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 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, inside a bubble of inescapable surveillance. And in the early 2000s, Big Brother, alongside shows like Survivor and American Idol, supercharged the popularity of reality TV, turning it into one of the dominant entertainment formats of the 21st century.
The Truman Show’s commentary on the media’s commercialization of the individual was trenchant at the time, bolstered by its broad appeal and strong, universal storytelling. But its impact has been followed by a series of long, deepening aftershocks as social media has turned its precept into a universal way of life. We all consume a sanitized, commoditized version of real life through screens, not just as a surrogate for real-world relationships, but as a permanent layer on top of them. Those of us who use any social-media platform are performing, editing, and broadcasting our own lives, too, willing participants in our own surveillance. We’re all Truman now, and we’re also all the actors in his show.
This is heavy stuff. The Truman Show’s startling, continuing relevance is just one reason it lands with just as much force now as it did 28 years ago. But that isn’t all there is to the movie.
For one thing, it’s a funny, warm film. Niccol’s original script framed the story as a dark, dystopian thriller set in New York City. Weir’s instinct was to make something lighter and more appealing, both in terms of the movie and the TV show within it. The charm of one was inextricable from the charm of the other. Truman’s world is a colorful, preppy, gently anachronistic bubble, and it’s easy to believe it was first created amid the cultural and technological optimism of the 1960s. The production design and cinematography are bold, clean, and brightly lit. It’s an inviting movie, which makes it pleasant to watch, but also comes with a subtle sting in the tail, implicating the movie’s audience as well as the TV viewers on-screen in the TV show’s exploitative fakery.
An even more important decision of Weir’s was casting Carrey as Truman — something the director was so sure of that he delayed production for a year to wait for an opening in the comedy superstar’s schedule. Although The Truman Show rarely delves into Carrey’s full manic slapstick mode, his emphatic, stylized physicality gives it a shot of raw energy. The Truman Show was his first major dramatic role, and he brings an aching sensitivity to it. As the cracks in Truman’s world start to show and he begins to question his existence, Carrey conveys subtle, existential disquiet just as effectively — if not more so — as he enacts his exasperated flip-outs.
But neither is Carrey a Robin Williams; he’s not a sentimental, tears-of-a-clown type. He’s handsome and likable, but there’s an alien quality to his intensity, and a sublimated fury to his humor. He has a ruthless, unsettling edge, in other words — an edge that he and Weir are happy to set aside for most of The Truman Show, but only so they can deploy it with scalpel-like precision when they need to slice open the film’s heart.
Over the course of The Truman Show, the TV show’s 30-year facade begins to crumble. First, a stage light falls from the faux-sky. Then Truman’s father, who “died” in a boating accident when Truman was a boy, sneaks onto the set looking harrowed, trying to reach his fake son. He’s whisked away, but first, Truman recognizes him. Then Truman’s car radio intercepts stage directions orchestrating his drive to work. The movie plays these moments for laughs and clever invention, but Carrey doesn’t. Truman is increasingly perplexed and horrified by his lack of agency in his illusory existence. He begins a series of absurdly doomed attempts to get off the island, and Carrey allows Truman’s beatific optimism to curdle into a sardonic bloody-mindedness.
Cunningly, Weir never really shows us what the world outside Truman’s bubble is like; we see sequences in the TV show’s control room, and vignettes of people watching Truman from bars or living rooms, but the “real” world only exists in relation to what’s going on under the dome, in the cameras’ gaze. In the movie’s closing moments, Truman reaches the threshold of a world he never knew existed. The path ahead doesn’t beckon him with the light of self-actualization; it opens onto the pitch darkness of the unknown. Carrey meets the moment with a devastating mixture of affection and ironic bitterness, hope and resignation. Then, without hesitation, he disappears.
It’s a visually stunning, spiritually powerful conclusion. It is the point of The Truman Show that we don’t know what world he is stepping into, and can’t follow him to see what happens next. This is about more than just turning off the TV, or setting down a smartphone; it’s about someone making the difficult choice to be himself outside the context of what others see and expect of him. It’s about how fragile our identities are, and how much strength it takes to inhabit them fully and honestly. Having learned that his reality was constructed for him, Truman has the courage to step outside of it, into the blackness. Would we?
The Truman Show is available to stream on MGM+ and to buy or rent on Apple, Prime Video, and similar services.
