The other day there was one channel that showed The Truman Show twice in a row.
Saw the last half first, then watched the beginning later.
It was really well made, clever, with good acting, original ideas?, a big budget...
Still, I wasn't sure if it was a good movie or not. Big budgets, good ideas and great acting
can cover up a dubious project.
In a way it was a Greek myth. A human life, a toy, subject to the whims of the gods- a human
life, in a way eventually achieving something like apotheosis.
In that way it was kind of interesting.
Its interesting elements, unfortunately, were somewhat offset by the stupid and mundane.
A multi-billion (trillion?) dollar structure built to follow the life story of one person. Very risky.
A child essentially kidnapped and subjected to experimentation for the amusement of others- the
viewers who are a synapse away from changing the channel.
Even if we ignore the improbable and ridiculous, most of what was good about the movie came
not from the script, but mostly from the viewers (like us) projecting their own existential bewilderment about life, purpose, meaning, freedom,
fate (and such) into the move to provide the substance that it essentially lacked.
If that was an intentional element of the movie, well then it was very clever.
I recently watched
The Lives of Others again. It's an excellent film about the horror of surveillance. It's amazing to me how tolerant people have become of being watched, listened to, and monitored. Also, the lust for fame, and being famous for being famous (Paris Hilton/Kardashians) perplexes me. Many actors, musicians, and other public figures come to see fame as a Faustian bargain.
Real life ended up being weirder than The Truman Show
25 years on, the '90s cult classic finally feels dated
By Daisy Jones
31 August 2023
It's 1998.
MTV is the most well-known music channel in the world.
Big Brother, a brand new reality show, has just begun broadcasting in the Netherlands. The internet, previously the reserve of sci-fi shows and techno-scientists, is now being used by around
41 percent of American adults. And
The Truman Show, directed by Peter Weir and starring man of the moment Jim Carey, has just been released in theatres across the US, and then the UK, to widespread critical acclaim.
The Truman Show – a film about a man, Truman Burbank, who gradually realises that he’s been the star of a 24/7 reality show against his will and knowledge for the past 30 years – was considered way ahead of its time for a while, because, well, it was. This was a good few years before our
reality TV obsession had reached fever pitch, and about a decade before our every move was being surveilled online. Cameras weren’t yet in everyone's pockets. In fact, upon initial release, it was simply considered a sharp, satirical commentary on the state of 1990s media. “Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into ‘content,’” wrote
Robert Ebert at the time. “If you think
The Truman Show is an exaggeration, reflect that Princess Diana lived under similar conditions from the day she became engaged to Charles.”
It was only as the millennium unfolded that the film began to look weirdly and increasingly prescient. We began following our favourite celebrities on social media, as if they were our personal friends. We started uploading photos of more polished or aesthetic versions of our lives. We became obsessed with fly-on-the-wall shows like
The Osbournes (2002),
Keeping Up With the Kardashians (2007) and
The Real Housewives of New York City (2008). Eventually, it became an eye roll-inducing on-the-nose cliché to refer to the film when contemplating the dark heart of modern life. “We’re living in the Truman Show!” people would say, in the same way they’d refer to
Black Mirror in the 2010s, or George Orwell’s
1984 or William Gibson’s
Neuromancer in decades prior. And we'd think: yes, obviously.
25 years later, and without sounding too much like someone who eats Bitcoin-shaped gummies off the dark web and covers their laptop camera in blue tack – real life is so much weirder than
The Truman Show ever envisioned. It's us who put our own lives up for constant consumption, and entirely voluntarily. This is the era of hysterically crying into a phone camera, post break-up and then uploading it to TikTok. We soft- and hard launch our relationships online, to an imagined audience. We film strangers on public transport, then upload it with sad music in the background with a caption reading “TikTok do your thing”. The plot points of our online lives have become so integral to how we live that it can be hard to imagine what it felt like before we were watching others watching us watching ourselves. Now we don't even need to follow our favourite celebrities movements – we can reimagine them, with the
help of artificial intelligence.
Where
The Truman Show was once lightyears ahead – an eye into the future – today it finally feels dated. Even so, watching back, there are still parts of the film that seem creepily foreboding. The way the characters constantly and seamlessly wedge product placement into casual conversation, for example, feels more pertinent than ever. “You know, you really ought to throw out that mower,” says Truman’s wife Meryl (Laura Linney) at one point, before the camera zooms in on her face. “Get one of those new Elk Rotaries.” The difference now is that advertising isn’t subtle or integrative. Now it's tailor-made to our specific likes and interests, based on a complex algorithm that has already predicted our buying habits based on the endless chain of our personal internet history.
The Truman Show still stands the test of time. It’s a cult classic, compulsively watchable, hilarious and razor sharp. But where it was once eerie and foreshadowing, it now feels like a throwback to the paranoia of the millennium, back when we thought that the paparazzi and TV commercials were the weirdest and worst it was ever going to get.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/the-truman-show-real-life
