Back to Rachel's Home PageJune 23, 1998
I recently saw the new movie, The Truman Show. As someone who thought I would never like anything Jim Carrey did, I was impressed by his first serious dramatic movie. But that wasn't what caught my attention in this movie. Indeed, I was so engrossed in the movie that I forgot Carrey's reputation for annoying characters and slapstick comedy. Rather, my attention was completely occupied by something best summarized in a statement made by Christof, the fictional creator of the Truman Show.
"We believe the reality we are presented with."
For Truman Burbank, reality was the quiet town of Sea Haven, "A nice place to live" as described by its license plates. For almost 30 years, he accepted the reality presented by Christof through the cast and crew of the Truman Show, because it never occurred to him that the world might be otherwise. For Truman, that was reality.
But the movie went further. It explored some of the social implications and consequences of putting a human being in a deliberately constructed environment. What does it mean to control someone's reality? Where does that control cross the line into taking away his free will, and his freedom? When does it stop being art and start being slavery? Christof said he gave Truman a better world than the one we live in. In some respects that may be true - Truman didn't have to live in a world filled with anger, senseless violence, hate crimes, politics, and the threat of nuclear armageddon. But he was never free. He never had a choice about who his friends were, who he would love, who he would marry, what he would do with his life. And he could never leave the island. Is that a better world, or is it just artificial?
On another level, and perhaps a more important level, I think The Truman Show spoke to a fundamental fear in all of us, or at least a fundamental question. What is reality? Was Truman's reality any less valid because it was created by one man's vision for a television show? To Truman, that was the universe. There is an old philosophers' debate about perception and the nature of reality. Because all we know about the universe is what we perceive through our five senses, we have no way of knowing that this isn't just a hallucination of some sort, a dream. One argument proposes that a person could be fed all of the sensory inputs to make him believe in the universe around him, and he would have no way of knowing that it doesn't exist except as a figment of his imagination because the only information he has is what his senses tell him. How do we know if what we perceive is reality? The answer is, we don't.
And so we come back to Truman. Like the person in the hypothetical argument, Truman was fed all of the sensory inputs to make him believe in Christof's imaginary world. He never suspected otherwise until the illusion began to crack. For him, that was reality.
We each live in our individual realities, never knowing whether what we perceive is truth or fiction. Sleep well tonight, and remember, you may be on TV for five billion people. Smile!
Rachel M. Thurston
surakofb5@yahoo.com