The Truman Show (1998, directed by Peter Weir) released last week on Netflix. One of the best films of the nineties, if not the best, it tells the story of Truman Burbank, a man who discovers that his life in the island town of Seahaven is a reality TV show, from which he strives to break free. Although rarely used as a cultural touchstone today, the film was not only remarkably prescient in predicting the rise of reality television - Big Brother first aired about a year later - but in observing how real people's lives were becoming as artificial as Truman's.
The emergence of social media as a tool not just of communication, but performance, has over time further vindicated The Truman Show's depiction of modern life as a manufactured illusion. Where The Matrix was celebrated long after its release for its philosophising on the nature of reality, Truman has perhaps been sidelined for asking more challenging and directly applicable questions about human nature and the ways we have willingly become actors in our own lives.
The film begins with press reel-style intercutting between interviews with the creatives behind the reality show, including director Christof and actress Hannah Gill (a beautifully clipped portrayal from the ever-brilliant Laura Linney), who plays Truman's wife, Meryl, and a monologue from Truman himself, delivered to a mirror. It's a bold piece of writing to seemingly invert your film's premise before the premise has even been established, but the inversion - Truman acting out a little fantasy, while those who manufacture his world supposedly speak candidly - in fact set ups one of the film's central premises, the blurring line between reality and performance.
The interviews are supposed to give viewers behind-the-scenes insights into the making of Truman's world, yet Christof and Gill offer nothing but hollow platitudes about the emotions of the show being 'genuine' and how the opportunity it presents for an actor is 'a blessing'. Meanwhile, Truman's monologue is obviously absurd (a plea to an imagined mountaineering companion, whom he implores to eat him if he dies en route to the summit) but depicts a moment of sincere, relatable humanity where he takes a moment before getting ready for work to be silly for - as far as he knows - an audience of nobody but himself. Christof knows he's being filmed and fakes honesty. Truman does not know he is being filmed and performs in a way which honestly reveals himself - that Truman is naturally something of a showman is a note of amusingly subtle irony.
One of Hannah Gill's quotes during this introductory segment lays this premise on the line. "For me," she says, "There is no difference between a public life and a private life. My life is my life, is the Truman show." Gill must stay in character as Meryl every hour of every day and the boundaries between her performance and her real self have all but vanished. Today, Gill/Meryl serves an analogue for social media users who curate their existence to present an image of themselves to their online audience, eventually leading to that curation taking over their lives entirely. They offer their viewers a vision of a perfect existence, as immaculately constructed as the Stepford-esque Meryl.
When the illusion begins to crumble, they find that the lie they have committed themselves to offers no protection at all. When Truman confronts Gill (as Meryl) about her increasingly obvious performing, she threatens him with one of the products she has been shilling, then screams for the producers' help when the confrontation escalates. The only time we see Gill being herself is when she is afraid for her life, her immediate terror revealing her distrust and dehumanisation of Truman. Her mistake leads to her being cancelled from the show and plans put in place to replace her. Despite her longstanding dedication to her role, in a moment of vulnerability she finds that those she sought approval and protection from view her as easily disposable.
One of The Truman Show's cleverest tricks is to hide the darkest aspects of its scenario just outside immediate observation. There is another aspect of Gill's shadow existence as Meryl which mirrors that of the social media user, particularly women: sexual performance. It is hinted through Truman's 'mother' pushing for grandchildren that Gill is obligated to have sex with Truman. Gill shows little feeling for the man she is manipulating, right down to crossing her fingers on their wedding day. One could argue that Gill is effectively acting as a prostitute, although in the real world, at least both parties are aware of the arrangement. If issues over consent in prostitution typically concern the woman, here it falls on the man. Truman believes he is having sex with Meryl, a woman who loves him as his wife, when in fact he is having sex with Hannah Gill, an actress who only loves him through obligation and uses his love for her to manipulate him.
Sexual performance is a big part of many female social media users' online presence. Like those users, Gill uses the power of her sexuality to acquire success by insincerely presenting the signs of affection. Unlike Truman, most of the men on social media know they are being performed to and can enjoy the fantasy (though some may be more delusional than others). For the women, though, while there are undeniably many - even most - who participate willingly and find it fulfilling, for others it becomes a double-edged sword.
Sexual performance is a big part of many female social media users' online presence. Like those users, Gill uses the power of her sexuality to acquire success by insincerely presenting the signs of affection. Unlike Truman, most of the men on social media know they are being performed to and can enjoy the fantasy (though some may be more delusional than others). For the women, though, while there are undeniably many - even most - who participate willingly and find it fulfilling, for others it becomes a double-edged sword.
Posting sexual photos is the easiest way for an attractive woman to gain a large following and reap rewards both financial and psychological (validation), yet for some of those women, it ties them to a presentation from which they cannot escape, or even be sure if they want to: note how many 'don't sexualise my body' posts come attached to a photo that is inescapably sexual. It is not uncommon for women who have presented themselves sexually on
their social media, even if only in 'candid' bikini or
modelling photos, to lament viewers making sexualised comments or
not treating them as anything more than sex objects. Like Gill, they know what they are doing, but are locked into their performance by an addiction to the rewards of their invisible contract.
If Hannah Gill represents those who turn their lives into a performance in search of fame, Truman represents the opposite: a man who does not realise he has been performing his entire life and seeks to find a more meaningful and genuine existence. At the turn of the millennium, the digital world was seen as something of a threat. Games like Deus Ex (another remarkably prescient piece of art) and films like The Matrix (which I will surely write about at some point) warned of technology growing out of control and enslaving humanity, while fears over the millennium bug were met with concerns that an increasing dependence on digital infrastructure could backfire in the case of widespread malfunction.
Watching The Truman Show today is a dispiriting reminder of how we have allowed ourselves to become Gill, telling ourselves that the lives we construct for others online are no different from living in the real world, rather than Truman, willing to overcome his fear in search of truth and freedom. At the end of the film, as Truman prepares to step out of the soundstage which has been his entire world, director Christof implores him to stay.
“I know you better than you know yourself," he says. "You’re not going to walk out
that door. Truman, there’s no more truth out there than in the world I
created for you. The same lies and deceit. But in my world you have
nothing to fear."
The story of the 21st century, the so-called information age, has been humanity's surrender to fear. From the moment the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th 2001, the Western world sought solace in comforting, simple narratives over complex truths, allowing a widening encroachment onto our freedoms in favour of safety and convenience. Where Truman fights for his privacy and right to be invisible, we give away our personal information with no idea where it will end up or how it will be used. We make ourselves the centre of our own fake realities, yet obsessively shape those realities to conform to a one-dimensional ideal, like Meryl, of what a person should be. We adopt labels and 'identities', diminishing our individual humanity to data points for no greater purpose than search engine optimisation.
The problem is that while this utopian bubble shields us from the discomfort of the ethically unclear, often dysfunctional nature of existence, we also know it is a lie. Knowing that we have accepted that lie leads to self-loathing, turning us against our created self-image. Instead of trying to achieve fulfillment by trying to navigating the difficulties of reality as best we can to make the small, gradual improvements from which productive change germinates, we instead try to vanquish our self-loathing by masochistically punishing ourselves for supposed complicity in the problematic 'badness' (whether real, imaginary or some combination of the two) our bubbles were supposed to protect us from. All the while, nothing is accomplished but the protection of delusions offering us nothing in return. Is it any wonder so much of social media is clogged with interchangeable postings about mental health and depression?
Once the knowledge of a lie has set in, nothing can shake it, no matter how hard one tries to deny it. In the film, Christof attempts to placate Truman's increasingly fervent suspicions by reintroducing the actor who played his father, whom Truman had believed dead in a childhood boating accident which instilled in him a fear of water (a directorial trick to make it more difficult for him to escape). Truman, however, persists in his attempts to escape, taking a boat onto the open water, risking being drowned, until finally colliding with the edge of the soundstage and climbing the steps to his freedom.
When Christof threatens him with the fear of the unknown, Truman simply bows and takes his leave, knowing that the risks of embracing liberty and truth are nothing compared to the spiritual self-destruction of surrendering an illusion of safety. Meanwhile, in the outside world, as the transmission of Truman's channel goes dead and an epoch of television comes to an end, two viewers shrug and, with an endless supply of drama on other channels to choose from, wonder what else is on.
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