The Truman Show

Author's Note:  This is my response to The Truman Show.  I focused on what I felt the movie was trying to say to us, and who Truman is as a character.  I also talk about why television plays a role in our daily lives, and how that also relates to the movie.  

Television.  A system that we all rarely go a day without using.  We may try to deny  it, but television is truly our guilty pleasure.  Everyone has something, whether it be nail-biting soaps like Days of Our Lives, the ridiculous antics of Jersey Shore,  or just a good laugh from How I Met Your Mother.  We feel better about ourselves knowing that maybe, just maybe, we aren't alone in the situations we deal with.  Sometimes it can be refreshing to find some common interest in these shows, but if we forget what we need to be doing, we will wind up becoming as real as a created character on TV.

There is never an exact answer as to why we do the things that we do, or why things happen to us.  Is it just because that is the way the dice fell, or is there some greater force playing a role? In the movie The Truman Show,  Truman attempts to answer these questions for himself.  On the outside, Truman is just another normal human being, but the reality is much bigger than he had ever known.  Throughout his life, he has dealt with situations that most other people go through.  Subsequently, an entire world is watching his every move, enthralled in those situations.  Before he was born, Truman had been cast as the star of his own show without his knowledge, with the creator of the show controlling his every move.  Like any other show, it attracts the attention of those who can relate to what he goes through, making it so popular, and continues to keep Truman away from where he should be. 

It is one thing to watch actors do their thing on a show, but it is a completely different circumstance when the actor isn't really an actor at all.  The creator has developed a world where nothing is concrete, nothing is real.  As he uncovers this sliver of understanding, Truman begins to question just what he is doing there.  He dreams of vacationing away, travelling to search for what he so desperately needs, but is held back by what put him there in the first place.  All his life, he has lived by the same rules, the same way of life, and as he breaks this barrier, he also starts to break the world around him.

We hold on to what we know because the unknown poses as a risk.  People don't watch their television shows because it is some kind of habit; it is because it is what is known.  Television exists to pull out some sort of seed of Truth amidst the landscape of fiction.  It is the same for this movie.   The television show creator builds this set from scratch, as the Creator did.  He develops Truman's life before him, and watches over, monitoring his every move, like He does.  Truman was created solely for this purpose, like Jesus was created to save us all.    At the end of the film, Truman sails across the sea and finds the end of the set, the end of his world.  At this point, stairs lead up to a door.  As Truman ascends the stairs, he is finally letting go of his world, realizing that this is where his journey ends.  The movie is symbolically saying that there is much more than what meets the eye, and if we can't see that, we won't be able to do what we need to do. 

When the television is turned on, it takes us away, if only for a moment.  Sometimes all it takes is a little refresher from our shows to help us realize that there is hope.  We watch Snooki from Jersey Shore because it is funny to watch others do stupid things.  We watch Barney Stinson from  How I Met Your Mother because his jokes keep us laughing.  We watch to find understanding.  This is healthy now and then to just relax, but it is when we click the television off that we can truly understand that there is a bigger card to play.