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BEYOND THE MOVIE :

The Truman Show

by Annalisa & Giampiero Cara

Are you really sure that this brilliant picture is a criticism of the misuse of television? We propose another interpretation, in which the real "artificial life" is not Truman's life, created by a ruthless network, but ours, created by our own limiting beliefs...

"We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It's as simple as that", Kristof says.

He's the director-creator of the Truman Show (a character masterfully played, with disquieting calmness, by Richard Harris) and he's answering a TV interviewer who asked him why Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the show (a surprising Jim Carrey, just perfect in his role), has never come close to discovering the true nature of the artificial world built around him.

It is in this line, immediately drowned in a flood of technical details about the show so that's not too easily noticed, that the key to the spiritual interpretation of this great movie lies concealed.

All the rest - the story of a man who, even before his birth, is adopted by a ruthless TV network that makes his life a live show to earn millions of dollars in advertisement - is not the true story of the movie, or at least is not truer than the fictitious world in which Truman lives trapped.

In that sense, the director of the movie, the brilliant Peter Weir (who directed puzzling movies like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Fearless, among others) acts like the director of the Truman Show: as Kristof wants Truman to believe that what he presented him with since his birth is the real world, so Weir wants us to believe that the true story of the movie is the one which is presented to us by Andrew Nicoll's ingenious script.

But his purpose is different from Kristof's, because Weir doesn't want to fool us: he wants to induce us to widen our perception, although he does this like the author of a mystery, who hides the solution among many details of little importance. Here the solution lies in that essential sentence: "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented."

If we understand that sentence, then our question won't be "Why did Truman never come close to discovering that the world in which he lives is not reality, that there is something else outside it?", but "Why did I never come close to discovering that the world in which I live is not reality, that there is something else beyond it?"

In fact, if we think it over carefully, the story of most of us is not so different from Truman's. We too, since we were born, have believed that the world was what our parents and "adults" in general presented us with.

For example, let's take the limiting beliefs that the creator of the Truman Show implants in Truman's mind to crush his desire to be an "explorer", preventing him to get out of his artificial world and discover the deceit. Aren't they so disquietingly similar to those who prevent most of us to discover our true potential, our true identity?

Who has never wanted to be an explorer? And in how many of us this aspiration has been discouraged, since we've been told, like Truman was told, that that desire was childish, irresponsible, because what really matters in the end, for an "adult", is having a family, a home, a steady job, something to identify yourself with, something that allows you to define your identity, no matter how fictitious it is?

And how many of us have ended up working in an insurance company, like Truman, or doing other things equally detached from our dreams? In other words, are we really sure that "our" world, the one we have inherited from our parents, is much less limited and limiting than the one in which Truman lives?

Of course, our parents didn't want to deceive us for economical reasons; at the most, they extended to us limiting beliefs and fears they had themselves, thinking in this way to protect us, to act in our best interests. But if you look carefully, doesn't Kristof resemble, in certain aspects, a "good father" when, to defend himself from the accusation of exploiting an unaware human being, he says that, ultimately, he did Truman a favor, building around him a world much better than the real one, in which his creature can live safely?

After all, like our parents have handed down to us the world in which they lived themselves, so Kristof lives in the same artificial world he has built for Truman, since he's busy directing it around the clock. There is one substantial difference, though: Truman accepts that world because he thinks it's real, whereas Kristof, and the actors working full time in the show know they're living in a fake world, but they decide to invest all their energies in it.

How many of us do the same thing? How many people know they're living in a world where hypocrisy and conventions rule, but they accept it as it is because they think nothing better can ever exist?

But Truman is different. He's "pure at heart", so when he understands that his world is fake, he tries everything to get out of it. And in the end his efforts, however troubled, cannot be in vain because, as Kristof says to his interviewer, "if Truman were absolutely determined to discover the truth, there's no way we could prevent him."

In what way does Truman come to the determination necessary to free himself? The "prime mover" is love, of course. In fact, the aim that eventually will free Truman is that of reaching the faraway Figi Islands, where he believes is Sylvia (Natasha McElhone), a former member of the Truman Show cast he had fallen in love with at first sight. Being in love with him herself, she had triedto warn him, before being tore from his arms.

It's for love, then, that Truman begins to act in a "strange" way, to become intolerant of the patterns imposed on him by the invisible direction, and the obstacles he encounters just feed his desire. In the first stages of his path to awareness, when he, "by chance" or because of his unpredictable behaviour, begins to notice strange things, he fights to change the situation acting inside a world that he still believes is true.

In doing so, he asks for help to the people who seem to be closer to him, like his "best friend" Marlon (Noah Emmerich) and his "wife" Meryl (Laura Linney). But when he understands that it is useless to keep on fighting inside that world, because all the people in it are there to keep up the appearances created to imprison him, then he decides to "not resist evil".

On the outside, he begins to live "normally" again, but inside himself he's still planning his escape, which will succeed through the overcoming of his greatest fear, illusory like all the rest. And eventually, after resisting even the last, desperate attempt that his god-director Kristof makes to keep him in his trap, he'll come through the door on the paper sky that defines the fake and fragile boundaries of the world of illusions.

In that moment, Truman symbolically appears as an "enlightened" man, a "true-man" who had the courage to believe that the real world is incomparably bigger and better than the one he was presented with. So he discovered his true nature, beyond the limitations that others had imposed on him.

Copyright © 1999 Annalisa & Giampiero Cara