Did The Truman Show Predict the Future?
The Truman Show. Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
When COVID-19 first entered our lives earlier this year, I found myself at home one evening watching The Truman Show for what must have been the first time in 20 years. It was my wife’s first time seeing the film, so I sat back with a big box of Balinese wine and we watched the movie together. Two decades later this film more than holds up.
For one thing, Jim Carrey revealed himself to be an enormously talented actor in The Truman Show. He enjoyed phenomenal success in the mid-1990s, but his career trajectory was quite exceptional as he went from the low-brow commercial success of Ace Venture, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura 2 (where at one point he crawls out of an anamatronic rhinoceros’ butt) to a superlative performance as a man turned into a media commodity without even knowing it. His reputation as an unserious pratfall specialist was such that he didn’t even get nominated for Best Actor for The Truman Show. This suggests to me that when people saw The Truman Show for the first time in 1998 they didn’t quite grasp what they had seen.
What they had seen was a vision of the future. And a dark one indeed. The Truman Show is about a baby taken at birth and turned into a reality star, without his knowledge or consent. He lives in a huge sound stage and every aspect of his life is filmed as content for the titular Truman Show, a global phenomenon. Every person in his life - his wife, his friends, his mom - is an actor. During interactions with Truman they frequently shoe-horn in awkward product placement for the show’s corporate sponsors. Eventually, Truman gets wise to what’s going on and escapes giving the movie what is meant to be a happy ending.
But it’s not a happy ending, really. Because The Truman Show was so good at offering up a plausible vision of the future that we are now living in, one where media conglomerates exploit the mundane drama of peoples’ private lives in order to sell more stuff. The main thing the show got wrong is that there’s really no need to force an unwitting participant to be the star of their own reality show; the compulsion people feel to seek out fame and recognition has produced a seemingly unending supply of volunteers who are perfectly happy to abase themselves and allow cameras to document their lives for the sugar rush of being in the spotlight.
There are many good reality shows - Masterchef Australia, for instance, which is possibly the greatest show ever made. But counter-examples of reality shows that are simply exercises in exploitation masquerading as documentaries, or where the worst impulses of terrible people are encouraged in the interest of feeding an insatiable demand for content, are too numerous to even mention.
I’ll still mention two of the worst, though. Jungle Gold is a good example, where a pair of white guys from the US went to Ghana and engaged in illegal mining activities. 90 Day Fiance is also particularly gross, as it uses an usual provision of US immigration law to force people, often from developing countries, to go through some pretty nasty shit for entertainment purposes as they have 90 days to either marry their American partner or be deported. For many of them, who are perhaps desperate to escape circumstances in their home countries, this seems a particularly cruel basis for a show.
The amazing thing is that The Truman Show anticipated a lot of where American media was going, though if anything it didn’t push the cynical conclusions far enough (in The Truman Show the director eventually stops short of intentionally killing Truman on camera; I am not sure producers at Bravo would show similar restraint). How did screenwriter Andrew Niccol have his finger so on the pulse of where the media-pop culture nexus was going?
In a way, it is simply the natural progression for a capitalist society like the United States that fetishizes commodification and consumerism. The ideology that has lately underpinned the American experiment is the belief that if there is a market for whatever you are selling, then you should sell and profit from it. That’s how we got things like Fox News. There was a demand from bitter white retirees for conservative content that reaffirmed their world view, and so Fox fed that market and made boatloads of money. In America this is considered good and the right thing to do, a natural expression of a properly functioning capitalist system.
It doesn’t matter that it ultimately created a right-wing echo chamber divorced from reality that is fueling insurrectionist tendencies in the electorate. That is the free market at work. Niccol was just playing around with that same idea, that The Truman Show is a natural outcome in an American-style capitalist system, one that happily exploits people and shoves ads down your throat in order to maximize profits and prop up corporate sponsors as long as the market demand is there to make it worth your while. Ethical concerns, such as they are, are shoved to the back and only dealt with reluctantly, if at all.
The Truman Show is a beautiful film, brilliantly acted by Jim Carrey. But it also tapped into the heart of the burgeoning grotesqueness of America’s media ecosystem which in 1998 was still in its infancy. Truman correctly foreshadowed where this country was going in its willingness to exploit people in order to create content and make money, and while in retrospect Niccol may seem like a bit of a clairvoyant if you just think about the way the United States has constructed its value system, its society and its markets then exploitative reality television like The Truman Show and 90 Day Fiance is an almost inevitable product of such a machine.
