The Truman Show is more than just prophetic |
Peter Weir’s 1998 satirical dramedy The Truman Show, which has just been inducted into the National Film Registry, is one of those rare works of science fiction that was hailed as prophetic very shortly after its release. It didn’t so much satirize its present or speculate on a far future as predict, with unnerving accuracy, what was just around the corner.
The Truman Show is now streaming for free on Pluto TV.
The movie, written by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) and directed by Weir (Dead Poets Society), is about a man named Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) who has unwittingly lived his entire life on a colossal TV sound stage, observed by hidden cameras 24 hours a day. His every step from infancy to adult life has been followed by an adoring global audience. Everybody in his life is an actor, every beverage is an opportunity for product placement, and the sky over his home island of Seahaven is painted on a vast dome. Behind the moon sits Christof (Ed Harris), the show’s godlike creator, micromanaging every detail of Truman’s existence.
When The Truman Show was released in 1998, reality TV was already a fact of life. In the early ’90s, Dutch show Nummer 28 and MTV’s The Real World threw young strangers together in shared houses and screened edited highlights of their interactions. The O.J. Simpson murder case obliterated the boundaries between news, documentary, and entertainment, as round-the-clock live coverage gripped viewers.
But very soon after The Truman Show’s release, in 1999, the not-at-all-ominously-named reality show Big Brother (also a Dutch invention, before it moved to the UK, the U.S., and around the world) realized the movie’s vision by isolating its subjects from the real world,........