Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Jim Carrey, Laura Linney, Noah Emmerich, Ed Harris
written by Andrew Niccol
directed by Peter Weir
by Walter Chaw The Truman Show appeared during a period when we were taking a hard look at how quickly and thoroughly we had given our lives over to technology, bracing for the Y2K bug to drop airplanes out of the sky and launch nuclear arsenals. The cruel irony of successfully averting disaster is that the morning after, having learned nothing, we redoubled our efforts to sell ourselves to our things. Introspection is like a nightmare upon waking: If it doesn’t disappear on its own, you do your best to wave it away. Orwell’s 1984 didn’t predict how we pay subscriptions for the right to be surveilled constantly, every detail of our lives documented surreptitiously for corporate information harvesters and publicly through social media, where we manufacture the best versions of ourselves to entertain, and shame, others. We line up around city blocks for the right to plant the world’s most sophisticated tracking devices on ourselves; there is a fundamental, exploitable flaw in our programming. We overestimated the extent to which we desired anonymity, underestimated our longing to matter and our vulnerability to flattery. Our will to power through influence, evolutionarily favoured, is the suicide pill encoded into our hardware. In our pursuit of a self to proliferate, technology allowed us to redraft our image and curate our environments. The films at the end of the millennium–Pleasantville, Dark City, The Matrix, and The Thirteenth Floor, to name a few–are warnings about what happens when we project our subjectivity upon the world. Perhaps none cautioned more definitively than Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, which has the balls to literalize the horror of living among undifferentiated versions of the self in a simulation of the outside that is merely an interpretation of an eternity of insides.
It’s “expressionism,” of course, which is nothing new in letters and images but was in the past the product of a more quotidian madness: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari rather than eXistenZ; the psychotic rather than the electronic. Most science-fiction of the twentieth century failed to predict the extent to which our technological miracles were turned inward instead of exploding outwards: designed to tweak our pleasure centres, not challenge our ambitions. It turns out, beyond the basics of comfort and necessity, we’re most of us not all that curious. A key exception is Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”, originally titled “The World the Children Made” (published in the SATURDAY EVENING POST in its September 1950 issue), remarkable because it nailed not just the immersive/addictive ambition of home entertainments, but also the malignancy buried in à la carte programming catered specifically to increasingly individual tastes–whether or not those tastes tend to the unsavoury or perverse. Three years later, in Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury reintroduced the concept of the all-consuming video wall in the living room of fireman Guy Montag. Bradbury had a healthy fear of the machine evolution of television, its power to insinuate itself like a parasite burrowing into willing flesh. We have nothing of a shared televisual culture now (even the “exceptions” would have been statistically inconsequential a generation ago, pre-Internet streaming), and our ability and desire to communicate with one another has suffered at the same rate our most antisocial impulses have found validation in vibrant fringe communities. Society has withered before the proliferation of sociopathic tendencies: Generation Splendid Isolation.
“Splendid Isolation” is also what movie director Viktor Taransky names his yacht in Andrew Niccol’s dismissed and generally reviled S1m0ne (2002). You can see it emblazoned there, clear as day, when Taransky dumps a steamer trunk loaded with the “body” of his ingenue, S1m0ne (Rachel Roberts), into the open ocean. The term originates as a 19th-century British diplomatic policy of isolationism, though I’ve only ever known of it as the title of a Warren Zevon ballad of introversion, misanthropy, and maybe the mental illness so often attached to artistic genius. I think Andrew Niccol is our finest documentarian of a very specific personal implosion occurring at the exact depth where our ability to manufacture our realities intersects with an individual’s desire to do so. His first produced script, Gattaca (1997), is about a man who creates a version of himself fit for interstellar travel in a future dominated by eugenics; his third produced script, S1m0ne, is about a man who creates an object of fantasy to which millions suture themselves. The film that bridged those two, The Truman Show, the only one of those first three Niccol scripts he did not direct, is about a man who creates the world around a captive who’s unaware that he’s the chief draw in a human zoo. Each of these films is, on some level, a rejection of the complacency not of the way things are, but of our acceptance of what we’re told are our limitations. None of them are stories of great upheavals but small and personal victories against mechanisms beyond comprehensive repair. They are thematic articulations of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), in which a terrorist to the “way things are” is tortured into meek conformity yet still manages, in his diminished state, some tiny, pyrrhic disruptions. At least that’s how I read it, given to nihilism at worst and fatalism at best–a speculative version of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” another parable for the extinguishing of the human spirit in the constant machine pressure of the systems we’ve erected to encourage surrender. Niccol’s loose trilogy is a single horror premise: we are all butterflies in diving bells in an inexorable descent into the black of the pressurized deep.
The Truman Show is about mild-mannered insurance salesman Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), married to shallow suburban materialist Meryl (Laura Linney) and best friend to vending-machine entrepreneur Marlon (Noah Emmerich). Having lost his father in a boating accident as a child, Truman has a pathological fear of the ocean–one tempered by his desire to someday make it to Fiji, where his lost love Lauren (Natascha McElhone) has been spirited following an alleged psychotic break. In reality, his entire life is a construct on the world’s largest soundstage (the first manmade structure viewable from space since the Great Wall of China), his day-to-day dramas engineered and scripted by megalomaniac “creator” Christof (Ed Harris) and his team of thousands of performers, technicians, and craftspeople. Truman’s life is broadcast on television 24 hours a day; “The Truman Show” has run for 10,910 consecutive days as the picture opens, placing Truman on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday. Thirty years in which Truman, save a near miss or two, has failed to detect the artifice of every facet of his existence. That changes when the actor playing Truman’s dead father (Brian Delate) sneaks back onto the set as a homeless person, cluing Truman into the possibility that everything he believes is a lie designed to keep him placid and content for the entertainment of a planet of people who are themselves constructs manufactured for our enjoyment. The Truman Show is a Lacanian ouroboros, a Platonic cave parable wherein the audience is indicted as mindless participants in their own cycles of object and voyeur. We’re only ever looking at our shadows, but “who’s watching us as we’re watching?” is the key existential question of the Internet age.
Truman rejects fame and the attention it brings–not necessarily for heroic reasons, but because he wants what everyone wants at some point in their lives: to live “authentically.” The larger question of what constitutes authenticity is what makes Niccol’s films so sticky, year upon year, as his predictions seem less like wild flights of fancy and more like quaint observations of terrible things our reality has already surpassed. Consider how Truman tries to recreate the image of Lauren by jigsawing pieces of portraits he tears out of fashion magazines. On television, Lauren watches his attempt at onanistic necromancy with a look one could read as either sorrow or desire. Sorrow for her lost love? For her inability to save Truman from what she sees as his imprisonment and half-life? Sorrow that all that’s left for Truman in terms of “authenticity” is his creation of a totem of…her, with which he can daydream or to which he can masturbate? It’s impossible to truly know what she’s thinking at that moment. It’s not romantic to watch someone make a hair doll out of you, unless you perceive the act itself to be neither possessive nor pathetic and sexualized. McElhone plays another role similar to this in Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002): the dead wife of psychologist Chris Kelvin, who finds himself able to reconstitute her through the agency of an alien intelligence. Kelvin says, “I was haunted by the idea that I remembered her wrong.” I think Truman is, too. Christof takes this opportunity to play a flashback to Truman’s quick dalliance with Lauren on the show, so that viewers unsure of what’s happening might be clued into the emotional significance of his patchwork. That includes us, of course, although because we are observing the audience for “The Truman Show”, as they learn the backstory, we feel a sense of privileged spectatorship. Yet we’re not privileged–and the fact that we’re being flattered to believe otherwise suggests we are, in fact, in a subordinate role to the imaginary audience of an imaginary show. This leads us to wonder, then, what our role is in Truman’s journey of self-discovery. With its many rabbit holes and tributaries, the pleasure of The Truman Show‘s text becomes the unsolvable tangle of it.
As the show’s technology begins to break down in its thirtieth year–a light falls from the “sky,” a rainstorm isolates Truman for too long, a radio broadcast accidentally captures stage directions–Truman starts to challenge “reality.” He changes his routine, becomes erratic, catches the city’s workers struggling to stay ahead of him. He asks his wife why she speaks in advertising slogans while looking off into the middle distance. He confesses his wanderlust and disintegrating sense of self to his best friend, and Christof ventriloquizes Marlon’s every response from his suite on the artificial moon. At one point, he cues his musical director to swell the score–his musical director being Philip Glass, who composed much of the non-diegetic music heard on the soundtrack, including the powerful “Anthem – Part 1” from Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi. There’s really no separation in the picture between itself and the reality in which The Truman Show exists as an artifact. So is what we’re watching the product of Christof’s direction, or is it Weir’s direction? Is Weir simulating what a television director would do? (Weir, for what it’s worth, briefly considered casting himself as Christof.) There are certainly a few closeups I don’t think even a fake town seeded with thousands of cameras could capture. And what of the set of The Truman Show, which simultaneously reminds me of The Conversation (and its surveillance expert’s rigging of public spaces to capture a single moment) and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), with its stadium of camera rigs and gags? It’s all here: the commodification of privacy and the personal as spectacle; the ephemeral moment monumentalized as the monolithic infinite; and the inseparability of any act of art from politics. That the technology fails on the eve of a major milestone places it precisely at the paranoid nexus of its historical moment. That the “god” of this universe takes its failure as an opportunity to present himself as a saviour and deliverer, as opposed to a narcissist and jailer, hews close to the bone of why we keep electing fascists. I doubt there’s a cogent, precise summary of what The Truman Show is doing, but it’s fascinating.
On day 10,913, “The Truman Show” goes dark. Truman figures out where the spycams are planted (even if he hasn’t completely put together that he’s the subject of a television show), and effects an escape. His plan is to go directly towards his greatest fear–the water–because he’s figured out that whoever or whatever is engineering his life has implanted him with an irrational aversion to water specifically. If The Truman Show is to be read as an aspirational piece, Truman figuring out that everything he wants is beyond his fear is the most eloquent expression of that. To thwart his escape, Christof essentially tries to kill him. Once he realizes he may not be above the consequences of televising this act of murder to a large and committed global audience, he relents. Recent evidence suggests that Christof would’ve gotten away with it, but no matter: This leads to Truman sailing his ship to the edge of the world, puncturing it with his hull, and then finding stairs that lead to an exit. He has a conversation with God/Christoff on the border of his reality and rejects the invitation to return to the safety of his routine amongst people paid to counsel him, love him, hire and fire him, fuck him, and lie to him constantly as a matter of habit and work. I think that’s the crux of Truman’s distaste: not any idealization of authenticity in others, but how it’s actually preferable to be among people whose job isn’t to know who you are enough to care to manipulate a response. The bargain of civilization is to live in close proximity to strangers without imposing the complexity of your interior life on others and to expect the same in return. Truman chooses to be unknown to everyone he meets. Weir ends the movie here, although the original screenplay goes on long enough for Truman to see a gift shop and a guided tour of his reality. Me, I hope he doesn’t look for Lauren, who, after all, sees him as a victim and a righteous cause. I hope he manages to disappear into a crowd without any notion of who he is. I hope he travels to Fiji and meets whomever he’s meant to at the edge of the world–and that he doesn’t have to pretend to be something for them, the same way they don’t have to pretend to be something for him.
THE 4K UHD DISC
by Bill Chambers Paramount brings The Truman Show to 4K disc in a casually breathtaking 1.85:1, 2160p presentation. The studio can be hit or miss with its UHD titles, owing to an on-again/off-again love affair with digital video noise-reduction, but this one is strictly “hit.” Fine freckles of film grain dance over the image, an improvement on the pitiful 2008 Blu-ray (included for posterity) in every way. The wider colour gamut, for example, injects newfound vibrance into the cornflower-blue skies, Meryl’s Maybelline lips, and the impeccably manicured lawns; while they were never wanting for saturation, here they gain depth. Closeup detail is often staggering: I don’t think I’ve ever been this conscious of Laura Linney’s dimples, or Ed Harris’s for that matter. The HDR10-compatible Dolby Vision grade sweetens the highlights and lends a sunny insistence to Seahaven’s resort-like exteriors, while the black levels are steep without contradicting the movie’s (intentional) televisual brightness. Only once, perhaps, does HDR foil narrative intent: During a shot of Truman in the final scene, beginning at 01:34:23, the black void behind him suddenly becomes a nubby painted wall that’s reflecting more light than it’s absorbing. My guess is this will vary with certain displays–my edge-lit Sony LCD TV just doesn’t deliver the gutter blacks of an OLED and tends to overexpose the shadows a little, betraying the seams concealed therein. (Plus, I’m viewing it in HDR10.) Incidentally, an A/B comparison reveals the 15-year-old Blu-ray to have been horizontally stretched. It’s also garish to a fault, rife with edge-enhancement, and cropped on the left and right sides of the frame; the transfer looks so much like a DVD upconvert, in retrospect, that it’s a miracle these HiDef formats weren’t received with more skepticism at the time. Anyway, The Truman Show in 4K UHD isn’t merely an upgrade, it’s a restoration.
Downmixed to 7.1 Dolby TrueHD, at least, the Dolby Atmos soundtrack renders a modestly enveloping mix with clarity and authority. The climax hints at the nautical thunder of Peter Weir’s next film (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) without overstating the power of a controlled storm in an artificial lagoon, and the Philip Glass selections sound especially dynamic. While there are no extras on the 4K platter, the Blu-ray offers some retrospective featurettes from 2006, starting with the two-part “How’s It Going to End?: The Making of The Truman Show” (41 mins., SD). Therein, an impressively large sampling of the cast and crew–minus star Jim Carrey and writer Andrew Niccol–reflect on the movie’s prescience (“Unfortunately, it kind of rang true,” says Harris), which began with a broody sci-fi script set in New York that Weir reshaped into something less conspicuously dystopian. (He felt it was important to suggest the therapeutic value of watching Truman 24/7.) I should clarify that Carrey appears in junket-sourced interviews, but he’s performing and living up to his persona in a way he probably wouldn’t have bothered doing eight years later. Weir and Carrey’s co-stars have nothing but praise for him nearly a decade on, with Linney calling him “a geyser of talent.” We learn the delays imposed by Carrey’s busy schedule resulted in 16 drafts of a screenplay that Weir says became “watertight,” and also inspired Weir to craft a wildly detailed character history for Christof that he recaps for us. (Noah Emmerich offers elaborate insights into Louis as well.) This is a good piece that eventually delves into the logistics of filming on location in Seaside, Florida, a planned community whose Stepford vibe creeped almost everybody out. Unmentioned, because it was blissfully irrelevant at the time, is that Truman’s house is the home of the Gaetzes, as in fuckhead congressman Matt Gaetz.
“Faux Finishing: The Visual Effects of The Truman Show” (13 mins., SD) spotlights the work of VFX supervisors Craig Barron and Michael McAllister, who helped design hyperrealistic environments that were believably synthetic. The digital mattes used to expand the world of Seahaven–building codes prevented production designer Dennis Gassner from erecting any tallish structures–might go unappreciated in the age of Adobe Generative Fill, but they’re incredible, seamless illusions that hold up today. Apropos of nothing, I like that Gassner refers to architect Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes inspired the outer shell of “The Truman Show”‘s soundstage, as “Bucky.” A 13-minute block of deleted scenes, four in total, features a lengthy backstage meeting between Christof and the actors in which we discover that Hannah’s/Meryl’s confrontation with Truman has left her in a neck brace. (Hilariously, Truman’s boss (Peter Krause) applauds when Christof informs them an on-air conception will still take place despite Meryl’s impending departure.) Christof grimly announces the next few weeks are crucial to securing a second channel devoted to chronicling Truman’s offspring, prompting a bitter Louis/Marlon to ask–in a nice bit of pushback–whether they’ll revert to a single channel when Truman dies. Christof cuts the meeting short. The concentrated darkness of this sequence would likely have torpedoed The Truman Show‘s box office, though I’ll mentally insert it during future viewings. Rounding out the platter: an old-fashioned photo gallery, two TV spots for The Truman Show, the film’s theatrical trailer, and its teaser trailer–the latter ending with Carrey singing “Trumania”‘s fantastic national anthem. U.S. copies additionally come with a digital code.
103 mins.; PG-13; UHD: 1.85:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10), BD: 1.78:1 (1080p/MPEG-4); UHD: English Dolby Atmos (7.1 TrueHD core), French DD 5.1, German DD 5.1, Japanese DD 5.1, BD: English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; UHD: English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese; BD: English, English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese subtitles; BD-66 + BD-50; Region-free; Paramount
