The real lesson of The Truman Show
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Everyone watching this movie will relate to the movie’s plot as it speaks to the existential questions that arise in every human. We can imagine the reality tv boss as God. Our own experience of thrownness feels like God is playing with us just as the reality tv boss is playing with Truman.
In the ending sequence, I wept when the tiny boat reaches the end of horizon and hits the blue sky wall. The utter devastation Truman experiences when he realizes he has been played all his life.
I was deeply impacted by this movie.
The thing I absolutely love about the end is that what happens after is completely left open. Did he find peace or was it disappointment at the horrors of what was outside the dome? We will never know, it is just something you have to wonder and accept. It is not for us to know, it is but the feeling a dream you can never grasp like the clouds behind a distant mountain.
It is funny looking back at media from that era and seeing how there was this idea that things were already too hectic. Like in the early 90's Bart Simpson referring to the non-stop fast times they lived in.
Vaguely related but another great one was the small doco "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age" filmed in 1985, they are talking about how they cannot keep up with the pace of BBS boards. If only they knew what was coming. Also of note is this is one of the earliest recorded sightings of Richard Stallman, his message was very on point even then.
I enjoy dumb movies toe but, like you, I prefer him in the "not totally dumb" movies.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie I like a lot too.
That doesn't change the fact he has some very deep internal issues/fears that Scientology has managed to hook on very tight and kept their grip so effectively. It fucked up his marriages and is a stain on his brand/legacy that literally everybody knows about but respectfully act like they don't see it. Almost a bit like Truman show :)
The director of Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) actually cast Sandler in a dramatic role a couple of years later (Punch-Drunk Love) that was also received very well. Might be worth checking out if you liked Magnolia (I loved that movie).
Btw, Jim Carrey has never won an Academy Award, and neither has The Truman Show, which is quite a shame.
Adam Sandler! That goofy idiot that plays in low-budget comedies that won't even make you laugh once!
Someone on Reddit explained that Sandler is a true genius because he doesn't work too hard, does "fun" low-stress movies, and takes his friends along to "assist" in beautiful tropical locations. All probably as a tax write off.
Brilliant.
Score of 7.5 on IMDB is not too shabby! https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272338/
Sure, I know I will groan at how dumb various things are, but that's part of the expectation.
Carey is similar but less so. His span is wider. That hits both ways, Carey at his best have more brilliant performances than Sandler, but it also means that you can be in the mood for Carey, but not Mask and Ace Ventura stupidly over-expressive Carey, for example, so it's harder to just semi-randomly pick one of his movies based on a mood.
(That movie is absolutely great, but it is a hard watch. I don't regret watching it, but I would never watch it again).
Also not a fan of his variety of slap-stick & such, he's good at it but it just isn't something that works for me from other performers either, but give him a slightly more dramatic role where he isn't just being Jim Carrey Jim-Carrey-ing like Jim Carrey, and you can see he has a talent.
(not that I object to his other stuff existing – different strokes for different folks!)
I think Carrey is seriously underrated as an actor.
I guess no need to see that movie now.
Thanks for that.
If this was a community based on the movie I'd say all is fair, but since it isn't I don't think it is fair to dismiss the concern just because the movie is old.
Opinions vary: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05/as-regards-spo...
When I first saw The Matrix I said to myself, they stole all the ideas in this film from Dark City.
Here is Dark City’s director Alex Proyas: “Alex Proyas on: The Matrix copying Dark City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytxjsetVIRM
And this is a juxtaposition of some scenes with background music: “The Matrix vs. Dark City.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moW17YHl6B8
This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:
> It was a very groovy movie, you see?
> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?
Always upvote Dark City mentioning :)
This comment completely ignores the ending where is clear that EVERYBODY watching him is happy, nay, ecstatic, that he escaped. It's part of the reason why the ending is so uplifting. It turns out that his fandom across the globe with their How Does It End? t-shirts really were rooting for him all along, just like us in the audience.
I take the final shot (two guys looking at the now-dead channel and saying "I wonder what else is on") as a sign that the audience will go back to their lives without even questioning what they just saw, with Truman being just another sacrifice in the altar of the TV gods.
Thanks for totally spoiling it for me :(...
So the future of The Truman Show was playing out in Japan, in real time, at right around the same time.
So much Philp K Dick has turned up in movies.
I am shamefully behind on the PKD library...
> "I had many reservations, and the biggest one was the wild card of this one human being who's being dropped into this situation that is all fake and manufactured," Marsden says. "Is this even something that is ethically right to do, to play with someone's human experience over the course of three weeks of their life?"
> From the beginning, Marsden told show creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (who also worked on The Office) that he didn't want to participate in a prank show. But they assured him that Jury Duty wouldn't be cruel or mean-spirited. Instead, Marsden says, the intention was to create a "hero's journey" for Gladden.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173271968/jury-duty-james-ma...
It was definitely real.
They picked a good one - I think he “acted” better than the actors in terms of facial expressions, reactions and general gravitas.
They had to pick someone smart but not cynical/sceptical , not crazy in any way, with a personality, but will behave etc, and who had some leadership skills.
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?"
I've actually used the movie when arguing about religion, because it makes for an interesting parallel. Christof plays the role of a mostly benevolent, power limited God.
And he does his best (of course not perfect) attempt to give Truman a good life. And Truman at the start seems quite happy and positive, until things start falling apart because Christof isn't powerful enough to keep up the illusion.
It's very interesting to me that people give the Christian god a pass for doing a worse job than Christof does in the movie.
"God has nothing to do with good or bad in our life. When it made us in his image, it means he gave us the opportunity to know what is good/bad and the liberty to choose between it. That's the pure definition of freedom. If he chooses everything for us, we're not free. "
Truman wasn't free until he choose to do something "bad" and left.
I am curious now: how do you define "Christian"? That's truly a bizarre definition if it admits sects like that.
For the record, the conventional definition of a Christian is someone who believes in the Holy Trinity, one God in three persons, and has been baptized with water and that formula.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism
How do you define "Christian"?
There are a number of sects, with significant numbers and influence, who call on the name of Jesus (in a "Lord, Lord" way) and they "self-identify" as Christian, and yet they do not share a Christian belief as commonly understood by Christians.
Christians have always defined our belief in a particular way. It's fine if sects wish to disbelieve in the Trinity or not use water Baptism, but then they cease to be members of the Church by any stretch of the imagination.
These sects include henotheists such as LDS, Arians such as Jehovah's Witnesses, and non-Trinitarians such as Oneness Pentecostals. They all believe themselves to be Christians, but have excluded themselves by definition.
These questions don't make sense. I am not claiming to be a believer etc., but if God exists then eventually you end up with your maker, right? So given an eternity of whatever is after this life, what does experiencing something bad or evil even matter then.
The existence of God implies a number of things about human nature and existence, and that's regardless of whether one accepts or rejects God. Per my understanding, humanity defines itself by defining what is not- what we say is evil or immoral or wrong, etc. I think the problem is that religion (historically) has been confounded by politics.
Tbh I don't think humans can do religion correctly, so society as a whole should be secular.
Not necessarily. As Luke 18:25 notes, "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".
"Better to be poor than a fat man in the eye of a needle."
For some reason, as a society, we tend to prefer parents who lovingly grant their children freedom to make mistakes, and present them with appropriate consequences after the fact. Growth and authentic love only come from a situation where we have the freedom to reject those values. A truly benevolent, omnipotent God would not force the people he created to obey him (i.e. to do good, because God is love), he would allow them the freedom to choose good, which necessarily grants them the freedom to choose the opposite.
Parents are just humans and are just at the mercy of the world. Unlike God. God made the rules and could have created a completely different world which doesn’t have the limitations that this one has. Meanwhile parents have to work with what they were given.
This is an assumption you are making that many (most?) religions do not.
We're really only talking about the Abrahamic faiths here, which are the ones making claims about God being omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent.
Any limitation to God's abilities implies that God is not all-powerful. If it is the case that this universe of sin and decay and the literal hail Mary of self-sacrifice on the cross with the result, as described in the book of Revelations, that the vast majority of humans who have ever lived will still burn in Hell for eternity is really the best God can do, then God cannot be all powerful. If God is all powerful then everything is arbitrary to Him. He chooses to allow evil. He chooses not to forgive sin. He chooses a pyrrhic victory at the end of time where evil still mostly wins.
Incompetent, yes. Malicious, certainly. To quote George Carlin, this is not work that belongs on the resume of a Supreme Being. All powerful? Obviously not.
Other religions don't have this problem. The gods of many other religions are limited in their capabilities and often exist within the framework of a cycle that allows constant redemption and renewal through reincarnation. In many ways, the cosmos itself is the highest power, and the gods are just what sits above humanity, but it's all still a part of the same flawed yet transcendental machine. There's always hope. With the Abrahamic faiths, there is only always existential dread. God by default will cast you into perdition, your sins are absolute and immutable, and if you fuck up the one life you have there are no second chances.
> > Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then from whence comes evil?
Because that’s the premise of the problem statement!
> This is an assumption you are making that many (most?) religions do not.
And?
For some reason you decided to take this up with someone who was responding to a problem statement which had already been established; the parameters were set.
I don’t know why you seem to be taking offense to the part about how this is a “religious problem”. No, that doesn’t mean that all religions share this supposed problem. Rebirth/reincarnation is relevant to Hinduism but not all religions.
And a glib response about how “not all religions” make these assumptions is also a useless starting point. (Not that I care to discuss this with anyone since it’s not my pet cause.) My first thought was that you might be alluding to something like Buddhism or some other very non-Christian religion. But I see in some other comments that you mention “other Christian sects”. Okay, yeah, sure. That makes things really simple to respond to: Hey, not all religions share these assumptions! (But I’m not gonna tell you where I’m coming from, either.)
If parents were unlimited in their abilities, granting children freedom to make mistakes would be completely unnecessary.
If anything can happen inside this incomprehensible plan, what is different from there being no plan? If you don't believe anything concrete about the plan, if there is nothing that is impossible because it would be against the plan, then isn't everything just as it would be if there was no plan and no god?
One issue is that it lets go of benevolence. Which works but raises the question of why we'd want to worship such an entity, and what does morality even mean anymore if it's supposedly based on an entity whose reasoning is inscrutable.
There's also that power removes excuses. Eg, Christof resorts to methods like "killing" Truman's father because it's all he can do to maintain the illusion. But if Christof had a whole planet to work with that'd instantly stop being a morally grey thing and just be plain evil. An actual god effectively has no excuses, because there are no limits forcing any kind of compromise.
There are many episodes in my life that were horribly difficult while I was going through them, but later on, I see how they have changed the course of my life and have benefited me deeply, in a way I couldn't foresee while going through the struggle.
The "problem of evil" also assumes that a world filled with automatons with no choice to do anything except submit to God's will is somehow superior to a world where anyone can choose to follow the Way of Life while surrounded by those who either haven't chosen yet, or have made the choice not to walk that path.
Eg, sawing somebody's leg off without anesthesia was the best we had before anesthetics. Today it'd be outright barbaric outside of extenuating circumstances like anesthetics being unavailable in some sort of emergency.
Whenever we get to the point where we can fully and painlessly fix up somebody's leg by using some sort of scifi device, then cutting it off even with modern anesthetics will become morally unacceptable as well.
The more ability, the less justifiable suffering becomes.
Your statement "Suffering is anathema..." is Enlightenment thinking that has had a devastating effect on the physical and mental health of the cultures that have adopted it.
Resilience is only necessary if there's some purpose to it.
> Soldiers are trained into this mindset and can accomplish much more as a result. Athletes train this way as well.
Right, as a means to an end, for lack of a better solution. If we could accomplish those goals without suffering, we would. Suffering is a last resort, not good in itself. It's a compromise. An all-powerful entity doesn't need any, thus loses any justification to resort to it.
For example, if everything was known and easy, wouldn't we be completely bored? Is boredom not also suffering?
For instance, transhumanism. No, we don't need to create a religion, but set a good chunk of facts and laws to govern ourselves. The American and French revolutions were a good step on that against the Old Regime around the mentioned Neolithic.
Certainly a god could come up with a plan that didn't require multiple instances of genocide and children dying of incurable diseases.
It's unecessarily overintelectualized and abstracted problem.
It's way better to truly consider way simpler and viscerally real one "Why do babies get terminal cancer?"
If you honestly approach it with undamaged humanist morality and won't abandon it before reaching the conclusion you'll leave any notion of benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God behind.
When this movie premiered it felt like an epiphany, a revelation, but almost everyone I knew hated it. Jim Carrey fans didn't like because it wasn't slapstick enough. High brown movies fans didn't like because it had Jim Carrey on it.
But it became one of my dearest "cult" movies. There is so much on it: mass manipulation, lies, religion, politics, the whole stupidity of reality TV, the fake happiness of consumerism, the lack of any authenticity in mass media, ...
I hope it doesn't become like Monty Python's "The Holly Grail": a brilliant movie that gets reduced to a collection of quotations and clichés.
Many possibilities, but none of them is a Monty Python movie. ;-)
I'm by no means a movie buff but I thought this was kind of obvious.
No idea why anyone would watch that but I'm sure I'm the weirdo.
The Attention Economy accidentally came into being taking advantage of the inequality above without anyone knowing about the inequality itself.
People have a need for attention. Advertisers have a need for attention for their products. The platforms had a need for cash to keep all their freebies running (search, chat, video, social, email, streaming etc) and make sense/filter down exploding Information the internet produced.
These 3 needs accidentally came together, with no one having any clue about Goldharbers inequality and we get the absurdity that currently exists.
The original problem being solved - how to handle the info explosion was forgotten. Everyone got side tracked into how to capture attention. And then they got rich.
The question today is knowing much more abt the inequality and still facing the ever increasing Info overload problem, how do we build better less exploitative systems?
Previously, I didn't know any of my friends (or their friends) flew private jets or stayed in $1000/night resorts regularly. Someone in town might have a nicer house or nicer car, but I didn't see them (or their kids) flaunting or humblebragging on social media about where they did spend their money.
Unironically it's probably much worse with kids because they don't have the social mores & filter to understand what they shouldn't be posting.
There's a lot of "stealth wealth" that has lost it's stealth out there due to this.
Its a black hole from which there is no escape. The only mechanism accepted by society is monetary profit and there is no way a less exploitative system will be more profitable.
Works every time!
Jed McKenna’s interpretation of the movie :
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2F...