THE TRUMAN SHOW

THE TRUMAN SHOW. Peter Weir, dir. USA: Paramount / Scott Rudin Productions (prod.) / Paramount (dist.), 1998. Andrew Niccol, script, prod. (one of several). Jim Carrey, Ed Harris, featured players. Philip Glass, Burkhart von Dallwitz (as Burkhard Dallwitz), music.

Very "near-in," in Thomas P. Dunn's phrase, satiric SF: near-future setting, almost possible with current technology. Truman Burbank (Carrey) is the unwitting star of The Truman Show: a continuous TV show of his life, pre-birth to—whenever ("How Will It End?" is one of the hooks for the show)—a show created by a producer/director named Christof (Harris). See for motifs of a contained, artificial world under a dome (the world's largest TV studio), continuous surveillance, and the question of authenticity.

In this movie, True-Man is the creation of Christ-of, with creation having taken place near Burbank: the studio is shown to be near the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, and Harris brilliantly plays a loving, if power-mad, God-the-Father to Carrey's Son. The end of the film may be read that Truman escapes to our world and a possible true love, but our world may also be a media world.

An important movie for media and cultural studies (including issues of modernism and po-mo), bringing to a temporary culmination themes from such disparate works as R. A. Heinlein's "They" (1941); the "metatheatrical" embedding of scenes within scenes of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and the "metacinema" that revived the practice; D. G. Comptom's The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe and the film DEATHWATCH; G. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the more paranoid works of P. K. Dick, including Time Out of Joint and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (filmed twice as TOTAL RECALL); the film 36 HOURS (1964), starring James Garner (our thanks to Ed Wysocki for that citation); The Prisoner TV series; G. Lucas's THX-1138 and R. Scott's BLADE RUNNER (including the theatrical-release cut of for the ending); F. Pohl's "Tunnel Under the World"—q.v. under Fiction and Drama. Note also parallels if not direct references to the episode of Star Trek, "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and the joining together of a town's population to seek a fugitive in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and other works.

Crucial for Clockworks theme are the shots of the Control Room in TRUMAN, esp. one showing in deep background a large screen showing Truman in what Truman thinks of as his private room, with an open (beach?) umbrella in the foreground of that screen. In front of the screen is a man on a stationary bicycle with a large front wheel: along with the umbrella, the bicycle is a clear citation to The Prisoner, specifically here, the control room in that show. Just in front of the bicycle, frame right, is a basketball hoop and backboard, and moving toward the foreground row after row of unoccupied observation stations each containing one large map screen or 20 or 25 monitors, the stations arranged along "Bacall Plaza," "Brando Street," etc. (see under Drama Criticism, G. Stewart, "Videology").[1] From the womb on, Truman has been in-frame; this shot shows a frame with a man watching Truman inside a frame that we are watching, itself containing more than half a myriad of screens. And the audience leaves the screening to step into our own surveilled and mediated world. See under Drama, EdTV.

Discussed by Alan Jones and reviewed by Patricia Moir, Cinefantastique 30.7/8 (Oct. 1998): 74-77.[2]

RDE, initial; finishing, 31Dec21