The Real Lesson of The Truman Show

The Real Lesson of The Truman Show
Story by Megan Garber •
04/18/24

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

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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.”
The Truman Show, the film, premiered in June of 1998: a summer blockbuster guided less by literal explosions than by metaphorical ones. Its durability is typically attributed to its insights about technology: Through Truman’s story, the movie predicted, with eerie acuity, the rise of reality TV, the transactions of social media, the banality of surveillance. But Truman is not the story’s true everyman. The people who watch The Truman Show are. As the years go by, Christof’s efforts to keep Truman in Seahaven become more extreme and more cruel. The viewers watch anyway. The series, we learn, has a global audience of more than 1 billion people. That audience, for Christof and for all those who defer to him, rationalizes everything else. This is what elevates The Truman Show from prescience to prophesy. The viewers are watching a captive. They believe they are watching a star.


“As Truman grew up, we were forced to manufacture ways to keep him on the island,” Christof says in an interview partway through the film. He is making an admission; he thinks he is describing his artistic technique. The show killed Truman’s father before his eyes: a sailing trip, a squall, a hand sinking into the sea. The plot twist served partly to write an uncooperative actor off the show—The Truman Show requires compliance from its staff as well as its lead—but mostly to foster a fear of water in the young Truman. An island, after all, has only one kind of exit. Christof builds reminders of the trauma into the show’s otherwise sterile environment. Having been asked by a colleague to visit a client on another “island,” a fearful Truman encounters a half-sunken skiff tied to the pier. Christof, through his actors, plants the idea that Truman might have prevented the tragedy. “I don’t blame you,” Truman’s mother tells him at one point, magnanimously and unconvincingly.

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.

[Read: We’ve lost the plot]

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?

The Truman Show was released in the years that found the Starr Report dominating headlines and series like The Jerry Springer Show turning voyeurism into a way of life. It arrived shortly before Survivor and Big Brother premiered. It asked questions about the shape American culture would take as we prepared to enter a new century. And it was not terribly optimistic about the answers.

[Read: Jerry Springer explained it all]

In that way, too, it was prescient. The Truman Show is extreme in its satire: Film audiences of the time would have recognized, in a way that the show’s in-universe audiences did not, all the madness in Christof’s methods. The fact that Truman is, as one character announces, “the first child to have been legally adopted by a corporation,” would have struck many as a cause for alarm. Christof, had he been a real-world producer of semi-scripted TV, would likely not have been the recipient of empty adulation that he is in the film. He would have been an even more influential figure: a purveyor of controversy.

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.

[Read: A grim new low for internet sleuthing]

The Truman Show, as the screenwriter Andrew Niccol originally conceived it, was dark and gritty and openly dystopic. The script’s early version was set in New York City; rather than living a life of synthetic ease, Truman struggled. He had a drinking problem. He cheated on his wife. In a pivotal scene, while riding the subway, he witnessed an assault—and, as the cameras rolled, failed to intervene.

When Peter Weir signed on to direct the film, he asked for a change in course, and in tone. He thought the movie should be—or at least look like—a comedy. Weir and Niccol reworked the script together, relocating The Truman Show to the seemingly idyllic island of Seahaven, and remaking Truman as a man who is preternaturally positive. Weir cast Jim Carrey, then best known for his elastic-faced comedic abilities, as his protagonist. The shift turned a strong idea into a masterful one. It allowed The Truman Show to mimic the TV series it was named for: a work of dark insight wrapped in technicolor cheer. The shift also allowed the film to take that original subway scene—bystander apathy colliding with live TV—and diffuse its pathos into every moment.

Truman is not the only person who is being exploited in the name of escapism. Christof, we learn, hopes that The Truman Show will feature “television’s first on-air conception”; the film leaves it to the viewer to consider the consequences of that desire. Early on, we hear two fans of The Truman Show—security guards who watch it to pass the hours during their shifts—acknowledging, grudgingly, that the show declines to air intimacy between Truman and Meryl. The film shows Truman in public spaces, making cheerfully bland small talk with townspeople. It shows him at home, and at work. But it leaves its audience to wonder how the TV series itself—broadcasting 24 hours a day—defines privacy: Does it cut away while Truman is showering, or using the bathroom, or getting dressed? 

The Truman Show—the movie—is not subtle about its moral stance: Nods to privacy, in the context of the broader abuse, are not merely cosmetic, but also absurd. But the film counters its heavy-handedness with subtler explorations of the moral dynamics of the show. The people who take advantage of Truman do so, for the most part, convinced that they are engaged in acts of care. As he manipulates Truman, Christof treats his subject with paternal tenderness. His staffers wear T-shirts that read LOVE HIM, PROTECT HIM. The show surrounds Truman with characters who are, as stereotypes, protective and nurturing. Meryl is a nurse. When Truman expresses doubts about his upbringing, his mother proffers a family photo album, using tender family memories as tools of constraint.

Seahaven turns those illusions of protection into an environmental proposition. It is stridently—stiflingly—middle-class and almost entirely white. It exemplifies the mythologized ease of postwar America. By the end of the film, those illusions shatter. Truman cannot be contained; he’s too much of an individual to be content with the placid, plastic world that has been made for him. The film culminates in a hectic collision of metaphors: for religion, for politics, for the question of what the individual owes to the collective, and vice versa. Truman struggles to be himself in an environment built to enclose him. And he fights against all the people, alleged friends and neighbors and fellow citizens, who claimed to protect him. Seahaven falls apart; so do its many lies.

By its conclusion, then, The Truman Show turns its study of voyeurism into a study of complicity. The Truman Show, the series, is an ongoing social experiment with a dark conclusion: Very much, it suggests—too much—might be justified because it brings an audience. The people who make the decisions in The Truman Show all have their reasons. The executives, somber guys clad in black suits, represent the financial rationale: Eyeballs mean money, and money means everything. Christof, who wears his beret as he wears his sense of his genius—gaudily—represents the notion that art is an end in itself.

And then there’s the audience: massive, constant, mistaking exploitation for fandom. As Truman struggles to escape—the island, the show, and the life that has been imposed on him—he commandeers a boat. The producers create a storm. He falls off the vessel, struggling in the water, gasping for breath. He could die, before their eyes. The audience at the Truman Bar is rapt. “I got two to one he doesn’t make it,” someone shouts. “Hey, I want a piece of that!” yells another. The exchange is 25 years old. It hasn’t aged a bit.


***
Psychoanalytic interpretation
An essay published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis analyzed Truman as

a prototypical adolescent at the beginning of the movie. He feels trapped into a familial and social world to which he tries to conform while being unable to entirely identify with it, believing that he has no other choice (other than through the fantasy of fleeing to a far-way island). Eventually, Truman gains sufficient awareness of his condition to "leave home"—developing a more mature and authentic identity as an adult, leaving his child-self behind and becoming a True-man.

For the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, its official poster pays homage to the film and its final scene with their website stating that "Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol's The Truman Show (1998) is a modern reflection of Plato's cave and the decisive scene urges viewers to not only experience the border between reality and its representation but to ponder the power of fiction, between manipulation and catharsis."

Similarity to Utopia
Parallels can be drawn from Thomas More's 1516 book Utopia, in which More describes an island with only one entrance and only one exit. Only those who belonged to this island knew how to navigate their way through the treacherous openings safely and unharmed. This situation is similar to The Truman Show because there are limited entryways into the world that Truman knows. Truman does not belong to this utopia into which he has been implanted, and childhood trauma rendered him frightened of the prospect of ever leaving this small community. Utopian models of the past tended to be full of like-minded individuals who shared much in common, comparable to More's Utopia and real-life groups such as the Shakers and the Oneida Community.[38] It is clear that the people in Truman's world are like-minded in their common effort to keep him oblivious to reality. The suburban "picket fence" appearance of the show's set is reminiscent of the "American Dream" of the 1950s. The "American Dream" concept in Truman's world serves as an attempt to keep him happy and ignorant.