The Truman Show: (Re)Producing Realities
The Truman Show presents us with an allegory of how the capitalist reality in which we live, by virtue of its make-up, seeks to preserve and reproduce itself, and in doing so limits our capacity to imagine alternative realities.
The Truman Show is one of my favourite films of all time, and it’s one of those films where I have grown a new appreciation for it with each watch, seeing things I didn’t see the first, second or third time of watching, and especially discovering themes and ideas that I hadn’t yet noticed.
The movie is probably most referenced in regards to its prophetic foreshadowing of the era of reality TV shows that was to come in its wake. Having been released in 1998, the Truman Show came out before Big Brother, X Factor, Love Island, Keeping up with the Kardashians or any of the numerous other shows of the kind, yet it seemed to predict and pre-empt a time where the reality show would reign supreme, where shows with hundreds of cameras would become a mainstay of TV, complete with product placement and ever blurring lines between reality and ‘content.’
The commentary on where TV was heading is however just the surface level theme of the movie, and like every good piece of media, there is a lot more going on underneath.
The Truman Show came out shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early years of the TINA-era (There Is No Alternative), and what political scientist Francis Fukuyama at the time infamously called ‘the end of history.’ The ideological battle between capitalism and communism had been ‘won’ and the victor was capitalism.
The Western world found itself, at least for a short time, without competition. The battle of ideas had ceased, and hegemony had been created. Western neoliberal capitalism was now without adversaries and existed without question, and in this way capitalism and reality became one and the same.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that in the following years, particularly pre-9/11 and the war on terror (the West’s next big adversary), we saw an increase in popular media that either depicted in some shape or form a world in which some type of alternative reality or alternative society was being deceivingly hidden by the powers that be, or films which themes were either anti-capitalist or at least warned of the dangers of unchecked capitalism.
This was of course a reflection of a world where for the first time capitalism, or any socio-economic ideology for that matter, existed in the world virtually unchecked and unchallenged, and the anxieties that some people had about the potential implications of this.
The most notable example being The Matrix (1999), which came out one year after the Truman Show. Unlike the Truman Show, the Matrix is much more explicitly political and its themes of the dangers of a reality which is unquestionable much more at the forefront. The literature on this is expansive and I won’t delve too much into it here.
Instead I find analysing the Truman Show to be far more interesting, firstly because its a theme that is a lot less obvious and one that many will miss, and also because I think in this way the Truman Show is even more effective in getting its point across. In other words, the more subtle and often unnoticed way in which it expresses this theme is precisely why it is more powerful.
A brief synopsis
For those of you reading who have not yet seen the Truman Show, do so now because there are spoilers ahead!
And for those who can’t be bothered here’s a very quick synopsis. Truman Burbank is the star of a massively popular reality TV show that follows every minute of his day-to-day life, only he doesn’t know it.
Truman was born into the show, and the whole world around him and everyone else in it is a fabrication. His parents, his partner, his best friends and all the people in his small made-up town of Seahaven are all actors.
Due to a series of strange events, from a studio light falling out the sky (Truman’s world exists in an impossibly enormous dome, in which everything from the weather to the tide of the sea is controlled from a TV studio), a glitching car radio that picked up the chatter of the stage crew, and the reappearance of a father he had long believed to be dead, all led to Truman questioning his reality as he slowly came to realise that it truly revolved around him.
As Truman becomes more sceptical of his reality, and viewers of the show become aware of his scepticism, the creator and director of the show Christof, played by Ed Harris, is asked in an interview why Truman had never questioned the true nature of his world up until that moment. He answers simply by saying that “we accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”
It is perhaps the most on-the-nose political commentary of the whole film, but also its most poignant. It makes the point that as people we all accept (at least initially) the systems and norms that shape our societies. We come to take so much of social and political life as granted, as natural and even immutable.
However it is not as simple as that. Previously in that same interview, the interviewer and Christof are in conversation about the ways in which Truman has been stopped from discovering the truth of his reality.
Christof states that as Truman grew up they were “forced to manufacture ways to keep him on the island.” The less extreme examples included a deliberate campaign of discouraging travel; from the teacher who told him “that there was nothing left to explore”, to the photo of a plane being struck by lightning at the fake travel agent he visits.
The most extreme example, and the most effective, was the drowning of his father on a boating trip when Truman was a kid, which led him to develop a deep fear of the water. This is important because Truman’s fictional town exists on an island, and therefore if he were to leave it he would have to cross water by bridge or boat; both of which he was desperately scared of.
Many parts of Truman’s life were controlled in a way that was deliberately meant to dampen his curiosity and critical faculties, and to essentially gaslight him when any doubt crept in.
The main reason behind wanting to stop Truman discovering the truth, aside from the ego of Christof and his god-like para-relationship with Truman, is that it would signal the end of a show that, as stated in the movie, “has grossed huge revenues now, equivalent to the GNP (gross national product) of a small country.”
In other words, Truman’s reality is constructed in such a way as to preserve itself, because doing so makes the TV studio and all its shareholders unspeakably rich. In order to do so it must shape and limit Truman’s capacity to question his reality or imagine an alternative.
For me this is the most interesting political idea that underpins The Truman Show. It is a political allegory of how we accept our given reality, but also how our reality is, by design or otherwise, bent on guaranteeing its continued existence by limiting our capacity to imagine alternatives.
An allegory of ideological self-preservation and reproduction
Often in philosophy or sociology we talk in metaphor, just like science. So when I say that a system or a reality will seek to preserve itself I am of course talking in metaphor, in the same way that a scientist might describe a virus as seeking to infect our cells. In neither case are we really implying that either a socioeconomic system or a virus are sentient, goal-orientated agents.
However, in the same way that a virus does in effect “find” cells to “take-over”, so does a socioeconomic system in effect “preserve itself.”
A crude, brief and un-nuanced explanation of how this might work in terms of capitalism is that in this system capital brings with it power, and those who have capital are thus beneficiaries of capitalism, and use the power that capitalism gives them to ensure the survival of a system that they greatly benefit from. The capacity to ensure its survival is massively bolstered by the ownership of mass media by parties who have vast power and vested interests in maintaining capitalism.
This simplistic description sometimes leads some to conspiracy theories, but it is of course far more complicated, and at the same time far more simple than this. Rather than collusion and evil meetings, although no doubt these also take place in some form or another (minus the blood-sacrifices I’d imagine), it is just a bunch of people following their self-interests in a system that rewards it.
Socio-economic systems are complicated things, not just top-down diktats. They are things we all participate in and all produce and reproduce, although of course to differing degrees. They are a complex web of economic, cultural and human forces, which are themselves all deeply intertwined, sometimes contradictory and involved in a continuous back and forth.
The studio produces and reproduces Truman’s world, but so too do the actors (who receive literal capital as well as I’m sure social capital through fame and fortune), so do the millions of the viewers around the world, and even more to the point, so does Truman, even though he doesn’t know it.
Like I already said, a huge reason for all of this is of course the pursuit and maintenance of wealth and power, but how this plays out is far more complex and far more human (for lack of a better term) than the mechanical description of the process makes it sound.
We see the perfect example of how human life and the reproduction of systems of power come hand-in-hand in the movie. The movie takes place during a period in which Christof and the studio are keen to show the world’s first on-screen conception, and it is perhaps the idea of fatherhood being pushed on to Truman that starts the wheels turning which leads to his eventual discovery of the truth. For he, like each and everyone of us, is faced with the option (whether he knows it or not) of very literally reproducing the same reality that constrains him. It is arguably this decision that is the catalyst for Truman’s newfound scepticism.
In a deleted scene, Christof lets the main cast know that the plan is to create a separate spin-off show following the child that they are pushing Truman to have. If Truman were to have a child, he would unknowingly be reproducing and ensuring the survival of the false reality constructed around him.
In a much less literal way, we with our actions often reproduce the norms and structures that form our reality and thus ensure its continuity. What the Truman show might be trying to tell us is that we have a choice. Of course as individuals there is only so much we can do, especially when like Truman we have a whole world fighting against us, but in the words of Christof: “if his was more than just a vague ambition, if he was absolutely determined to discover the truth, there’s no way we could prevent him [from leaving].” Or in other words, with determination, we can discover new realities, new ways of living.
The Truman Show, like The Matrix, both present us with a world where without some kind of dramatic intervention, by luck or by design — in the case of the Truman Show a falling studio light, and with the Matrix a cryptic message that appears on Neo’s computer screen — the protagonist couldn’t even begin to imagine that there exists another reality besides the one they currently inhabit.
In this way I believe the Truman Show was playing with an idea that the late great British cultural theorist Mark Fisher would term ‘capitalist realism.’ Simply put, and in his own words, capitalist realism is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”
A similar sentiment, one which highly influenced Fisher’s work, was expressed by Fredric Jameson when he said that “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” I don’t think there are many people who disagree with this, and this shows exactly the power that capitalism has over our imagination.
Imagination Constrained
Fisher’s work, like the Truman Show, would end up being truly prophetic. Back in 2009 Fisher would eerily predict a not so distant future in which popular culture, fashion and media would be deeply drenched in nostalgia and consist of remakes and reboots.
Popular culture is of course just a reflection of our broader reality, that our culture seems stuck and bereft of new ideas is only an indication of a societal stagnation. Our political ideas would very much follow this pattern, from the rehashing of post-war state-capitalism during the Corbyn era Labour Party, the Thatcherite rebirth in the current Tory party, to the new-New Labour of Starmer, it seems that we have run out of new ideas and are stuck in a loop of political nostalgia.
The world that Truman inhabits itself seems like a world from the past, with many dressed in 1950s attire (a period in American history which is often seen as a golden era, despite the inequality in civil rights). It is itself a form of nostalgic pop culture consumed by the masses of the real world that Truman is kept from, and thus indicates that even the viewers are having their imagination constrained in a way similar to Truman himself.
The world of Seahaven that Truman exists in is literally stuck in a loop. In one scene Truman sits in his car and watches the same people and cars go past behind him over and over again as the extras of the show follow their set paths through the town. Stuck in the past, stuck in a loop, Truman’s world is the perfect expression of what Fisher is describing.
The popular media of our world is both the result of, and in itself guarantees that our imagination of a different world stays constrained. As Fisher argues, modern media creates a safe and diluted way of expressing anti-capitalist ideas without actually challenging the system. This is why so much of popular activism which might be described as anti-capitalist is often about mitigating capitalism rather than ending it, and why so much political activism nowadays can be boiled down to individual consumption habits. In this way the very supposed criticisms of capitalism are actually intent on maintaining it.
Like with mainstream climate change activism, much of it asks us as individuals to change habits and recycle, rather than talking of dismantling the systems which rely on unsustainability and the gross exploitation of the planet.
In a very real sense we are living in a reality where the capitalist system conspires to maintain itself by keeping us stuck in a cycle that erodes our ability to imagine genuine alternatives. Even now the UK finds itself with two main parties who are essentially indistinguishable from one another, with both being deeply rooted in and vocal about continuing capitalism’s rule over us. When a few years ago the Labour Party found itself presenting the most mild alternative to the status quo, and yet one very much itself still rooted in capitalism, it faced an onslaught and coordinated campaign which sought to completely discredit it.
Since the end of the Corbyn-era we have seen a double-down on the idea that there is no alternative. Starmer’s Labour have been worryingly vocal about how much it wishes to offer no alternative to our current state of affairs. During a period in which Britain finds itself in crisis, rather than being offered alternatives by mainstream politics, we have seen a closing of ranks.
In the same way that Christof doubles-down on his efforts to stop Truman discovering an alternative reality as the world around him begins to crumble, going as far as almost drowning him in a manufactured storm, so too does our socioeconomic reality doubledown on its effort to maintain itself at the point of crisis.
Right now we are all Truman, living in a world where powerful forces seek to constrain our imagination, to stop us from finding alternatives, and to ensure our role in reproducing that world.
