The reality-TV psyops in Weir’s movie looks naïve compared with today’s political propaganda.
The 25th-anniversary release of The Truman Show on Paramount Blu-ray reminds us how the most terrifying speculative fiction can be upstaged by political reality. The Truman Show’s conceit — physical clown Jim Carrey playing insurance salesman Truman Burbank suddenly realizes that his entire life since infancy has been lived as the contrivance of a television program — was embarrassingly, unconvincingly broad. Nineties reviewers cried “Brilliant!” Now it seems naïve — its absurdity less striking than what we’ve all lived through and suffered from the media in recent years.
Just as last year’s film version of Don DeLillo’s apocalyptic White Noise couldn’t match the truth of Covid-era tyranny, The Truman Show underestimates the assault that TV media — and by extension the government — have waged against us.
Made in a less jaded era, just before Bill Clinton’s gamahuching in the White House, The Truman Show wasn’t clever enough. It fooled reviewers who regarded Australian director Peter Weir (Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, Master and Commander) as highbrow, not realizing he was a middling aesthete and a dull thinker. Weir gave art-house slickness to screenwriter Andrew Niccol’s ponderous attack on television’s fraudulence and mass-audience cretins.
The film’s supervillain is Christof (Ed Harris), a bald, bespectacled visionary-artiste who arranges the enormous social hoax employing hundreds of technicians, 5,000 closed-circuit cameras, and performers who play out his manipulation of Truman’s business life, family relations, and marriage (wife Laura Linney and best friend Noah Emmerich speak in TV-commercial slogans). The daily drama, broadcast 23 hours a day, becomes a worldwide viewing sensation, like CNN used to be. All that, somehow, without Truman himself ever switching on the idiot box.
The Truman Show is one of those lousy ideas — like Hal Ashby’s film of Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts, Sidney Lumet’s film of Paddy Cheyefsky’s Network — that’s regarded as “classic” among college-sophomore types. That’s the intellectual class Christof speaks for when he explains, “We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We’re tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. . . . It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine.”
The futurism of The Truman Show fell short of reality TV and was surpassed by such phony phenomena as The Real World, Survivor, Big Brother, and the Housewives franchises — the “scripted reality” that replaced the idea of cinema vérité.
It also encouraged fans of speculative fiction, once considered a profound subgenre of sci-fi, that either warned or satirized dystopia. It’s pointless now that totalitarianism has become a common feature of mainstream media. Christof’s psyops, previously unimaginable, seems paltry after the Covid-lockdown broadcasts, big-tech censorship, the J6 show trials, and routine media bias. Given the promise/threat of A.I. meaning that none of us can trust anything anymore, The Truman Show feels absolutely creaky.
Weir and Niccol don’t explore political mendacity. They play liberal Hollywood’s same lame game as Pleasantville, Suburbicon, Downsizing, Don’t Worry Darling, and Barbie — essentially extending a humorless Twilight Zone episode. Weir’s visual style confuses levels of artifice and realism, unsure whether he’s satirizing media, politics, or life. Studio lights drop out of a clear blue sky, frame sizes fluctuate. Weir’s not a master who understands perspective and POV like Brian De Palma does. So he falls back on Christof’s false-god irony: “I am the creator of a television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.”
In retrospect, The Truman Show anticipates what some call a “simulation.” Its re-release makes one question today’s media presumptions: What if the J6 trial was a game show? What if Anderson Cooper is an apparatchik? What if George Stephanopoulos is a political-party consultant? Or are “asylum seekers” and “migrants” really illegal-alien invaders?
Mass susceptibility has gotten worse in the 25 years since The Truman Show. Elites look down on what they call “low-information” Americans, but low information has become the condition of those who remain unaware of media blackouts and censorship (which they likely favor). The Truman hoax itself is maintained by fanatical binge-watchers who wear buttons asking “How’s It Going to End?” The movie’s ending is shameless hokum — global viewers tearfully applaud Truman’s escape into unspecified reality. The condescension never stops. That’s how Weir and Niccol reward the stupidity of credulous viewers.