The Truman Show's False World

When does Truman begin to think his world is false?

We enter his life when he's in his thirties.  It's a work day.  He walks outside and says ritualistic hellos to his next door neighbor and the African-American family across the street.  The greeting is the same each day.  It feels false.  Truman seems to go through the motions enthusiastically.  Before getting in his car, a stage light fixture falls to the street.  Truman timidly approaches it.  Written on it is: Sirius.  It had represented a star in the night sky above Seahaven. 

Phony greetings plus the phony heavenly body.  It’s hard not to see  precipitants to Truman’s breakdown; namely, he can no longer put up with the reality with which he is presented every day.  But what can he do?  Indeed, what can we do when a society is so corrupted that we want to crawl out of our skin.  Yet, all we can do is make it through another day of life.  We have no apparent exit.  Truman must bide his time.  He’s uncertain about the exact nature of the falseness.

No one wants to believe one’s life is a lie.  Truman sticks with his wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), and accepts his overbearing mother (Holland Taylor).  The traumatic loss of his father created a psychological toll on him, but his father’s death amounted to a practical course of action by Christof (Ed Harris) to create a reason for Truman to fear water and never want to leave the island.

This strategy gets to the heart of the problematic relationship between individuals and society.  The reasons why we do what we do are molded or engineered by “them”: the world around us, society.  And what is society?  An invisible force weighing on us to act in ways that often seem coercive. In a sense it is unknowable, making it very suspect and lack authenticity because society can never account for itself.

Another example of the “manipulation” in Truman’s life is the way he met Merle.  Truman is actually interested in Sylvia (Natasha McElhone) and she returns the favor – her “reason” is also less an honest, since she belongs to an organization that protests the way Truman is being deceived by the show.  As he watches Sylvia, Meryl lunges into Truman with a faux sprained ankle.  Before you can think, they’re dancing together. But Sylvia’s still around and Truman’s still trying to make some contact.  The forces behind the show must forcibly take Sylvia away.

Truman is left with Meryl, whom he marries and becomes increasingly frustrated with.  She seems to be stifling his real desire: namely, to get out of Seahaven.  She’s like a cloak of falseness on his life that he cannot get off.

His frustrations, not unsurprisingly, extend to his job.  He sells insurance and is trying to save money, apparently, to have a family.  Meryl reminds him of this when he insists that they go away and she says to him that he’ll use all of the money they were saving.

Truman’s circumstances and inhibited dreams reflect strongly our own.  Watching his life, we see society conspiring against him.  All of our worst fears are realized.  We could not achieve what we really wanted, we could not become our own person, because the world prevents us.  Society is at war against individual human happiness.  And, apparently, everyone around us, friends and family and colleagues, are against us despite what they say.

Enough things begin happening to Truman, starting with the falling light (star), that he becomes convinced something is wrong.  He tells his best friend, Marlon (Noah Emmerich), there IS a conspiracy.  He sees people keeping tabs on him.  He enters a fake elevator and sees people/actors talking and eating lunch. He claps his hands and yells but nobody takes special notice of him.

It is important, however, that he can’t name or quite get his head around what’s really happening.  Who could conceive it?  But he’s onto something when he states that it the conspiracy centers on himself, his life.  The crisis in his life (and for the show itself) is reaching critical mass.  This leads to my favorite scene in the film.

Marlon and Truman are drinking beers at the end of an incomplete causeway. Marlon tries to allay any suspicions. We are then privileged to see how the show works, as well as get an introduction to a sociological theory.  Marlon reassures Truman that their world must be authentic, and that if it is false, then everything he and Truman went through for more than twenty years was false. The movie then privileges us by showing Christof saying the lines being uttered by Marlon.  All leading to the reunion of Truman and his long lost father.

Christof’s feeding Marlon his lines creates an analogue for a process described by sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.  Goffman describes social interaction as if we are role playing and in everyday situations we are ‘fed’ lines and gestures to lubricate our dealings with other people.  He likes it to have the words whispered in our ears.  The book’s impact on life in the 1960s cannot be overestimated.  His theories were interpreted by many in the counterculture as prima facie evidence that the establishment was bogus and plastic.

A few generations later the children of the 1960s have grown up and seem to be living if not perpetuating the false world they once deplored.  The Truman Show illustrates the density of the problem.  We cannot escape society, we cannot simply walk out a door into a world of ‘truth’.  We would have better luck getting out of our own skin.  We are simply left to ponder what is authentic, what is our ‘real self’, and what can we do about it.