You choose: the fake light or the black door

Rating: 7/10 (9 December 2006)

Peter Weir's earliest major films -The Last Wave, Picnic at Hanging Rock --are studies of people overwhelmed by circumstances they can't understand or control. But his later films offer hope of redemption and triumph. Like Dead Poets' Society, the Truman Show is the story of struggle for freedom from an oppressive system. While "DPS" was an interesting development of a standard situation (a liberal-minded teacher helps students free their minds from tradition through creative literature) the Truman Show is based on a very unique setup. The main character, Truman Burbank, is the only "true man" in a TV-show world of actors and commercial advertising. We, the viewers, discover this truth before he does because Weir introduces us to a selection of viewers who are hooked on the show. The film holds our interest by showing us, first, Truman's process of discovery, and then his attempts to escape his situation.
A lot has been made out of the supposed religious elements of the Truman Show, presumably because of the "Christof-Christ" name parallel (a bit too cute, don't you think?). But to turn the film into a religious allegory misses the obvious: the film is about the line between fake and real, and how television destroys humanity by hooking us on images in order to sell products. The key line in the film is (Truman to Christof): "You never had a camera in my head!" You can't say that about God. Second, the real Christ was a rebel (as in the confrontation with the money-changers) who was killed by the system. If you want a Christ image in the Truman Show, it's Truman "walking on water" at the end of the film, not the lord of commercialism chillingly played by Ed Harris.
If there's a deeper philosophical message in the film, it has to be the rejection of the postmodern idea of how we know what we know. Truman lives in a world that's been created for him. A postmodernist (i.e., pretty much anyone teaching in the literature or history department of my university) would say that we accept the world we're given. What we "know to be true" is what we are told is true. My "truth" depends entirely on the culture I live in and the categories of thought I'm provided with. On this basis, Truman should never escape Seahaven. But human intellect and curiosity exist precisely to question and change categories of thought. So, Truman's quest for the truth involves observing both anomalies (a falling stage light, odd patches of rain) where there should be consistency, and patterns (bicycle, flowers, Beetle!) where there should be randomness. He persists until he finds a way out of the world of image into the real world, out of the fake light, sky and clouds into the black door of whatever is out there. The tragedy is that the commercial world of television needs us not to find our way out. So the very last image of the Truman Show is not the hero escaping, but the viewers saying, "So, what else is on?"