Great combination of social satire and philosophical allegory.

Rating: 10/10 (20 February 2005)

The Truman Show may be approached on one level as social satire exposing the emptiness of an American Dream defined by consumerism and purveyed by the electronic media over the last half century. Life in "Seahaven," the vast dome-enclosed set/community in which Truman (Jim Carrey) has been raised under the watchful eyes of a worldwide TV audience of millions, is a sharp and elaborate parody of the corporate sponsored images of middle-class American material bliss and innocence first introduced to mass television audiences through such '50s sitcoms as Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and The Donna Reed Show. A closely related target of The Truman Show's satire is the pervasive voyeurism and passivity that has increasingly characterized American social behavior as witnessed in film (ED TV), entertainment television (tell-all talk shows, Reality TV, the talent search genre), and even broadcast news (disaster/victim footage).
Yet, on another level, The Truman Show, like Gattaca, The Matrix, Dark City and other more obvious examples of science fiction, deals with broad philosophical themes such as free will versus determinism in human action, subjective versus objective perceptions of reality, the assertion of humanness through existential rebellion, and the quest for an authentic self/ identity. Most immediately, the names and plot functions of the film's two principal characters - "Christof," the megalomaniacal producer/director of a 24/7 reality TV show, and "Truman," the show's eponymous everyman figure - invite the viewer to approach the work allegorically.
Legally adopted by a corporation (in a clever parallel to virgin birth), manipulated by the all-seeing all-powerful Christof (Ed Harris) into phony friendship and empty marriage with actor-minions, and psychologically conditioned (i.e. terrorized) into fearing adventure and change, Truman gradually begins to suspect that Seahaven is not the paradise it purports to be. To assert his humanity and escape his artificially prolonged state of childlike ignorance, Truman must ultimately undertake that most mythic of journeys, a Sea Voyage. At its end, he must turn his back on the secure, controlled environment of his "heavenly" father's house and step through a forbidding black passageway that leads to the true human condition: emotional and physical risk, scary freedom, and - perhaps - real love. In so doing, Truman ironically brings to his TV audience (whether they are still capable of appreciating it or not) the very affirmation that the false god of television claims they receive from the contrived "hope and uplift" pabulum the show has been ladling out for 30 years along with its subliminal primary diet of product placement advertisement.
In its climactic scenes, The Truman Show reveals Christof to be neither a social visionary nor a benevolent deity. Rather, we learn he has much in common with Orwell's Big Brother and - allegorically - with the implacable, sadistic god that Melville's Ahab imagines is running things behind the sky's impenetrable veil. By literally rending the heaven of his imprisoning universe, Truman navigates his storm-tossed sailing ship toward a completion of the heroic quest that Ahab's mad distraction (and Melville's theological uncertainty) forestalls: he momentarily frees himself and us from the diabolical/divine puller of the chains of human fate. In its final act, The Truman Show recasts the tragic despair of Moby Dick as comic triumph.