The Truman Show (1998)

Is Truman Burbank the embodiment of us all? The character, played by Jim Carrey in The Truman Show (1998), won him a Golden Globe for Best Actor and numerous other awards for the film. In it an insurance salesman comes to recognize that his entire life is a lie, a television show he has unknowingly been the star of since birth. Truman entertains millions who watch his life unfold through cameras placed all over the huge globe set created by the director Christof (Ed Harris). The name is of course a reference to Jesus, as he carefully constructed the world in which Truman lives from one day to the next.

Yet the underlying message of the film appears to be a metaphor about media culture itself. Are we not in some ways the same as Truman? How do we decide what we want and need? Where do our dreams come from? Why do we believe marriage is the realization of a happy life? Why do we buy Heineken instead of Bud Light, or vice versa, or craze pizza or a big mac when we are hungry? Why do cigarettes or chocolate entice us like the sirens? Who tells us what is cool and passé? From where does our image of beauty emerge? And what of ugliness? How do we decide what we want to do with our lives? Why do we believe what we do?

Does all this develop from within? Or is it possible that the external world emerges inside of us and helps us refract the very lenses through which we view the world. Is our psyche in some sense colonized by the media/consume culture that surrounds us – rearticulating needs and desires and creating a revaluation of values that does little to bring satisfaction, contentment or that elusive goal of happiness? Or is it the very fount of happiness in a sad, saturnine world? Sure our parents, peers, teachers and communities help us develop into who we are. School, church, neighborhood, country and a whole other series of institutions help us define ourselves and our place in the world. But what of the culture industry? Recent studies have shown that media and technology take up an astounding 7 ½ hours of the lives of youth each day. How can we not pretend that their influence transcends all others? Sure everyone is not the same and all these other influences are important. But where do are parent’s identities emerge from, how about our peers? Media culture has arguably become the key rearing and reproducing institution in society – all the more powerful because many fail to recognize its power.

Ultimately, Truman escapes the ecosystem that defined his life from birth. He bowed to the cheering audience and took the exit sign to freedom, saying you are not in my head. Can we do the same? Can we escape the grasp of media, even if we try? Do we want to? What does it mean to recognize the externalization of all that we presume emanates from within? The truth is that truth itself is constructed just as we are. But as the existentialists argue, recognizing the social construction of reality before most, we are conditioned but not determined. Ultimately we have the power to find our own exit door and forge a different life. How many will make that choice?