Copyright America Press Jul 18-Jul 25, 1998JACOB SET THE PATTERN in the book of Genesis. He grappled with an angel for an evening's entertainment and got a dislocated hip for his trouble. At dawn his mysterious adversary congratulated him: "You have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed" (32:29). After all his troubles, he gets a new name, Israel, and with characteristic understatement he reflects: "I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been spared" (3233). It's bad form to reveal too much of the plot, but Jacob got a life for himself despite a bum hip.
The Truman Show, a brilliant, challenging and very funny film by the Australian director Peter Weir, might best be unpacked with one eye on Genesis. The Creator, as he modestly identifies himself, is a sinister television producer-a "televisionary," mind you- aptly named Christof (Ed Harris). The single name marks him as something special, like Liberace, Cher or God. He dresses in black, with an open collar that photographs like last year's clericals. He looks down on his creation through wire rimmed glasses that the scriptwriter (Andrew Niccol) must have stolen from Dr. Eckelburg's sign in The Great Gatsby.
And what a creation these eyes of God oversee! His Seahaven, the world's largest structure, dwarfs the nearby Hollywood hills. This geodesic dome 200 stories high is the world's ultimate theme park, designed by Christof as a set for "The Truman Show," a 24-hour-a-day television program that runs without commercials. The show has become an intercontinental ballistic mania. Its ratings make the last episode of "Seinfeld" look like C-Span's gavel-to-gavel coverage of a convention of unpublished poets. From high in the ceiling of his stately pleasure dome, Christof looks down on his prelapsarian paradise from a tangle of control panels housed in his fully automated moon. He barks orders to his staff: "More wind"; "Now lightning"; "Cue the sun!" He doesn't seem to need a seventh day to rest.
The ingenious idea behind this elaborate artifice involves recording every moment in the life of Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), an ordinary man with a goofy grin, who works for a make-believe insurance company in this make-believe town down below. Truman began his career as an intrauterine scan and was chosen for the part because his actual birth corresponded to the start of the season. He has never seen the outside world. Everyone else in Seahaven is an actor, whose lines and actions Christof dictates through hidden speakers. Over 5,000 television cameras lurk in the most unlikely places: Truman's car radio, his pencil sharpener, his medicine chest. As a stroke of absolute genius, Christof had Truman's father die in a boating accident when the young boy insisted that they stay out on the artificial ocean during an artificial storm. The death not only brought high ratings but it left Truman with a deadly fear of water, and this of course made him less likely to want to leave his pastel island paradise and head for the mainland, otherwise known as the real world.
TRUMAN'S WIFE Meryl (Laura Linney) and best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) are actors just like everyone else. Do the names suggest actors? Truman's mother (Holland Taylor), also an actor, wants them to start a family, but professional though she is, Meryl's dedication to the Method has its limits. Tender Is the Night, but not that tender. She can't stand Truman. Meryl got the part when his high-school sweetheart Laura, really an actress named Sylvia (Natascha McElhone) started to feel sorry for poor Truman and tried to tell him the truth. Laura was summarily sent off to an insane asylum, and Sylvia was fired. Besides, Meryl has deeper dimples and looks smashing in her nurse's uniform. Note carefully, all you working wives out there in television ratings land. She's someone you can readily identify with. With her smart, starched nurse's cap, vintage 1958, she also has the authority image to do on-camera "product placements" that take the place of standard commercials in "The Truman Story." Holding up a box of cocoa mix in the shadow of her dimples where the camera can get a clear shot of the label, she offers to make Truman a refreshing, delicious cup of the stuff. Marlon shills beer and the junk food he loads into vending machines. Truman hasn't got a clue.
FRUIT falls from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the form of a spotlight from the ceiling of the dome and shatters on the perfect pink brick street. It may be the first bit of debris Truman has ever seen in his contrived perfect world. This falling missile puts the lapse in prelapsarian. His suspicions deepen when he notices that a rainstorm falls in a five-foot circle from directly over his head. Before the technicians can get a genuine Florida downpour working, they improvise by following him around with their micro downpour. Even someone as slow-witted and trusting as Truman starts to suspect something is amiss on This Side of Paradise. And so the evidence begins to accumulate. Finally, Truman spots his dead father dressed as a homeless man in the town square, where there simply are no homeless people. It seems the actor has been down on his luck since his drowning. In an act of petty vengeance, he tries to crash the set and spill the perfect beans to Truman. No fear. The Seahaven police and townspeople whisk him away in a sealed bus before he can reach Truman and destroy the program that destroyed his career.
That does it! Truman decides to test the world beyond Seahaven, but Christof uses his almighty powers to thwart his escape repeatedly. Of course, all this becomes part of the program, and ratings soar as audiences follow Truman's nervous breakdown and attempts to run away. Finally, when Marlon comes over to offer guy-talk advice, carrying his customary six-pack with labels plainly in view, he discovers that Truman has escaped. For the first time in 30 years, the transmission is cut. Actors and technicians, arms linked and marching in cadence, scour the set, like the pod people searching for Kevin McCarthy in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (Don Siegel, 1956). From his vantage point in the moon, Christof directs the chase, and shows that he will kill Truman on air rather than let him escape, and he nearly does.
In the final scene Truman discovers that he has in fact been living in Christof's bubble, and when he does, the wrestling match begins in earnest. Truman finds an escape hatch, but Christof from his lunar observation deck challenges Truman to think again about what he is about to do. Life in Seahaven has been comfortable, protected and untroubled. His life in this seaside paradise can continue just as it had been. The outside world, by contrast, holds terrors beyond imagining. Truman alone must make the choice: Is it better to be safe or to be free? For Peter Weir and Andrew Nichol the answer is clear, since they portray their God as a self-interested manipulator, The Last Tycoon, as it were. For them it is clear that Truman should take the forbidden fruit and accept exile from his phoney paradise.
"The Truman Story" invites reflection on many other issues as well. Does television in fact create its own contrived world that shelters its audiences from the real world? Peter Biziou, director of photography, continually blurs the margins of the frame to remind viewers that they are seeing Truman's life through the lens of a video camera. The flat images in unshadowed primary colors call attention to the videotape reconstruction of Truman's world. Truman in fact becomes what other people, paid actors, have made him. Does he have a core, do any of us, that is not dependent on what others make of us? And, in turn, does he exist simply by playing to the camera and its diverse constituencies? Is any one of us able to exist without a carefully fabricated public persona? Without an audience, would Truman simply cease to exist? Would we?
PERHAPS we are at cross-purposes, Peter Weir and I. "The Truman Story" grows from a post-modern context where the notion of a creator God is threatening and ultimately malevolent and whose power depends on keeping its creatures in ignorance. To be fully human, Truman must free himself from this servitude of divinely constructed illusion. My God holds little in common with Christof, and so I cheer for a Truman who strives to free himself from all illusion, however comfortable, and discover the authentic self in the midst of all this external artifice. Who knows? He might even wake up with a dislocated hip. RICHARD A. BLAKE
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