless, backstage interviews with Truman’s perky wife, Meryl, and best friend, Marlon, are then juxtaposed together that reinforce the paradoxical nature of Christof’s philosophy, “It’s all true, it’s all real. Nothing here is fake, nothing you see on this show is fake…it’s just merely controlled” (TS). Upon the closure of these lines, we immediately cut into Truman’s phony world where Christof’s pervasive surveillance equipment watches his every move. Using Browne’s “power of the gaze,” we can see how spectators are thus sutured into Christof’s powerful, Big Brother gaze over Truman.

In fact, spectators cannot help but see Truman through Christof’s point-of-view throughout the majority of the film since the studio cameras record and reveal everything he does. However, even though we might be forced into Christof’s POV, it is debatable whether “Weir” is asking spectators to agree with his schemes as morally laudable. For instance, given Christof’s demeanor of totalitarian spectatorship over Truman, the spectator watching The Truman Show the film might feel unsure if whether to trust his perspective; whether he/she is seeing truly through his perspective.

After all, Christof’s reality is centered on the fabrication of Truman’s entire reality: his childhood, his job, even his marriage. He even goes as far to manufacture his fears, like his fear of water, which is used to keep Truman from escaping the studio of Seahaven, escaping from his false self. As Kimberly A. Blessing observes, “Everyone, including his adoring television viewing audience, is complicit in the lie…” (5-6). One possible meaning that we can extract here is that “Weir” is crafting Christof’s reality in a way that challenges the public’s perception of how the media operates.

The media, like Christof, would have us live inside a fictitious world governed by commercial glamour that fuels their sales, ratings, product placement, etc. Just as the creators of Truman’s world commercialize his life with product placement ads, like when Meryl showcases the wonders of a new kitchen utensil to Truman but is really advertising it to the millions of viewers watching, so too is “Weir” making a satirical commentary on how the creators of media attempt to commercialize our lives by getting us to buy their products.

The question becomes, then, whether a person who lies even for an allegedly noble cause can be trusted. How noble are Christof’s intentions anyway if he is deceiving Truman in order to receive higher television ratings? There seems to be no escape from Christof’s questionable morality or autocratic gaze, but it is here that “Weir” carefully steps into the text and shows us through camera angle and plot progression that Truman and spectators alike can escape from Christof’s duplicitous schemes.

No sooner when the camera light falls from the sky and Truman begins to sense something is wrong with his reality that “Weir” intermediately switches from Christof’s camera perspective (the “despotic perspective”) to the omniscient perspective when viewing Truman. The omniscient perspective is void of the studio camera’s edges that remind spectators they are sutured into Christof’s POV. Instead, the omniscient perspective is transcendent, clear and fledgling as it frees Truman and spectators from Christof’s gripping surveillance, but it also is transient.

Just as it will take the entire film for Truman to realize the extent to which he is being deceived, it will also take the entire film for “Weir” to gradually overwhelm the despotic perspective with the omniscient one. As a result of these double-shifting, ambivalent camera POV’s, we can see by using what Browne calls the “plural subject” that “Weir” is asking us to be at two places at once: where the camera is and from whose perspective we’re seeing Truman from.

The difficulty here is that although spectators are implicated into Truman’s life and naturally yearn to identify with him, it is imperative to remember that “the logic of the framing” and our identification with him has already been subjugated primarily through a liar’s eyes (Braudy & Cohen 127). Consequently, it becomes tricky to discern whether we’re ever actually identifying with the “real” Truman or just Christof’s deceitful version of him. But of course, this is what the film is about.

It is about asking us what it means to see with eyes truly, whether we’re all being duped inside Christof’s matrix so to speak, and whether it is possible to awaken from counterfeit reality to something truly authentic. The presentational structure of the film argues that although we identify with Truman through a liar’s eyes, we do not have to accept that POV as morally commendable, but can reject and feel liberated from it when viewing Truman omnisciently.

Because of these presentational structures that Browne argues “convey a point of view” and are “fundamental to the exposition to the moral idea” of the film, Truman, like spectators, must achieve awareness of their constructed or controlled-by-another’s kind of existence, and choose to embrace a “reality” that is not manufactured by another individual or economic system (131-132). In several instances of the film, Truman tries to gain this awareness by escaping from Seahaven.

He drives his car to the edge of the forest and sails through a massive typhoon but gets blocked at every turn. Christof, like the media, has trapped Truman inside his false reality and does not want him to leave. Truman even receives help from certain cast-members of the show who try to reveal the truth to him, whether flying over head with signs reading, “Truman, you’re on television,” or jumping out of present boxes screaming the same.

Weir-as-narrator-in-the-text is “telling us,” as Ken Sanes argues, “that we too have to take a journey—of mind—and distance ourselves from this media landscape, if we want to secure our freedom” (Sanes). The strategy of despotic/omniscient perspective in particular helps “Weir” establish these moral orders by focusing on the relationship between Truman and Christof, truth-seeker and pseudo-truth giver, for it seems as though he subverts the traditional IMR codes of who spectators are supposed to identify with.

Again, despite seeing the majority of Truman’s life from the despotic perspective, the sparse use of the omniscient one is where “Weir” is actively engaged in the text and leading us to accept Truman’s final choice of rejecting his manufactured reality as indeed the correct choice. Weir uses the cinematographic apparatus to lead spectators to see the truth about Truman, to become more aware about their own susceptibility to “false ealities” and in doing so uses the conventional language of the film as Browne would argue “against itself” by reversing the traditional meaning of form to make a statement about content. He shows through the despotic perspective that although Christof’s version of pampered reality for Truman might hold noble intentions—indeed, Christof is convinced he is actually helping Truman by sheltering him from the “sick real world”—he is in fact wrong in his judgment because reality, even if unknown or “sick,” must be preferred to some counterfeit version of it.