The Favourites
The Truman Show
Few films have been able to capture lightning in a bottle like Peter Wier’s The Truman Show. Many elements seemed to have come together in the perfect time and place, like a celluloid lunar eclipse. Themes predicting our constant monitoring and mass enjoyment of the mundane everyday. The sharp comedic and dramatic capabilities of a peak-form Jim Carrey. Utopian facades cover up a bitter underbelly. These and many other ideas captured the cultural zeitgeist on the brink of a new millennium, and still resonate deeply in a world that has changed in superficial ways but at its roots is still deeply troubled.
All of these themes come down to one core element: control. It is the control that Christof exerts over the world he’s created, down to the most minute details. It’s the control that Truman exerts over his life, both his perceived life and his true life. And the control we’re willing to give up, as seen in the characters of Meryl and Marlon. If everything around us is preordained, are we true ourselves? Or simply a reaction, an inevitability? Who is Truman if not for those around him? It may not be until the final frames of the film that we truly find out.
We see Truman living his everyday existence for the first hour of the film, aware of the premise but the filmmaker allows us this time to get to know him. From the outside he first appears to be the model citizen, a cornball Sunday morning comic strip come to life. He lives in a nice house, drives a nice car with a nice wife and a nice job. Everything around him is the repressive insistence of normality. It’s only in the quiet moments, the ones he thinks he is only sharing with himself, that we can see the light through the cracks of his grey existence.
Whether it be his wishes to travel away to a far-off foreign land, or his secret treasure trove of lost love, it’s Truman’s secrets that make him such a compelling figure to both the audiences within the film and outside of it. Secrets are an act of defiance in a life so constricted, a quiet defiance, one that Truman doesn’t even know that he is participating. He actually feels shame for these thoughts, as in the world that has been created for him he feels these secrets are a betrayal to everything he has been given. He has the white picket fence, yet he yearns for more and does not know why. These secrets prove that the will of Truman is stronger than the forces around him.
That’s what gives Truman the ability to not only discover the falseities of his world but the courage to rebel against it, even when he doesn’t know what he is rebelling against. He actually proves Christof right, but not in the way Christof had intended. Christof insists throughout the film that Truman is real which is what makes him so enjoyable to watch. But it’s not the mundane constructions that have brought the world to Truman, not his fake marriage and lying friends, but his secrets and his self-reflection. It’s in rebellion that Truman takes on the mantel of the “true man”, and it’s in this that Christof proves that it was never his intention to show the world reality. Christof wished to play God and tries to drown the world he created when his creation chooses free will.
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