The Truman Show

EN

“Sometimes, it happens that a film explodes into a million particles, which flutter down into households, schools, universities, and all over the internet. The Truman Show is such a film: it has served as an illustration for a multitude of theories. It has generated excitement among philosophers, scholars, students, and many others who seem to have discovered a new relationship with reality with the help of it. But The Truman Show is not a stand-in; it is real. The film as an experience exists, and there we meet Jim Carrey with his bright, big teeth. His smile seems to escape his face yet still manages to keep everything in place.”

Nina de Vroome

“The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all the people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small-town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a twenty-four-hour permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him around the clock. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 1950s gradually realizes that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied. The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way irreal, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia. So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, ‘real social life’ itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in ‘real’ life as stage actors and extras. Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of the ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a spectral show.”

Slavoj Žižek1

“In fact, Weir says he recalls a comment by the creator of Big Brother ‘[who was] in the planning stages [of the show] at the time of the film’s release. He said something like: ‘When I saw Truman I thought we better get a move on’. Big Brother came out a year or so later.’ But The Truman Show's sharp commentary on living under constant surveillance foreshadowed not only the reality TV age but the whole social media culture. (…)

Weir also hit the nail on the head when it came to the conventions of "unscripted" television, before these could even be described as such. As with all good reality TV shows, the Truman Show's ‘reality’ is really spun by producers dictating the happenings of Truman's contained world. Christof (Ed Harris), the megalomaniac creator of the Truman Show, has a despotic eye that oversees everything, his power illustrated with his demand to ‘cue the sun!’ Encounters with passers-by and acquaintances are minutely rehearsed so Truman's interactions with the world seem organic. The collective desire to observe a mundane ‘reality’ is outlined by Christof in the film's opening moments: ‘We've become bored with watching actors give us phoney emotions… While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself.’”

Emily Maskell2

“A satire of Orwellian proportions, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show is a cleverly conceived (by Andrew Niccol), masterfully executed cautionary tale that would have tickled late media guru Marshall McLuhan.”

Michael Rechtshaffen3

Academic titles that are citing The Truman Show:
Ahmet Samet Tuncabayin, “Analysis of The Truman Show with the help of Jean Baudrillard”
J. Macgregor Wise, “Mapping the Culture of Control: Seeing Through The Truman Show”
Emine Koseoglu, “Truman Show and Perceptual Realities in Architectural Space”
Adjie Pamungkas, Bobby Octavia Yuskar, “The Use of Metaphors, Similes, and Personifications in the Truman Show”
Sue Kegerreis, “Life lessons from The Truman Show: Parenting, adolescence and the therapeutic process”
Christoffer Lammer-Heindel, “How’s It Going to End? The Truman Show as Critique of Hegemonic Theism”
Dusty Lavoie, “Escaping the Panopticon: Utopia, Hegemony, and Performance in Peter Weir’s The Truman Show”
Douglas A. Cunningham, “A Theme Park Built for One: The New Urbanism vs. Disney Design in The Truman Show”
Ronald Bishop, “Good Afternoon, Good Evening, and Good Night: The Truman Show as Media Criticism”

[deleted]
A true hallucination you say?
[deleted]
A lot of people became convinced that their lives were a television show… it became known as the Truman Show Syndrome
GrahamSkehan
I had a really bad manic episode about five years ago and I had that as a recurring thing. 
[deleted]
Wow that’s really interesting.
Emperor000
Yeah, but don’t worry, your life definitely isn’t a situation like that. Seriously, it isn’t.
KelMc13
Yeah, the last thing I would ever do… is lie to you.
Bigga_nutt
It really is, there’s a documentary about it on Netflix I believe. Specifically about the Truman Show and Jim Carrey.
Papatheodorou
Jim & Andy? That’s about Man on the Moon
Bigga_nutt
Whoops, you’re right.

Reddit, 2018.

• 1Slavoj Žižek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real!,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, Duke University Press, Spring 2002.
• 2Emily Maskell, “The Truman Show, Has a Film Ever Predicted the Future so Accurately?,” BBC, 1 June 2023.
• 3Michael Rechtshaffen, “‘The Truman Show’: THR’s 1998 Review,” The Hollywood Reporter, 5 June 2019.