I love the Truman Show. It’s an all time favourite for me. It’s a film that’s aged really well as the years have gone by.

The Truman Show, for those unaware, is about a man named Truman who grows up in a reality show revolving around his life. The people around him are all paid actors, and their main work is to paint the backdrop of his day-to-day life. Their main goal is to never disrupt the illusion to Truman that what he’s experiencing isn’t real. These people are engineered to craft a compelling narrative. They act as ‘plot events’, further his ‘story arcs’, give him ‘inciting incidents’, and maneuver and weave his life into an entertaining live show that audiences all around the world tune into.

An artificial plastic simulacrum of the real world that holds and controls who Truman is, and who he becomes. A snow globe for audiences to peer into, to laugh and cry with Truman. The ultimate reality show.

Truman is never going to be aware of all this, yet he will be the most famous person on the planet. He will have his entire life planned out for him. He will mean something to so many people. Don’t we all seek that? For our lives to have some form of meaning?

Doesn’t this sound like a win for everyone?

The studios are happy. It is a massive effort to be sure, thousands of paid actors working in tandem to facilitate this man’s life into being as entertaining as possible, yet the product placements and the massive viewer ratings justify the effort..

The audience is happy, they get to see this unprecedented view into the life of someone else, and watch them go about their day unaware of the audience. and the film shows people revolving around Truman just as much as the studio set and the show he’s in already does.

What’s the problem here? What’s that deep unsettling feeling in your stomach telling you?

Why is this wrong?

The more time I spend thinking about it, the less easy the answer seems to be.

There was a time in my life, that I thought the major takeaway of The Truman Show is that ‘this could be happening to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’. After about 5 years after I first watched this film, I find that too simple, and dismisses too much of what this film really wants you to think about.

Big Brother Loves You, On Christof

Christof: We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.

The ‘villain’ of the Truman Show is the creator of the show. Villain is of course, an oversimplification with this film.

He’s not fully evil, and there’s so much going on here that needs to be unpacked. Christof, the creator, played by Ed Harris is a purist. A person who has allowed for his own apotheosis in the world of The Truman Show. But a lesser writer would have stopped there.

A lesser writer would paint him as a god who is stopping Truman in his odyssey to the real world. Although this exists, there’s so much tenderness and sincerity presented in his performance.

Christof: I know you better than you know yourself.
Truman: You never had a camera in my head!

What’s done here is much deeper. Christof genuinely cares about Truman. He stays up late at night caressing the screen while Truman is onscreen. He reminisces about Truman’s memories like they were his own, he thinks he’s doing real good with his TV show. He genuinely believes he’s a force for good in the world.

But that’s not the only side to him. Christof seems fixated on entertainment above all. Even while Truman is escaping, he focuses on making sure he gets the ‘hero shot’ of his escape. He’s aware that the audiences are rooting against him, and yet he’s making things as engaging for audiences as possible. Switching camera angles and adding sound design to help the audience.

There is genuine emotion here, and that makes it much harder to just be dismissive.

A cold emotionless villain that was trapping Truman there is easy to side against. A sensitive loving man who sees himself as an artist that is entertaining and helping billions of people… That’s not as easy.

In some weird twisted way, I can almost see his point of view. How noble a task it would seem. In some sense, Christof is an artist. All his motivations are predicated on creating good entertainment, morals be damned. Yet, at the same time, I wonder if he believes that what he’s doing is a good thing. I wonder if he’s attached to the story he has created.

I interpret his affection as that of an artist. His love for Truman is the same love a sculptor feels for their sculptures, it’s not the same love that a father feels toward their son. This nuance helped me understand his character in more depth.