Peter Weir (1998)
I didn’t get The Truman Show when I first saw it, a few years ago, and I don’t get it after a second viewing. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is a man who lives, and has always lived, in a constructed reality television show. Selected for this unique role at birth and now in his thirties, Truman doesn’t realise that his wife Meryl (Laura Linney) is in fact an actress called Hannah Gill, playing Meryl; that every person he meets on the street or at work or wherever is pretending to be that person; that his home town of Sea Haven is a giant set. The show’s creator and executive producer is a blonde-haired, vaguely android character called Christof (Ed Harris). He controls Truman’s existence – Christof has, for example, devised various means of discouraging Truman from wanting to venture out of Sea Haven. Truman Burbank’s life – ‘The Truman Show’ – is filmed by thousands of hidden cameras and broadcast live, around the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All of a sudden, things start happening that cause Truman to become suspicious about the ‘reality’ of his world: a theatrical light falls from the artificial morning sky; his car radio picks up a conversation in which the television show’s crew are talking about Truman’s movements. While it’s surprising that no such technical issues have obtruded previously, during several decades of live transmission, it’s easier to accept this than other aspects of Truman’s troubled awakening: why, for example, does he only now notice that Meryl tends to advertise – showily, as if to a television audience – the products she buys for their home? His doubts grow, in spite of assurances from his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich).
The Truman Show was widely admired on its original release. The powerful growth of reality television in the years since has conferred on Peter Weir’s science-fiction social comedy, written by Andrew Niccol, the added lustre of inspired prophecy – the words ‘It’s just like The Truman Show’ are not unknown, even though the show within the movie doesn’t at all suggest what you think of as the best-known examples of reality TV. A major factor in the success of something like Big Brother – when it started, anyway – was surely its curious marriage of truth and falsity, the spectacle of ‘real’ people doing things both mundane and contrived. The stars of this kind of show were unusual because they were ‘ordinary people’ – people hitherto deemed not interesting enough to absorb or entertain television audiences. The arguments continue as to how much reality TV exploits those who appear on it but the participants do understand, at least superficially, what they’re involved in. (They also tend to become less watchable as they become more aware of their public image and of the camera.) At one point in The Truman Show, the increasingly suspicious protagonist, wondering if others in his world are fakes, admits, ‘It’s hard to tell – they look just like regular people’. Of course, to him, they do – but, to the film audience and surely to a significant part of the television audience for ‘The Truman Show’, the typical inhabitants of always sunny Sea Haven, with their toothpaste smiles, look less like ‘regular people’ than like characters in a satire of hygienic small-town, white picket-fence suburban America: The Truman Show is filmed in the style not of a recording of real life but of a cinema movie making the satiric points about media manipulation and distortion that this one seems to be making.
Weir cuts occasionally to viewers of ‘The Truman Show’ – a man in his bathtub, the regulars in a place called Truman’s Bar – but it’s not very clear, if they’re watching Truman’s life continuously, what they think, for example, of his suspiciousness and growing resistance – and when, in due course, he wants to escape from the world in which he comes to realise that he’s trapped. These viewers cheer when he eventually does escape but is that an expression of their own resistance to the concept of the show or just rooting for their favourite TV character? As the crisis around the show grows, one of its producers says, ‘We can’t let him die on live TV!’, although that’s surely what the audience would expect in the fullness of time. It seems meant to be a telling satirical moment when, at the height of Truman’s rebellion, the show’s ratings go through the roof but I couldn’t understand why. It would be natural – when Christof decides he has no option but to halt transmission temporarily, for the first time in the show’s long history – for this to attract people who didn’t normally watch the programme. It’s harder to understand why there’s little indication in the film that ‘The Truman Show’ has been the subject of cultural and moral controversy and debate. The answer may be that Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol want to concentrate on the follies and evils of mass entertainment but the picture they paint of these is very incomplete. At the close of the film, when the plug has finally been pulled on ‘The Truman Show’, two dumb-looking men arrive on screen; one says expressionlessly to the other, ‘What’s on the other side?’, or words to that effect – a cheap shot at gogglebox mindlessness. Weir and Niccol never acknowledge, however, that consumers of mass entertainment are capable of fickleness: the show appears to have been an uninterrupted hit, without significant changes to its format, for generations of TV viewers. Another oddity of the film is that, although it may appear to address mass-media manipulation, it often feels to be more about ganging up on a single individual. Everyone but its leading man knows how ‘The Truman Show’ works; virtually everyone except Christof – including some other members of his production team – appears to exult in Truman Burbank’s eventual freedom. In defence of his brainchild, Christof claims that the show ‘gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions’. Putting these words in his mouth may be effective in exposing Christof as a pretentious charlatan but doesn’t fit with Weir’s and Niccol’s more persistent implication that Truman Burbank’s extraordinary life has become merely part of the ordinary life of the audiences who watch him round the clock.
A concept like ‘The Truman Show’ might seem welcome in hugely increasing the employment rate within the acting profession although it’s remarkable that, during the show’s three decades or so, there seem to have been fewer problems of cast members wanting to leave and try something different than in the average successful TV soap. The playing in the film is a curate’s egg. Almost needless to say, the hyperactive Jim Carrey’s Truman seems less ordinary than anyone in Sea Haven: dressed, for reasons I didn’t get, in clothes more eccentric than those of the other townspeople, Carrey dominates The Truman Show but his presence contradicts the concept of ‘The Truman Show’. He stands out from the crowd so emphatically – and there’s no rationale for his doing so – that it’s hard to believe Truman Burbank would be popular, except among television viewers who never ceased to enjoy the sophisticated oddness of observing a real life being lived by someone who seemed less real than all the people pretending to be real around him. Laura Linney, even though she’s made up as if for a comedy sketch spoofing bright-and-shiny American consumerism, has a naturalness that places Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill more convincingly on the cusp between fiction and reality. (Have the names Meryl and Marlon, which do have a certain cinematic connotation, been deliberately chosen? If so, what does this signify?) Natasha McElhone is Sylvia, cast in the show as Truman’s first and truest love, Lauren. Sylvia is quickly kicked out when she tries to reveal the truth of his life to Truman – she starts a ‘Free Truman’ campaign, which doesn’t appear to catch fire. It’s ironic and unfortunate that McElhone, when Sylvia is trying to get the message across to Truman, seems most like an actress in a standard TV drama. Ed Harris has undeniable sinister authority but his best, most surprising moment comes in his expression of Christof’s keen interest – when Truman tries to break out of Sea Haven – in what’s going to happen next. Paul Giamatti, keeping his feelings from his bosses but giving the viewer an idea what they might be, is outstanding in his small role as the TV control room director.
14 September 2014
