The Truman Story
A TOK and FRESCIPLACT reflection
Foreign and Military One of the main themes is space and time. The organisers have created an ‘artificial’ space in which Truman lives. Truman gets hints that this world does not ‘correspond’ with reality when, for example, people break in on events with placards saying that it is a TV show, and one of the actresses tries to warn him. He also sees in a lift the back of the scenery. In every other sense the world that has been created is ‘coherent’ and so acceptable as true. This idea suggests to us that the world of a small American community is so close to being hermetically sealed the film makers can make us believe that life in a community which IS hermetically sealed is capable of being confused with reality for the span of Truman’s life (about 25 years?). Confusion about space and time is to be expected in a country where geography is not taught in schools.
Religion and Ideas. The film is a reflection on freedom. To paraphrase Rousseau: Truman ‘thinks himself free, but is … a slave…’. Religious and libertarian opinion in the USA would unite against such a proposal if a TV company ever made it. In another sense the film is about solipsism. Truman is, indeed, the only real person there, but not in the sense that solipsists imagine. The film does not propose that the people with whom Truman interacts are imaginary, but that they are insincere. The figure of the TV director is God-like, and causes us to reflect on the probable unpleasantness of a man-made God if indeed he were a reality. In the film Truman is an individual without sin, and as such is a suitable sacrificial lamb on the altar of TV revenue. In reality, though, Truman is himself an actor, and so equally ‘unreal’. From Christianity the audience has imbibed the idea of free-will, which Truman is shown being denied. Would an Islamic version be less controversial, since Truman would be required to accept whatever was thrown at him as ‘the will of Allah’?
Economics The setting up of the deception would have required vast sums of money, but frequent comments on ‘ratings’ show that the investment is expected to show a profit. In this sense the film is a left-wing critique of the things that capitalism does to people. The film does not raise any of the important issues of poverty in the modern world, having been placed in an affluent American environment.
Social Truman has been placed in a Western, post-Christian, bourgeois, relatively wealthy environment. The show is to entertain an audience, so the film is commenting on the taste of an audience which happily watches the cold-blooded deception and exploitation of a human being. ‘Oh, Brave New World’, it seems to be saying, ‘that hath such people in it!’ It seeks to curry favour with the real audience (us) by making us feel superior to the audience watching Truman in the film. One may query whether the film audience’s response corresponds with one’s appreciation of the real range of human responses. Crowds of radicals surely would have been assaulting the studio premises on a daily basis! The main issue raised is of corporate responsibility. There are no issues of class, crime or education in the community, and only a hint of gender issue in the arguments Truman has with his wife. The film accepts American assumptions about lifestyle, and raises, for example, no ecological issues.
Constitutional: The experiment would be illegal under any system of law, because it proposed the abduction of an infant and his false imprisonment for 25 years. Multiple crimes in the area of child protection and civil liberty have been committed. Pretending that a TV company could override this is surely part of a Hollywood agenda which states that authority is all a plot arranged by the powerful, laws are a sham and no-one is on the side of the ‘little man’. This agenda makes the work of local agencies like police, schools and housing departments more difficult than it need be. We reflect that the film takes advantage of the popular gullibility about the power of science and technology. A theme of the film is the distance that exists between people who really wield power and have knowledge and people of average ability and restricted experience. The existence of such a gap is worrying for democracy. The film undermines democracy firstly by impugning the motives of those in authority and secondly by portraying an ‘electorate’ which is cruel and supine.
Individual The idea that we might ourselves be ‘Trumans’ is a paranoid delusion. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars (or, as in this case, in the corporate wickedness of TV companies) but in ourselves’. The film fails to explain how it is possible to have controlled the other individuals with whom Truman comes into contact. The main problem here is not with the adults, but with the children with whom the infant Truman would have played and gone to school. I have taught many children who have not travelled more than a few miles from where they attend school, but I have never taught a class in which everyone was in that condition. These children would themselves have had to be similarly deluded, or they would certainly have commented to Truman on their ‘journey to school’.
Points of View: The Film makers – making money themselves by appealing to the section of society which believes that we are all just pawns in corporate games. Universal rightists who think that Truman has a right to choose between real things. ‘Luvvies’ – like all drama, the view of reality is the view of the sort of people who go in for acting. Their prejudices about teachers, doctors, lawyers and policemen are presented to the audience as ‘truths’, and are difficult to challenge because they control the main media ouitlets. An anti-English agenda is an obvious component of many American films made in the last twenty years (Braveheart, and ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ are obvious examples)
Language Truman = True Man? ‘Trumania’ = the instinct to form a hypothesis which corresponds with observed reality? Trumania = TOK?
Alternative Hypothesis The film suggests that our lives might be like Truman’s, and the alternative is that they are not. I am, as always, willing to bet that no-one will find a rip in our sky.
Cause, Change and Similarity Truman’s plight is caused by the wickedness of others, and his ‘break-out’ is a triumph of TOK because the lack of correspondence between observed reality and the explanation caused the downfall of the explanation. Truman changes as a result of his experiences. We are asked to reflect on similarities between Truman’s plight and our own. I would draw attention to two other cinematic works: the first is ‘The last Emperor’ which portrays Henry Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, immured in his palace for ten or twelve years in the erroneous belief, perpetuated by the palace establishment, that he is the ruler of China. In fact of course the government has passed to various worlards and nationalists. The emperor ends up as a tour guide under the communist regime (in the film, in reality, actually I believe, the gardener in his own palace). The other film is a series on British TV called ‘Seven Up’ where a group of children from different social classes was brought together and interviewed. The process was repeated at seven year intervals until the subjects were 42 years old. After that it was discontinued because some of the individuals’ lives had assumed tragic proportions, and many of them felt that the programme was a millstone round their necks. Real ‘reality’ was too painful to be good entertainment. ‘The Truman Story’ in the classic American way, looks forward to a happy ending where Truman is happier in touch with ‘real’ reality than he was with illusory ‘reality’.
Time The film refers to changes through time, for example to the more sophisticated camera devices. If it had begun 30 or so years ago it is very doubtful that the range of illusions seen in the film could have been managed at that time if indeed they could be managed today. Can a tsunami be generated on a film set even now? If it be alleged that the film is set in the future, then why are there so many indications that it is not. (Mobile phone technology dates films very precisely these days).