"The Truman Show" -- A Fairy Tale for the Media Age

I've been thinking this week about Peter Weir's film The Truman Show. It's been so much on my mind that it seems right, without further ado, to share an analysis of the film that I once wrote for a class. I actually did two papers, one from a Freudian and one from a Jungian perspective. I thought both were good, but I got an A on one and a B+ on the other; the B+ paper is the one I'm excerpting here, with an ending taken from the other paper.

Director Peter Weir's captivating and quirky tale, The Truman Show, tells the story of Truman Burbank, the hapless hero who's totally in the dark concerning the truth of his own life. He's the subject of a 24-hour-a-day television "reality show" dreamed up by director-genius Christof. Truman's parents, his wife, his best friend, everyone around him, are all actors, and his life is a set-up. Viewers all over the world tune in to see Truman deal with such situations as the "death" of his father, his school years, his marital tensions, his job, and his escapades with pal Marlon, all of which are carefully scripted episodes. The real story begins when Truman starts to wake up to what's happening and tries to break out of the role that's been written for him.

At first, it's the dullness of a round of days in which each seems much like the one before that begins to wear on Truman. In the time-honored tradition of a situation comedy, he endures endlessly repetitious set-ups and pratfalls involving the neighbors, the local grocer, his mother, and his wife. Eventually, a series of mischances gives him an alarming realization that things revolve around him in a peculiar way. He's nearly hit on the head by a falling stage light. He tunes into a frequency on his car radio in which technicians and stagehands seem to be talking about him. His unscheduled appearance in a building leads him to a backless elevator and a glimpse of things behind the scenes, including caterers. He begins to put together odd incidents from the past in which bits of the truth are apparent. One day, he sees the man he thought of as his father, supposedly dead, now in the role of an extra walking down the street.

As the director tries more determinedly to keep Truman in the dark, Truman becomes bolder about testing reality for himself. Despite the attempts of the other actors to convince him that things are what they seem to be, Truman executes an escape plan leading to the last place Christof thinks of looking for him: the sea. For Truman's long-standing fear of the water, engineered to keep him from roaming off the set, seems to negate the possibility of his ever attempting to leave his island. Once he manages to break out, he finds that the world is both larger and smaller than he realized--larger in the sense that his life is his own if he chooses to seize it, and smaller because (literally) he has been living his life on a Hollywood set whose horizon is a painted backdrop.

Truman is a stand-in for each of us in our journey toward Selfhood. He suggests the archetypal Divine Child in his obscure beginnings. Though to himself Truman is nothing special, his smallest doings are followed by millions of viewers around the world, so that his power and reach are almost supernatural. He has retained a childlike quality even in adulthood, a sunny innocence in the face of the deceit practiced all around him. If, as Jung said, the Divine Child represents the future, Truman personifies unawakened potential in its purest form.

Truman's push toward Selfhood is nearly dormant in the beginning as seen by his acquiescence to the subtle and not-so subtle manipulations of the director and actors. He has been content to live in Jung's "unconscious identification with the plurality of the group." He is so far from knowing himself that when he looks in the mirror every morning, he doesn't realize he is looking into a camera, on the other side of which are the technicians and directors who are actually running his life. "Do you think he can see us?" asks one abashed technician when confronted by Truman's steady but unknowing gaze.

There is no fear of that yet, since Truman's ego is so split off from his unconscious that he is totally identified with his social role. There's an implication that any mild attempts Truman has made at independent growth or assertion have met with disapproval or even disaster in the past. He is oblivious to all the signs that indicate his predicament until he meets Sylvia, who goes against the script by falling for him.

Before being booted from the show (the director has recognized Sylvia's power over Truman), Sylvia tries to tell him the truth about who he is and what's happening. This scene takes place near the ocean, symbol of the primordial source of life and the unconscious. Truman is afraid of the water to the point of being unable to cross a bridge (representing both initiation and its hazards), and this fact has been largely responsible for his failure to realize that he is living on a set. Even though he and Sylvia are parted, he thinks of her constantly, and spurred by an intense desire to be reunited with her, he begins to dream of leaving Seahaven.

When Truman hatches a plan to escape the set, he goes to the basement of his home, where all of his childhood treasures and relics of the past are kept. It has been obvious for some time that Truman is most himself when he retreats to this private world, and it now becomes the springboard for his escape. Out of view of the camera, he makes a break for it by climbing a ladder. A means of egress between the unconscious, "basement" part of himself and his "daylight" ego has been found and moves Truman toward greater consciousness. But to truly change, he still has to cross the ocean that has always terrified him.

For years, Truman believed himself responsible for the death of his father in a boating accident. His realization that this is false now enables him to see a boat not as a symbol of guilt but as a transport that can take him to freedom. In crossing the sea, he is reborn to a more self-determined life, and the boat becomes a womblike vessel of safety that carries him through a special effects storm. Once he weathers the crisis, he realizes that the sea--as well as the painted backdrop he eventually crashes into--represent only the early stages of his journey. The ocean had seemed limitless to Truman when he stood on the shore, but he is just beginning. When he reaches the stage door, it leads into darkness.

In the act of passing through it, Truman enters the unknown territory of authentic life, where nothing is guaranteed. Sylvia, however, has been watching in suspense along with everyone else, and leaves her television, running out of the house to find him. Truman is about to enter her territory.

Though the imaginary television audience in the film--and we viewers of the film--have been complicit in the conspiracy against Truman by the very act of watching, another truth is revealed at the end of the story. We are each Truman in our own way, and our glee at his triumph expresses our own deep yearning for Eros and a more vital, authentic existence than the one we may have settled for. After all, if Truman can do it, so can we.