The Truman Show. Country Or Th Essay, Research Paper
I d like to start off with a quote. Whilst looking through a book called Poets on Poets
I flicked to the section on Blake. This is the sentence which caught my eye,
He proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination, which he called the divine
humanity and the true man as against the rationalist materialism already prevailing in
his time, and the industrial revolution. 1
This sentence refers to Blake s prophecies and links nicely with the subject of this
essay, The Truman Show . In this film we are introduced to the true man in an
idealistic setting. I would like to discuss in this essay how the issues that have been
raised during the work on the country and the city are present in our post-modern
media. How these issues are still a problem even with today s technologies and
understanding. It seems that the progress we are so proud of may be causing more
problems than solutions. If this film was to ever become a reality ( which I m sure it
could, moral issues or no moral issues), would this be the setting that was used? Is this
what people class as the idealistic place?
The town in which Truman lives, Seahaven, can not be classed as either the city or the
country, but as a suburbia of the highest standards. America has so many variations of
what they call the country that it is difficult to define between it s boundaries. In
Britain it is classed as the areas associated with vast land, limited buildings, forests etc.
In comparison though I feel that the Americans look on the setting of the Truman
Show as the British look on the setting of a small country village.
Seahaven has many values which can be attributed to the rural, the people work
together, there is a sense of cohesion and everybody has a place, a trade to do, a role
to play, there is no competition. However it also has some values of the urban injected
into it, the people are not mono-ethic and the jobs are not done poetically and with
love. It is said that the rural and urban can not co-exist, but we are not talking about
natural evolution, this is a controlled environment, which has been established to exist
in a naturally evolved environment. There is a clear divide both figuratively and literally
between the two worlds. In the middle of a thriving city, which contains all the
problems and issues that are associated with them, a small rural world which contains
very few of them. If the two had no separation between them there would be chaos as
they mixed. This is exactly what happens when Truman discovers the reality and
breaks the boundaries, and it is what happened when the boundaries were broken
between the Garden of Eden and Hell. There is a poem by Blake which is called The
Marriage Of Heaven And Hell , a fitting title to the situation I have just described, it
reads,
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death;
Truman keeps going until the very end when he finds out the falseness that surrounds
him.
Till the villain left the paths of ease
to walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes. 2
Truman is pushed to the edge of his boundaries by the deception that he discovers, the
barren climes to him is the outside world, a world he has never seen before, he leaves
his Garden of Eden to gain the knowledge that he desires.
If the rural began with the Garden of Eden, is Seahaven not the creation of a suburban
Garden of Eden, the same idealism but with a post-modern twist? It has a creator,
Christof ( a man who s very name contains religious connotations), it has an Adam,
the true man and it has the temptation of the other side, a place filled with evil. Adam
and Eve were innocent to this and so was Truman. The persuasion to keep Truman in
his Garden of Eden is based on the evils that he is innocent to. He may have read about
them, but he has never experienced them. There is an incident when Truman enters a
travel agents, spread across the walls are posters advertising all the dangers that are
associated with the cities. The urban is presented clearly as the hell in comparison to
the heaven of Seahaven, but only to the viewers. To Truman Seahaven is hell. At the
very end of the film when Truman reaches the boundaries of his world he ascends the
stairs, rising up from his hell to what he thinks might be his heaven. This is when
Christof speaks to him. Again he gives himself the image of being the creator, God.
Only his voice is heard and it is made to sound like it is coming from the sun. The
whole scene takes on the appearance of God trying to persuade him to stay in the
world he has created for him. It is a well known saying that one persons heaven is
another persons hell.
During the film a man holds up a newspaper which holds a headline stating that
Seahaven is the best place in the world to live, more persuasion against the outside
world. However the world in which Truman lives contains very little reality. Even
Adam and Eve saw a real sky and a real sunset rather than a computer simulation, so is
this not hell instead of heaven. In the book Virtual Light we see the use of virtual
realities, this is what Truman is experiencing, a virtual reality, it doesn t really exist,
everything about it is false. With this comes the sense of losing a notion of place and
confusion over his sense of identity. This is seen when Truman discovers what has
happened to him. He becomes confused over what is real to him and what is virtual
reality.
In the poem The Human Abstract the first lines read,
Pity would be no more
If we did not make somebody poor;
And mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we. 3
This applies to everything. How can Truman be happy with his piece of heaven, his
rural town if he has never experienced the alternatives? How can he learn from his
mistakes if there are no opportunities for him to make them? For one to exist there
must be an opposite.
When the full scope of the setting is shown in the film it begins to shift it s perspective
from that of the rural to the urban, maybe not in the eyes of Truman himself, but
definitely in the eyes of the viewers. Just like a city there is a reduction in the amount
of private space. Today in our large towns and cities we are permanently watched by
cameras, whether they are in stores, or on roads, or even the CCTV cameras that are
supposed to protect us, they are still watching every move we make. This is what
Truman experiences in the film without his knowledge, he has very little private space
and his world becomes that of the entire planet s.
As in Bladerunner product placement plays a big part in this film. It is a big part of
the post-modern landscape and so although the setting is that of the rural the target
audience is the larger population that lives in the cities, this is done to generate
revenue, another attribute of the urban life. Another point is that like the cities there is
a clear use of boundaries and space, the impression is given that the setting is vast,
whereas in reality there are boundaries as to where it ends
Other situations in which boundaries appear like this is soap operas, or docu soaps. We
watch them constantly, day or night. The Truman show takes on the appearance of a
soap opera in the film. In Britain alone we have them set in the country, the city and
the suburbs. Do we watch them because that is the life we want to live, or are we
watching them because they are the opposite of our lives? It seems in the film to be the
second one. People are transfixed to the show because that lifestyle doesn t appear
anywhere else. With the growth of cities there is a breakdown of the community. In the
Truman show the community plays a big part, it is what the show revolves around.
There is no graffiti across the buildings, there are no arguments between the
neighbours, gangs don t appear on the street doing drive-by shootings. Compared to
the cities of America this place is heaven, it s the idealism of all the viewers. A place
where innocence still lives, the creator has created the soap operas that are common to
us, but has left the innocence in his by keeping the knowledge away from Truman.
During the film, Sylvia ( an ex-cast member) phones up and tells Christof that he is
wrong to keep Truman in his cell, he replies to that we this speech,
I have given Truman the chance to lead a normal life, the world, the place, you live in
is the sick place. Seahaven is the way the world should be.
He continues,
He could leave at any time if his was more than just a vague ambition, if he was
absolutely determined to discover the truth, there s no way we could prevent it. I think
what distress you is that ultimately Truman prefers his cell. 4
Christof believes that Seahaven is normal and that Truman is leading a normal life, but
how can Truman determine what is normal when he knows a no different. Christof has
given him everything except reality, it may be true that the world is a sick place, but as
human beings we are the ones that have to discover it and, we are the ones who have
to realise that we helped make it that way. A normal world in our modern lives consists
of many things, both urban and rural lives play a part in it
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