# Truman Show, The (1998)

### reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen

I think it was inevitable that some guy in Idaho (or someplace like that) would dub a film "Movie of the Decade" somewhat before the millennium. I'm just surprised no one has declared a "Movie of the Millennium". At least you'd have that bit of alliteration.

In any case, our "Movie of the Decade" for this summer is "The Truman Show". Jim Carrey is Truman, a man in a fish bowl, unaware that he is being televised to the world. The TV series of Truman's life, captured by thousands of secretive cameras around the movie set/town of Sea Side, is Bigger Than Seinfeld (if that can be imagined). He has been televised, unaware, since before birth (why not conception?), and, in the show's 30th year, he begins to realize that his world apparently revolves around him.

This basic plot has been used before. Relying on the Way Back Machine, we have the whole Descartes thing: the proof of god's existence comes from "I think therefore I am", but raises the possibility of a Great Deceiver, spinning an illusionary world around "I". Arguably, spin the Way Back dial a bit farther, and you'd come up with Plato and the Cave, but Plato didn't mean the Cave in a literal sense, and we were in the cave because of ourselves rather than some external entity. Much more recently, Philip K. Dick played with this "what is reality" idea in any number of novels. There was one novella with a nicely surrealistic moment: the protagonist, already believing there was something wrong with the world, buys an ice cream cone, only to see the ice cream vendor disappear, leaving behind only a slip of paper saying "Ice Cream Cart". The novella, however, ends more sinisterly and more conventionally, with it being revealed that the hero was unknowingly computing missile trajectories by solving the Sunday newspaper puzzle. Most closely to "The Truman Show", there was a 1980s Twilight Zone in which a man's life was the subject of a TV series. I don't recall how that episode ended, but I'd like to think that the discovery of the TV studio was scripted, and that there were infinite layers of TV series within TV series, Russian Dolls of voyeristic entertainment.

I suppose the main difference is that the narcissism has changed from god or the devil giving sufficient damn to make up the world for us, to the planet's television audience giving sufficient damn to watch us brush our teeth in the morning (though, seeing that we have "America's Funniest Videos", the Fishing Channel and C-SPAN on cable, as well as random webcams peering into people's apartments, this shouldn't be surprising). Yup. At the close of the millennium, television is our wrathful diety.

I suppose also that the tag, "Movie of the Decade" is not inappropriate. It fits our media-saturated time well.

Anyway, did I actually like the movie? Yes and no. The "No" comes from having problems getting into it in the first place. I kept on thinking "klutzy, klutzy, klutzy" as the television people when through their acrobatics to keep Truman from realizing the truth. There's minor clumsiness when Truman picks up studio instructions on his car radio: why not have rigged radios incapable of picking up certain frequencies? And why didn't they realize that Truman probably doesn't know how to tack a sailboat into the wind? You have smart people, who have constructed an elaborate illusion of a TV studio, and yet they don't know how to plan for contingencies beyond ham handed traffic jams and nuclear plant meltdowns.

The most glaring clumsiness is the methods used to keep him in town: make him afraid of the water, make him think travel is dangerous, tell him that Sea Side is an earthly paradise. It's easy to come up with better ideas than this. You can simply not tell him there's an outside, a sort of medieval thing to do -- you'll fall off the edge, say "hi" to the elephants and turtle on your way down -- but possible because Truman more or less was raised in your Skinner Box. You pretty much can tell him anything you want. This, though, makes him less like us, hurting television ratings. Alternatively, you can have this giant inflated weather balloon roving the beaches, smothering anyone who tries to leave. The villagers can come up with spooky stories about the thing, creating your prohibition. (True, this is not "The Prisoner", but it's a neat idea). Perhaps best and most subtly, they can simply use the techniques in "It's a Wonderful Life", which was partially referred to in a TV program Truman watches: whenever he thinks of leaving, saddle him with responsibility. "About to go on my world tour! Whoops, the savings and loan is in trouble!" There's no weirdness in his staying -- he'll be just as good as George Bailey -- and there'll be tear jerker moments when he finds Zu Zu's petals in his pocket.

One thing, brought up and then ignored: how do you handle Truman's childhood friends? He's known his best friend since they were seven years old. Can you trust a seven year old not to let Truman in on a Really Big Secret?

Well, I did get into the movie more after all that. It's an entertaining film, not really the masterpiece that some people have claimed, but certainly worth the two hours. "Truman" may also mark a new phase in Jim Carrey's career, that of a more serious actor. He does well in this movie: there a nice moment when he stops traffic, realizing that he's the center of it all, and, near the end as he reaches the edge of the world, he's convincing. Think of Steve Martin, going from "The Jerk" to, say, "Leap of Faith" or "The Spanish Prisoner". Yes, there are occasional regressions, like "Sgt. Bilko", but his range is broader now.

-- "The court determined that Fox TV does not impede free and fair competition in the teen-angst soap-com genre, therefore Party of Five need not be broken into five 'Parties of One,' one being distributed to each of the other networks."

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