A warning against spying and oppression?

Rating: 8/10 (3 January 2012)

I used the last days of December to watch some films, that had impressed me about a decade ago. The film The Truman Show was among them. Around 2000 I watched The Truman Show several times, and tried to analyze its contents. Like many modern movies, it contains an ambiguous message. Obviously the leading theme is the obtrusive invasion of our private life by the producers of television programs. The common life of individual people is transformed into entertainment, not just in the form of a single commentary, but by means of regular (weekly or even daily) broadcastings. At the time this type of entertainment was still a novelty. I even remember that shortly after The Truman Show a similar film about the topic was released, titled EdTV. Since 2000 the so-called reality TV has become a common vehicle of entertainment, probably because it is cheap and doesn't require any careful considerations. Nevertheless The Truman Show has withstood the ravages of time, and still succeeds in fascinating me. At the time, I interpreted the story as a critique on the unwanted invasion of your private living space by unknown outsiders. For passer-bys clearly and intentionally block Burbanks passage, when he is in a hurry, both in a hospital, on the sidewalk, or in the file on the highway. During a chance meeting a cop unexpectedly happens to know his name. When Burbank wishes to visit the Fijis, the posters in the local traveling agency try to instil a fear for flying, and the flights to the Fijis happen to be fully booked for at least a month. Burbank discovers that in an eternal procession the same group of strangers circulates around his house. As a whole the chance of an accidental conjunction of circumstances becomes negligible, and Burbank logically concludes that it is all premeditated. The only surprise is his slowness in the uptake, considering that he had already been encysted for thirty years, since his birth. In the end Burbank succeeds in escaping from his artificial, repressing and hostile world. But now, after another ten years, I doubt that this is really the leading theme. For we live in a world, where you can simply watch the home life of your neighbors by infiltrating their computer through the net and controlling their web-cam by means of spy-ware. And if you can not do this, your government or an ICT firm certainly can. Apparently The Truman Show is not so much a protest against a threatening future Big Brother society (after the narration of the totalitarian society by George Orwell), as a warning against the actual way of living, that develops around us. Thus the story becomes a hotchpotch of undesirable developments: for instance the intrusion of advertising in our lives. Or the social encysting and gossiping in the small community. Perhaps even the oppression by social conventions in general. Or the spying by the state and enterprises on their citizens and costumers, which in the professed age of terrorism has become unbounded. Apparently the narrative of The Truman Show is more a shower of grains of shot than a well-targeted critique. So although I still appreciate the film and its invitation to ponder, it is clearly not the monument of resistance that I presumed twelve years ago. A pity. Disappointing.