13 October 1998
The Truman Sham
The Truman Burbank docu-soap has opened to general critical acclaim allied with
widespread condemnation about the manner in which the media manipulates people's
lives. David Nolan has a different take on what the film reveals about the
media
The Truman Show is the latest of this year's very long list of heavily-hyped
movies to open in the UK. Unusually for the normal blockbuster dross served up,
this is a movie with a particularly clever take on the interaction between the
media and people's lives. While there's nothing intriguing about Truman's empty
life, nor about those who follow it through their TVs, the film carries a much
misunderstood message which, rather than exposing media manipulation, reveals lot
about the contempt the media has for its audience.
The Truman Show is the epitome of the docu-soap, fly on the wall documentary
which has become a regular feature of TV listings. Every time we press the
remote's button there is yet another programme about 'ordinary' people reflecting
(or not, as the case may be) on the mundanity of their lives. The Truman Show is
a docu-soap writ large, on an enormous scale but with a clever twist and a very
thoughtful message.
Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey in an unusually 'straight' role for him, is
a struggling insurance salesman in the curiously plastic American west coast town
of Seahaven. He is married to a simpering wife who regularly tells us far more
than we need to know about certain products she is about to use or eat (as do
other characters) and leads a very ordinary life.
The twist is that (in case you have been out to lunch since the first trailers
appeared in the Spring) the whole of Seahaven is on an island - on a television
set. Truman's life is the subject of a 24 hours a day TV show aired live
throughout the world. We're told he started life as the result of an unwanted
pregnancy to become the most talked about and watched individual in the world. As
we join him, Truman has reached thirty and is getting itchy feet. Like the
majority of Americans, he does not own a passport - but then Truman has never
even left his home town.
Seahaven is probably like many small American towns. The newspapers carry
headlines like 'Who needs Europe?' always enforcing the 'you don't want to leave
here' message to Truman who suffers from a fear of water which prevents him
crossing the bridge to the mainland. The 'town' is filmed constantly by 5000
cameras, in the lapel badges of other characters, behind car radios and mirrors
and in many other places - some so obvious you wonder if Truman is in fact
'camera blind'.
At the outset, Christof - the producer of the programme - justifies the
stage-management of Truman's life with the allegation that people are reassured
by the cocooned safety of Seahaven and comforted by Truman's ordinariness to the
extent that they like to go to sleep with his sleeping face on their flickering
TV screens. The producer of this global show tells us that 'Seahaven is the way
the world should be'. Erm, no thanks, pal. A world shorn of all emotion apart
from bland good humour may be some sort of spin doctored happy news media heaven.
But for those of us with a life ... it sounds like hell by the sea.
We are however told about the 'very vocal minority' opposed to the staging of
Truman's life in this manner. The 'Release Truman' campaign is run by a former
extra in the show who sneaked a on-air kiss with him and then tried to explain
that his whole life was a charade. Apart from that, a 'Cheers-like' bar where
everybody goes to swap Truman stories and a couple of other glimpses of the
people who spend their lives watching Truman's life, very little is shown of the
real world.
Some critics have said that the film forces us to consider the manner in which
the media manipulates our lives. The opposite is true. The media reflects the
world around it. While many may watch the show, and enjoy it, as the truth slowly
dawns on Truman there is a wave of support for him to lead his life beyond his
dome. The film reveals the contempt the media has for its audience: it is the
media which considers the inanity of Truman Burbank's life is worthy of such
attention. And the idea that such enormous resources would go into a single show
(24 hours a day or not) suggests that those who made this film have an outlandish
sense of the depth of their funders' coffers. The dome which encases the set is
on a scale far grander than anything Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson could dream
up and is even apparently visible from the moon.
The whole presentation is the ultimate in dumbing down as the producers expect
everybody to be satisfied with watching Truman live out his empty life in
Seahaven. Reassuringly, the people in the 'real world' don't live up to those
expectations.
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