Copyright New Republic Jun 29, 1998Samuel Beckett's short film called Film is about a person's being perceived. Esse est percipi is the picture's motto; to be is to be perceived. Film shows us a man, played by Buster Keaton, trying to avoid being looked at, fleeing it, and finally discovering, to his horror, that it is impossible to escape being seen. Beckett's work, then, is a small agon of the entanglements of living and a sly dig into the metaphysics of film itself.
We know, and we relish the knowledge, that a film character is not alone even when he may glory in solitude. He wouldn't be there except so that we can see him. This large encircling paradox often tempts us to consider how the character (not, of course, the actor) would react if he knew he were being watched. His horror might at least be the equal of Keaton's.
The Truman Show (
Paramount) is a reminder of the Beckett theme. The screenplay by Andrew Niccol starts from something like Beckett's abstraction and reifies it with details of contemporary culture, then moves on into fantasy.
The basis is simple and sickening. Truman Burbank is a thirty-year-old insurance salesman who lives on a street of tract houses with his magazine-ad wife and neighbors. This good-sized community is on a big island. There's one point of marital disagreement early on. Truman's wife wants a baby; Truman wants to travel, and he dreams of Fiji.
The audience is warned from the start that Truman's cookie-cutter life is in some way extraordinary; the very first shot is of a TV director, played by Ed Harris, commenting on what we are about to see. At first this is a bit puzzling, but gradually we understand, helped by the fact that many shots of daily doings in Truman's life are framed as if on a TV screen. It becomes clear that absolutely every moment of every day of Truman's life is being watched by hidden TV cameras and is being broadcast on "The Truman Show," which is an international hit. What's more, the film begins on Day 10,909 of the show. It has been going on since his birth.
Truman himself knows nothing about the show. Nothing. Every other person whom we see, except one, is rehearsed and programmed for TV, including his lovey-dovey wife. Every person in the street or in his office is, knowingly, part of "The Truman Show." (So, though he is unaware of it, Truman isn't really living a real life.) When he eventually finds out about all this, his reaction is like Keaton's, except that his horror moves him to action.
Truman hasn't known about his TV show because apparently it isn't broadcast on this island. He sees only the local paper. He isn't aware of the Truman T-shirts or the Truman bars where people gather to watch his show. A graphic reason is supplied why he never leaves the island.
We understand why Truman's new itch to travel is opposed: it would take him off the huge TV stage, and it would inform him about the show itself. But he begins to suspect, anyway. A theaterlighting fixture falls from the sky into the street in front of his house. In a storm at the beach, a shaft of rain hits him like the beam of an overhead spotlight, and when he moves, the beam moves with him. More clues to his TV existence soon follow. (The TV director's control of the elements is godlike. My favorite line in the script comes when, in the gigantic spherical TV control room, the director barks at an assistant, "Cue the sun! "-and the sun comes up on Truman's island. Note that the name of the TV director is Christof.)
Most of our questions about the plot are answered as the film proceeds, but we shrug them off anyway, answered or not. We don't want the fantasy interfered with because it keeps striking home ferociously. It doesn't take long to see the dark underside of the film's theme: the captive of TV isn't Truman, it's the audience. Us. And our love of that captivity, the gobbling of showsfictional drama or news or sports or politics, but always shows-engulfs us. We used to go to theaters and films; now, more seductively than radio, TV comes to our homes, entwines us. (And is paid for, in "The Truman Show," not by commercials but by "product placement." We see the brand name on a six-pack, etc.) The shows don't have to be dramatic, as "The Truman Show" and most TV attests. They need only be shows, life outside transmitted to the TV screen inside.
Toward the end, after Truman discovers that his entire life is a show, Christof is at first not worried because he thinks that the imprisoned protagonist likes his "cell." When Christof learns otherwise, he warns Truman that if he leaves he'll discover that life outside the enormous TV stage is no more real than within. (Discomfiting, when we see how the office chat on the TV show resembles the chat rituals of all offices.) But Truman, something like Keaton, would rather not be perceived; and his urge is seconded by the one non-TV person among the principals, a young woman who truly loves him, who has been watching the show and hoping.
Despite its grim reminder of our media slavery, The Truman Show refreshes. Besides its novelty of subject (although I'm sure science-fiction experts could cite antecedents), it has dash and daring. The director-of the whole film-was Peter Weir, the Australian whose career has ranged from Gallipoli to Witness to Dead Poets Society, and who is adroit here in letting the TV presence in Truman's life seep into our awareness. We learn that 5,000 small hidden TV cameras are watching Truman everywhere, always, so we can appreciate some of the queer shots we have seen-like, for instance, one through the digital clock on the dashboard of Truman's car.
A lot of blather has erupted about Jim Carrey's performance as Truman. My own view of it is, in a sense, negative: at least Carrey has omitted almost all the muggings and cavortings by which he prospered. Weir has sheared off most of Carrey's high-school exhibitionism, and, in any case, the script itself helped to keep him from being unbearable. Whether this new-found restraint proves that he has undiscovered depths and possibilities is a question. But of course we can hope.
Laura Linney, as Truman's wife, supplies the requisite steel under the chickabiddy surface. Natascha McElhone, as the true young woman, endows the film with its one soft touch, a scent of romance. The cinematographer, Peter Biziou, veteran of such eccentric numbers as Bugsy Malone and Life of Brian and Time Bandits, suggests subtly from the start that all this world's a stage.
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