Truman Burbank – played by Jim Carrey – is under surveillance by television cameras twenty-four hours a day within the framework of a carefully choreographed Reality TV show that is watched by billions of voyeuristic viewers all over the world. Truman lives inside a vast Hollywood studio erected as an enclosed dome that is so large that it can be seen from outer space. There are five thousand cameras observing him, and more added all the time. It is not the totalitarian state permanently watching us, as in George Orwell’s novel 1984. It is all of us watching each other and watching ourselves.
The high-tech engineering studio of The Truman Show can simulate the brightness of day and the darkness of night in Truman’s world. It can control weather conditions. Truman is the only person in the world who does not know that his life is a TV show, who naively believes that he is living a real life. As a child, Truman was adopted by a corporation. He was born and has lived his every waking moment on the television screen. Like everyone in postmodern society, he understands nearly nothing of the effects that the media have on him (us). We are all Truman. We cannot distinguish what is real and what is media. Although Reality TV as a genre has been sold to us as being more “authentic” than the traditional scripted narrative show, Truman acts as the perfect television character, talking in slogans and cliches – but with an added Jim Carrey layer of self-irony: “Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya – good afternoon, good evening, and good night.”
Truman’s wife and his best male friend are actors faking him out every day. They are live performers in the show. His wife Meryl behaves like a Disneyland animatronics character who just stepped out of a 1950s Sears shopping catalog. Marlon has been Truman’s best buddy since childhood. In on-screen advertising interviews for the show, Marlon assures the worldwide audience that “It is all true, it’s all real. Nothing here is fake.” Meryl declares: “My life… is the Truman Show.” The show’s creator and director Christof comments: “We’ve become bored with actors giving us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. There is nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards.”
Truman’s home Seahaven Island is better than real life. It is the hyperreal copy or recreation of the perfect 1950s American suburban community. Its resemblance to perfect-living Disney communities in Orlando, Florida is unmistakable. It is a copy of a copy, and at the same time more real than real. Truman is a prisoner in paradise. Despite the constant discursie invocations of “the real,” simulation and hyperreality have become the obvious goals of existence in Seahaven Island. “Seahaven is the way the world should be,” says Christof. There is a frantic proliferation of signs of “the real” to mask the absence of reality. All of America is television, cinema, Virtual Reality, and an immense spectacle.
Truman dreams of traveling around the world, to faraway places like Fiji, and having adventures. But he is unable to leave water-surrounded Seahaven due to being psychologically crippled by a phobic fear of water. He developed aquaphobia after his father apparently died in a boating accident. It was a staged death. Constant radio broadcasts on the local station warn of the dangers of leaving the comforts of one’s hometown and the chaos of the outside world. The producers of the show have manipulated Truman’s life and psyche very badly. They faked his father’s death and they got rid of the girl whom he loved.
In a crucial close-up scene on a pier after hitting golf balls aimlessly into the water, Marlon assures Truman of his loyalty and honesty as his best friend. “I would never lie to you. I would gladly step in front of traffic for you, Truman. And the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.” Tears are welling up in the eyes of both pals. From his microphone in the control studio to Marlon’s hidden earpiece, Christof is telling the dialogue to the actor, feeding him his lines. It is the biggest whopper of all time, yet it is not a pure lie. The relationship between true and false, between truth and lies, the simulacrum or hyperreality of this moment, has a complex structure. In the “post-truth” culture, there is a paradoxical synthesis of authenticity and lies.
Truman begins to suspect that “something is going on.” A light fixture falls from the sky. Raindrops fall only on his head. He espies a camera crew behind an elevator door. He overhears a radio transmission while in his car that describes precisely where he himself is driving. In the final climactic scene, Truman escapes on the small Santa Maria sailboat, no longer afraid of the water. As Truman becomes increasingly aware of the fakeness of his life and his prisoner status, Christof becomes more and more desperate to come up with tricks to keep him from leaving. Truman’s departure will be the death of the show. Truman sails until his boat strikes the wall of a painted sky. He has reached the edge of his cosmos.