The Truman Show is all the prescient vision of runaway celebrity culture and a nation with an insatiable thirst for the private details of ordinary lives

Rating: 8/10 (14 September 2015)

The Truman Show is founded on an enormous secret that all of the studio's advertising has been determined to reveal. I didn't know the secret when I saw the film, and was able to enjoy the little doubts and wondering that the filmmakers so carefully planted. Truman's world is controlled by a TV producer named Christof (Ed Harris), whose control room is high in the artificial dome that provides the sky and horizon of Seahaven. He discusses his programming on talk shows, and dismisses the protests of those (including Sylvia) who believe Truman is the victim of a cruel deception. Meanwhile, the whole world watches Truman's every move, and some viewers even leave the TV on all night, as he sleeps.
The trajectory of the screenplay is more or less inevitable: Truman must gradually realize the truth of his environment, and try to escape from it. It's clever the way he's kept on his island by implanted traumas about travel and water. As the story unfolds, however, we're not simply expected to follow it: We're invited to think about the implications. About a world in which modern communications make celebrity possible, and inhuman.