The Meaning of The Truman Show
The Truman Show is pregnant with thought-provoking thematic concerns: our horror of
totalitarianism, our love of personal freedom, our belief – justified or deluded – that knowledge is a
powerful tool and that access to information is a God-given right
–
Barbara Shulgasser, SF Examiner
In addition to being consistently moving and funny, The Truman Show, almost as an aside, makes
accurate satiric points about conformity, commercialism, the desire to play god, and what can
happen when television, or any other medium, permanently blurs the lines between what's real and
what's on screen. Yet despite these subversive underpinnings, what's perhaps most engaging
about The Truman Show is the way it still delivers vintage Hollywood satisfactions to an audience.
With a beleaguered hero determined to live free or die, The Truman Show demonstrates a belief in
the indomitability of the human spirit that is as four-square as anything Frank Capra put on screen.
– Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
Critics generally saw the film as a powerful indictment of rampant technology and rote consumerism or as a
thought-stirring parable about privacy and voyeurism.
The Power of the Mass Media – and whether it can be trusted
On one level, the film is a social commentary about problems created by the modern media, and the way it blurs
the lines between appearance and reality. To what extent is our perception of the world the result of media
manipulation?
The film is essentially a sharp criticism of the dangers of a false 'reality' cultivated by the media, and a warning
against losing our sense of genuine reality. It offers a playful deconstruction of our tendency to confuse reality
and media-presented fiction. For its audience, 'The Truman Show' promises reality. Truman's life has a truth
that they can't find anywhere else on television. He is not an actor; there are no scripts. At the beginning,
Christof claims that people love the show because it is real, and that ordinary television can never reach people
the same way.
The only problem is that the audience has been fooled just as much as Truman. Seahaven is no more real than
the set of any other show. The illusion of reality has only been created on a much larger scale. Each moment is
carefully crafted. The behaviour of other characters is tightly choreographed; lines are fed to them; music
dictates mood, and even the creators refer to special events as "episodes".
The film demonstrates that 'reality television' is just as constructed as any other television. In some ways it's
more fictional because it claims to be true: it tries to pass itself off as something it's not. But the illusion of reality
gradually unravels for both Truman and the audience, until Marlon (as Meryl has done less overtly earlier) finally
commits the ultimate betrayal: he breaks the fourth wall, speaks directly to the camera and shatters the lie
forever.
The captive of TV is not Truman, it’s the audience, us. And our love of that captivity, the gobbling of shows –
fictional drama and news or sports or politics, but always shows – engulfs us. We used to go to theatres and
films; now, more seductively than radio, TV comes to our homes, entwines us. ... The shows don’t have to be
dramatic, as 'The Truman Show' and most TV attests. They need only to be shows, life outside transmitted to
the TV inside.
– Stanley Kauffmann,
thenewrepublic.com
Films like Truman are created by entertainment companies as a means to exploit, and at the same time
dissipate, our desire to engage in genuine media criticism. In the end, the power of the media is affirmed
rather than challenged. In the spirit of Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, these films and television
programs co-opt our enchantment (and disenchantment) with the media and sell it back to us.
– Ronald Bishop, Sage Journals Online
The Truman Show is timely in its reminder of the tenuous division between real and media worlds, and its one
virtue is the very thorough dissection of the entertainment-complex machinery behind such life-like chimarae
as its docu-soap setting suggests. The world of The Truman Show isn’t a given; it has to be manufactured and
sustained by extensive technology. … The new paranoia movies have less to do with political anxieties, more
to do with the feeling that there is little verifiable reality in the screen image itself, and by extension, in the
world we know through visual media. It’s no longer a question of who is to be trusted, as in the Seventies, but
a question of whether anything, any image, any evidence of the state of things, can be trusted
–
Jonathan Romney, 'The New Paranoia: Games Pixels Play'
We will have to stand up to the manipulators of television and news if we want to protect ourselves from the
absurdity and falsehood that now surrounds us at every turn.
– Ken Sanes,
Transparency
The harrowing message of The Truman Show is not the grandiose contrivance of a media mogul. It is, rather,
the fact that each of us can be seduced into making only those 'free' choices that the culture approves.
Innocuous smiles, American dreams of manicured lawns and pleasant jobs, elections and visits to foreign
countries that are little more than staged events, moralizing about saving our children while the state and
economy cannibalise them, capitalism proclaimed as freedom when it is often our bondage – these are all part
of the fabric of lies that hides the sky.
– John F Kavanagh, American
Press
Peter Weir: There has always been this question: is the audience getting dumber? Or are we film-makers
patronising them? Is this what they want? Or is this what we're giving them? But the public went to my film
in large numbers. And that has to be encouraging.
… the movie uses its mythological raw material to tell a new myth about contemporary America and the
connection between invented substitutes for reality and the misuse of power. This new myth takes a number
of elements of our current media landscape and mixes them together to convey its meaning. In part, it plays
on the way we increasingly find ourselves watching staged events and theatrical illusions on television, even
when we are viewing news, politics, advertising and public affairs. But in place of showing us an audience like
ourselves that is being tricked, it cleverly turns the star of the show into the victim of the fraud.
It also plays on the way news and so-called reality programming turns real people into the unwilling stars
of melodramas for audience entertainment. Dan Quayle and Tammy Faye Bakker get turned into comic
characters who are a source of derision and ridicule. O. J. Simpson and the Goldman family end up as the
stars of a courtroom drama. Monica Lewinsky's mother discovers she has been unwillingly cast in a supporting
role in a political 'bedroom' farce. But, once again, the movie cleverly mixes things up so that, unlike the real
people who knowingly get trapped in fictions, it shows us a character who has no idea he is a character in a
media invention.
And it plays on the themed environments that are turning up all over the United States, from Disney and
Las Vegas to the fantasylands of many malls to the growing number of planned communities with faux quaint
architecture and contrived nostalgia. These too are forms of media – stage sets to be more precise – that offer
us entertaining fantasies. By placing its character inside an immersive stage set like this, the movie is able to
depict the way we are surrounded by the self-contained simulation of the contemporary media industry.
These same elements can be found, with some variation, in the other works that depict false paradises
and environments of illusion, as well, since all tell variations on the story found in The Truman Show. All make
use of images and ideas about birth, the mind, growing up, gods, and contemporary culture. They use these
images and ideas to depict these things and to comment on these aspects of life.
But it is when we begin to see how these meanings enrich each other that things get interesting. Through
these multiple meanings, these works tell us we have to mature, individually and collectively, and be born out
of false paradises of media and technology into a harsher world of truth. They tell us we experience the new
media class of entertainment, news, politics and corporations as made up of corrupt and controlling parents
who try to use us for their own ends. And these works depict the members of this class as suffering from a
god complex, in which they toy with human lives and act as if they are above and beyond life's travails.
– Ken Sanes, Transparency
Popular Mechanics (in 2008) named The Truman Show as the fourth most prophetic science fiction film:
… straddling the line between science fiction and modern-day fairy tale. … it's hard to deny the impact The
Truman Show has had on pop culture, and especially on TV producers. Arriving just before the explosion of
reality television, the intentionally over-the-top story still echoes today. … the show's popularity is its
straightforward voyeurism. And, like Big Brother, Survivor, and every other reality show on the air, none of his
environment is actually real.
It's easy to chalk up the debut of Big Brother a year after Truman's cinematic release to coincidence. And
MTV's The Real World debuted long before The Truman Show, in 1992. But whether it actually predicted the
sudden (and lasting) popularity of orchestrated realism, or simply capitalised on it, consider this: in 2003,
Spike aired The Joe Schmo Show, which featured a regular guy tricked into competing on a completely fake
reality show. Unlike Truman, Matt Gould could see the cameras, but all of the other contestants were paid
actors, playing the part of various reality-show stereotypes. While Matt eventually got all of the prizes in the
rigged contest, the show's central running joke was in the same existential ballpark as The Truman Show.
(Dissecting the plausibility of an extended parable is an exercise in missing the point, but producing a
hurricane on demand to keep Truman from leaving his fictional town is still pretty hard to swallow.)
– Erik Sofge
The Consumer Society
On one level, the film criticises greed and those people who will do anything for fame and money. Meryl is the
ultimate symbol of this – she is willing to sell her body in the full glare of an international audience in return for
fame and fortune. It is also a criticism of our consumer society – a portrait of our alienating society where
everything is commodified, including human beings. Truman is a commodity – a slave who is paid nothing for his
unwitting stardom and who is denied 'permission' to leave until he finally rebels.
The Truman Show is a postmodern presentation, offering a microcosm of the post-war suburban version
of the American Dream, and voicing our internal tension over such a dream. In some ways, life in Seahaven is
appealing. It is safe, heavily protected from outside influences: The conservative right-wing American dream
town. It has no crime because there is no real socio-economic disparity. There are very few people of colour,
and the few look a lot like the Cosby family. There is no cultural diversity, just a walled city preventing any
undesirables from upsetting this created upper-middle class W.A.S.P. nest. This seeming heaven-on-Earth
quickly turns into a nightmare, though, as Truman physically and metaphorically looks for an escape. The level
of control and lack of privacy in Seahaven isn't worth the safety and stability. The surveillance is downright
chilling. In truth, we also don't want consumerist conformity anymore. Our culture is starting to embrace
individualism and uniqueness now, and we no longer want to be tied down by the illusion of choice that the
mainstream media has to offer us. Part of Truman's desire to explore comes from how sick he is of the bland
uniformity of Seahaven. He longs to travel to Fiji, where he can find an island that no other man has set foot
on before.
Truman's mythic battle ends with his coming to terms with the possibility that life isn't what it seems. He
is our stand-in in this fictional world. He battles his own fears, and conquers them through determination. He
must also defeat nature in a physical trial, then face his creator in a challenge of willpower. The result is a
sequence that is supremely satisfying, one that always leaves me a bit teary, yet hopeful as well. Although we
may always be a step or two away from truth or reality, the quest for self-determination is a critical one in our
own development.
– Joel Pearce
'The Way the World Should Be'
Christof responds to Sylvia's charge that he should feel guilty, with, “I have given Truman a chance to lead a
normal life. The world – the place you live in – is a sick place. Seahaven is the way the world should be.”
Implicit in Christof’s argument is the idea that the world outside Seahaven – our world – is no less counterfeit, no
less inauthentic, no less voyeuristic than Truman’s virtual-reality world.
The values of the world that Christof has created are those of a (mythical) past. Christof has created a world for
Truman to grow up in that is modelled not on any real time in history but in a 1950s America as portrayed on
American TV in shows such as 'Leave It t Beaver', 'Father Knows Best' and 'The Donna Reed Show'. It is a
world without tension, without unpleasantness, without crime – and without creativity, without diversity, without
challenge. [See also 'Setting']
The Totalitarian Society: 'Big Brother is Watching You'
Truman's discovery of the way his entire life is monitored provides a powerful metaphor for the increasing amount
of surveillance in contemporary society. According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2 million
CCTV cameras – one for every 14 people in the country. It has been calculated that each person is caught on
camera an average of 300 times daily. Ironically 32 cameras scan the home and its surroundings of George
Orwell, author of 1984 with its warnings of surveillance and so loss of privacy and independence of thought and
movement. The ostensible purpose is to reduce crime but so far there has been little reliable evidence that this
has happened. Although there is so far nothing like these numbers of cameras in the USA, more and more cities
are installing police-monitored CCTV cameras.
The film makes use of our fears of surveillance and loss of privacy; at the same time, it links to the increasing
fascination of many people to record their lives on camera and broadcast it to the world. The film was made
before the widespread development of the internet, and long before YouTube and MySpace etc, so it seems
prescient in this as it is with reality TV. (For a look at a world where lack of privacy is carried to extremes, see
Ben Elton's latest novel, Blind Faith.)
On a Personal Level
The Truman Show demonstrates an individual’s struggle to gain his true self.
– Robert Castle, Bright Lights Film Journal
Truman's story is one of self-actualisation, of asserting one's humanity purely on one's own.
When Christof speaks to Truman just before he leaves Seahaven for the unknown world outside, Truman's
second question is the age-old one, asked by most people at some time in their lives: "Who am I?" Christof's
answer is the answer of a media mogul: "You are the star." And so – in the language of philosophy – the
existential question of who he is and what he is doing in this world is replaced by the ontological issue of whether
to accept the given identity of a star in an obviously contrived milieu, or whether to assert his individuality and
free will by choosing to live in freedom.
In the five days leading up to this question, Truman is shown questioning the world he lives in and trying to
determine just where he fits in – the journey of discovery most thinking people make as they grow up. The
flashbacks and the present time action show Truman trying to assert his individuality, being knocked back and
lied to:
 When he climbs the rocks: Why? What's over there? / KIRK: Nothing. It's dangerous, that's all. You've got to
know your limitations, Truman.
 In school: I'd like to be an explorer. Like the great Magellan. / TEACHER: Oh, you're too late. There's really
nothing left to explore.
 Meryl – a baby should be an adventure enough. You want to be an explorer... This'll pass. We all think like
this now and again. Let's get you out of these wet clothes, huh? And into bed. [She uses sex to try to distract
him from the pursuit of his real self.]
 His mother uses guilt against him: But I never blamed you, Truman. And I don't blame you now.
 Marlon mocks his suspicions: That's a lot of world for one man, Truman. You sure that's not wishful thinking?
He is handicapped in this search for himself because his world is a false and manipulated environment, yet he
eventually discovers the truth. He is certain there is more to life than the bland and unchallenging existence in
which he is trapped, and his determination to escape this enables him to overcome the (instilled) fear of water (=
fear of the unknown) and so find a way out of the studio and into the real world. To achieve this he demonstrates
perseverance, commitment, determination. His battle is a metaphor for the way people need to conquer their
fears to achieve their goals, the sea a metaphor for any of the obstacles in their way.
Christopher Niccol has said that the origin of the story was in his own fantasy as a child – a very common one
among children – that their family is not their real one. 'I think everyone questions the authenticity of their lives at
certain points. It's like when kids ask if they're adopted.'
But like any supple parable, the film allows for several plausible interpretations. It is also about control – the
control we try to exercise over ourselves and others, using stratagems of love, hope and fear. Most people
think they have something to do with shaping their existence. But what if that's a fiction? Who's directing our
lives? And how do we negotiate with God or fate or the great TV auteur in the sky? Finally, the film speaks to
man's isolation from the world around him. The solipsist believes that he is the only reality; everything else is
just... TV.
– Richard Corliss, Time
The Truman Show as Allegory
Some interpretations
Truman exemplifies the human spirit. He is a true man who will mature into adulthood and have a genuine
relationship with a woman. He is a true man in the sense that he demonstrates courage and perseverance. He
has to overcome his greatest fear in pursuit of his true self. And he is a true man in the sense that he is the
archetypal man for our age, who stands up to the false god and illusions of the media manipulators and develops
the potential for an authentic life. The conclusion is a triumphant chorus for humanity: he has become his own
person.
The most important theme is that each person should be free to make of life what they will, and not walk down a
set path, no matter how comfortable and rosy it seems. See Robert Frost, 'The Road Not Taken':
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
An essay published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis analysed Truman as a prototypical adolescent
at the beginning of the movie. He feels trapped in a familial and social world to which he tries to conform while
being unable to entirely identify with. He believes he has no choice, and his only escape is the fantasy of fleeing
to a deserted island.
Truman's journey out of Seahaven can be seen as an allegory of growing up within a family that seems
determined to keep him a child. His mother uses an array of weapons to keep him with her; his father – Christof
(it is significant that his supposed father is removed early) – controls him and tries to prevent his ever leaving the
false happiness of a controlled family. Ultimately, his journey from this sanitised, happy-face world into the
unknown larger world, where he will find a genuine love, is his effort to grow up, in the face of their opposition.
Truman is in many ways very young: he fantasises out loud, wears childish clothes, retreats to his basement to
examine his wooden treasure chest, and dreams of going to Fiji. Maybe Christof is right, that if Truman's desire
to discover the truth were more than a "vague ambition", if he were a true man instead of little more than a child,
a true child, he'd have found his way off the set years ago. Of course, it is Christof and his accomplices who
have kept Truman that way.
During the five days of the film narrative, he gains sufficient awareness of his condition to 'leave home' – he
develops a more mature and authentic identity as a man, leaves his child-self behind and becomes a 'true man'.
The Truman Show is a re-creation of myth, depicting as it does a man imprisoned in the nest of a fake paradise
(or heaven) by a manipulative god. At the end, after Truman comes up against the enclosing wall and finds the
door to the outside, the 'god' speaks to him in a voice from above and tries to instil fear in him, to keep him under
control. It is an interesting ironic touch that as Truman goes up the steps to reach the door, just before Christof
speaks to him, he is in a heaven-like setting. He rejects this false paradise and chooses to exile himself into the
mundane world that is his natural home. He travels from fake – fantastic and fabulous – nature to true nature.
Plato's 'The Cave', an allegory
The Truman Show is a manifestation of Plato's allegory of 'The Cave'.
Plato's allegory of humankind suggests that most people are like prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their
heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave, on which are cast the shadows of puppets. The prisoners, unable
to see the puppets, mistake appearance for reality. If any of them manages to struggle free and leave the cave,
he is confronted with the brilliant sun, a metaphor for goodness – for Plato, the origin of everything that exists.
Plato’s hero adjusts to the sun, becomes enlightened and returns to the cave, only to deduce that the masses
must be ruled by a few 'learned' elite.
Truman’s world is the cave, and Truman (true man), having watched only shadows of reality for nearly 30 years,
is the individual who escapes the limitations of the cave. The actors in Truman’s artificial world as well as the
audiences who follow the show are the ignorant masses, all of whom are fooled into believing that the shadows
they see are real.
The film however, suggests a different ending from Plato's. When Truman asks Christof (whose voice comes
from up above, like the voice of god), “Was nothing real?” Christof responds, “You were real.”
The movie's message is that we are real, even if our world is manipulated by pseudo-democratic governments,
CNN, Disney, sitcoms, Microsoft, Apple, professional sports, reality TV, MTV, soulless technology, rigid religion
and so on. We can break free.
It may just be coincidental, but Truman has to overcome all four 'elements' in his fight for freedom. He drives
through fire, is temporarily stopped by dangerous 'air' (nuclear plant leak), tunnels out though earth to escape
his basement, and then nearly drowns in water, from which he rises triumphant to finally ascend into the 'air'
again (among the clouds) before leaving.