"It's Live! It's Live!"...

Rating: 10/10 (28 May 2011)

With "The Truman Show", released in 1998, Peter Weir delivers a brilliant satire about the excesses of reality shows, with a prophetic relevance disguised under a misleading comedic mask.
This underrated gem of the 90's, tells the original, to say the least, story of Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey in a breakthrough dramatic performance with this bit of tender wackiness we expect from him. Truman is an ordinary insurance salesman living in the small peaceful town of Seahaven. He's popular and lives in harmony with his wife, his mother, his best friend, his colleagues and neighbors. In appearance only
What Truman doesn't know, and here's the visionary originality on which relies his life, is that Seahaven, is in fact a huge studio with 5,000 cameras always keeping an eye on him and that everyone's an actor, including his wife, his mother, his best friend etc. and last but not least, all his life, was filmed since his birth to become the greatest and longest-running reality show in television history: 'The Truman Show'. Truman believed in a reality which is in fact, completely fictional, and all the protagonists of this pseudo reality, are puppets hanging on the string of the show's Creator who designs the perfect screenplay creating emotional cliffhangers for future episodes. The Creator is Kristoff, brilliantly portrayed by Ed Harris like a kind of almighty God, and the human incarnation of media's omnipotence. And Truman eventually realizes that his life is a huge hoax, and decides to leave the perfect utopia of Seahaven, and go discover the "real" world.
Because that's the point: reality shows don't depict reality, but paint it with fiction, it's real fiction, but fiction nonetheless. The ambivalence is obvious in "The Truman Show". Truman's life is fictional, because all the protagonists play a role in order to create a story for the viewers. Viewers who follow the show like a soap opera with a 'realistic' dimension. Indeed, Truman's character is real, as stated by the creator of the show, he is the only "real" protagonist of this world, his reactions are spontaneous and sincere. The reality is pushed to (unscrupulous) limits, because unlike other shows, Truman doesn't know he's filmed, he's natural. His life is a fiction, but paradoxically a 'real' one. This is the semantic loophole, unscrupulous TV program managers use to justify the unrealistic aspect of their shows.
The script's fascinating brilliance reminds of "Network" in the 70's, highlighting many unpleasant aspects of TV Reality, including the viewer's tacit complicity. Indeed, the viewer never minds the scripted aspect of reality as presented in TV programs as long as it improves his personal enjoyment, like for all these people who were assiduously following 'The Truman Show' in all over the world. The second aspect is the subjectivity of reality. Truman, for all his spontaneity and sincerity, was unknowingly following the storyline that producers traced. And all the situations were constructed to make him react according to a script. The process of mediation doesn't prevent from spontaneity, but it undermines its credibility by creating specific situations for premeditated reactions. Like in some programs where two people who don't appreciate each other or whose views totally differ, are both invited just to create a violent verbal confrontation -supposedly unexpected- to please the audience.
Finally, the main lesson of the film lies on the climax where Truman, tries to leave the fictional world of Seahaven, materialized by the powerful symbol of a dome painted like a sky. Truman struggles to get outside before he faces the producer of the show. The latter warns him against the dangers of a hostile real world where truth is no worthier than elsewhere, and invites him to join the perfect utopia of Seahaven, where he's a hero. Truman's reaction is very symbolic. He left the cameras' world, like an artist who addresses his fans for the last time, with his famous catchphrase as a farewell, and finally gets out. This last pirouette, sublimated by the thrilling score of the film, earned him the applause of the audience, as if the excitement made them forget that the show was ending. Indeed, when the show was finally interrupted, two viewers quickly recovered from their emotions, and zapped to another program. The end.
Truman is a genuine character, who understood the completely artificial status of his stardom. He therefore preferred to leave a charming utopia and face the real world. Television today launches ordinary people at the rank of stars for the simple reason that we, viewers, observed their everyday's moves, the details of their life's banality during weeks or months. But that kind of artificial popularity is inevitably ephemeral: it sinks into oblivion as soon as a new reality show emerges. And that's because camera's point view as depicted in the film, presents the reality in a dangerously subjective way. The 'staging', admitted by the public as it highlights positive values like friendship, fame, success, and empathy is a dangerous emotional depiction of reality. The risk is less for the viewer, who accepts the process, than for the protagonists of these emissions, whose purely artificial and prefabricated fame can lead to deep feelings of frustration later.
The emotional excitement is binary, and plays on both positive and negative poles, it may present for the sake of transparency, real people who suffer and live under difficult conditions, whether in the context of stories, talk or reality shows. The danger here is moral, because with this constant clash between reality and fiction, how can we be sure that the depiction of suffering and frustration will inspire the audience positive psychological reactions like compassion and solidarity rather than a voyeuristic sadism mixed with a circumstantial empathy?
"The Truman Show", denounces the fictionalization of reality, through a remarkable fiction, that makes today's reality look like a less believable fiction