The Truman Show (1998)

I heard someone say recently that in the 90s we have made celebrity out of people who have done basically nothing. This would certainly apply to Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), a man who doesn’t know that every moment of his life has been manufactured and manipulated from birth to be a television series.

Truman lives in the town of Seahaven, a plastic looking community (he doesn’t see it that way because he doesn’t know anything else) with white picket fences and friendly neighbors always ready with a friendly howdy. But one day he starts to get a little suspicious. Truman, though happily married still longs for a girl whom he had a crush on in college. She was the only person who had sympathy for him. So he hatches a plan to go to Fiji to find her. I loved the clever way that the television staff keeps coming up with ways to keep him in town using everything from delayed buses to his fear of the water to a nuclear reactor leak.

Andrew Niccol’s script reminds me of his previous work on ‘Gattaca’ another movie about a man whose life has been manufactured from birth. Watching the film I thought a lot of the life of Princess Diana from the day she started dating Charles. Our voyeurism and our love for peering into the lives of our neighbors are central in this story.

We are made to feel bad for Truman but we are curious about how he is going to get away. We become as voyeuristic as the audience in the movie does. Therefore our voyeurism is called into question. Our curiosity is aimed at making celebrity of a man who has done basically nothing.