The Truman Show

The Truman Show, American satirical comedy-drama film, released in 1998, about an ordinary man who realizes that his entire life is a reality television show. The film stars Jim Carrey as the title character and was directed by Peter Weir. The Truman Show opened to critical acclaim. It was nominated for three Academy Awards and won three Golden Globe Awards. The film was also a commercial success, earning approximately $264 million globally, including about $125 million in the United States. The Truman Show was prescient in its depiction of the often-manipulative influence of mass media, the popularity of reality television, and the rise of the surveillance state, with its accompanying voyeurism and loss of privacy.

Synopsis

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is an insurance salesman who thinks he lives in the pleasant island town of Seahaven (real-life Seaside, Florida). He has no idea that he is actually living inside a gigantic, 5,000-camera television soundstage and that before he was born, he was legally adopted by the OmniCam Corporation to be the star of “The Truman Show.”

Every person in Truman’s life is an actor, including his wife, Meryl (Laura Linney), his best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich), and his parents (Holland Taylor and Brian Delate). Seahaven is a fabricated town with residents played by extras. The show is run by Christof (Ed Harris), a domineering television producer and director with few scruples, whose control room is hidden in the “sky,” the top of the soundstage’s dome.

“The Truman Show” has aired live on television, 24 hours a day, for the past 30 years. The show is extremely popular, with a global audience of more than one billion, which makes Truman an extremely valuable piece of intellectual property. Christof and OmniCam have a vested interest in preventing him from finding out the truth about his life.

The show keeps Truman in Seahaven with a variety of tricks. The town is on an island, and a fabricated sailing “accident” that killed his father when he was a child has made him afraid of the water. In college, when Truman falls in love with Lauren (Natascha McElhone)—a classmate who tries to tell him he is in a reality show—she is fired, and Truman is told she and her family moved to Fiji. In the outside world, Lauren becomes part of the “Free Truman” movement that advocates for his release from the show.

Truman grows into a cheerful, kind man who is becoming bored with his dull life. Although the show manipulated him into marrying Meryl, he longs to find Lauren and explore the world. Gradually, he becomes suspicious about his reality after a series of unusual occurrences. A light falls from the sky. A patch of rain falls only on Truman. His car radio tunes into a transmission describing his movements.

When Truman tries to leave Seahaven, Christof and his crew throw obstacles in his way, but Truman fights his fear of the water to pilot a boat away from the island. Finally, he reaches the edge of his world—the wall of the soundstage. He opens an exit door, and although Christof tries to persuade him to stay, his voice coming from above as if he were God, Truman delivers his catchphrase (“In case I don’t see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night”) and steps through the door into the real world.

Critical assessment

Since the film’s release, critics have pointed out how The Truman Show predicted the excesses of the modern reality television era, which began in 1992 with MTV’s The Real World but kicked into high gear with the premieres of Survivor and Big Brother in 2000. Christof’s machinations foreshadowed how the events on reality shows would be sculpted by directors and producers.

The Truman Show anticipated the audience’s hunger for the details of other people’s lives, propensity for voyeurism, and casual dismissal of the loss of privacy. Even people who are not in the cast of a reality show, critics say, can use social media to create a “Truman Show” of their own lives, and this mixing of reality and entertainment makes it difficult to discern what is real. This point was vividly illustrated by the sneaky way “The Truman Show” inserts advertisements into the show by having Meryl hold up products she had just purchased and describing them to Truman.

Despite their interest in a particular reality show, critics point out, audiences can be fickle, turning their attention to other shows in the endless stream of content provided by mass media. At the end of The Truman Show, when Truman walks out the door into the real world, the film shows members of the audience—who have been watching Truman all his life—cheering his escape. The transmission ends, and viewers’ screens show static. Two security guards who were watching grow bored: “What else is on?”

Production notes and credits

• Studio: Paramount Pictures
• Director: Peter Weir
• Writer: Andrew Niccol
• Music: Burkhard von Dallwitz and Philip Glass
• Cinematographer: Peter Biziou

Cast

• Jim Carrey (Truman Burbank)
• Ed Harris (Christof)
• Laura Linney (Meryl Burbank/Hannah Gill)
• Noah Emmerich (Marlon)
• Natascha McElhone (Lauren/Sylvia)

Academy Award nominations

• Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ed Harris)
• Best Director (Peter Weir)
• Best Original Screenplay (Andrew Niccol)