The Jim Carrey vehicle The Truman Show was not only a smash hit when it first hit theaters Summer of 1998, but in ensuing years has been lauded as prophetically anticipating the eminent rise of Reality Television (Survivor debuted in 2000), the post-9/11 surveillance state, and the mass-end of privacy in the digital age.
The film stars Carrey in his first ever dramatic role as Truman Brubank, an otherwise unremarkable small-town insurance agent, who slowly starts to realize that he is not just metaphorically trapped in a ho-hum middle-class existence, but literally trapped inside a massive sound stage, where he is the unwitting star of a mega-popular TV program that broadcasts his life 24/7, and where everyone around him is a paid-actor actively manipulating his life for ratings.
The film feels especially prescient of our Social Media era, wherein we are all under pressure to continuously broadcast even the most mundane details of our lives for the broader public’s consumption, where the distinction between a so-called “authentic” human reaction-shot and a staged reenactment performed for “clout” has been repeatedly blurred into meaninglessness, and an algorithm aggressively influences and curates our responses to maximize viewer-engagement. We are all in the Truman Show now; perhaps we always have been.
The film has also been lauded by academics as an excellent pop-cultural representation of Michel Foucault’s 1975 concept of the Panopticon (wherein modern life is conceptualized as a massive prison wherein all the prisoners are watching each other–and therefore regulating each other–simultaneously), as well as Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation (wherein modern media is conceptualized as an endless series of signs merely reflecting and representing each other, with no relationship to any original reality whatsoever—that is, we have been living in an economy of AI-generated art decades before AI-art was even invented).
Far be it from me to add to the discourse of a film that has been obsessively dissected by fans and academics alike for over a quarter-century now (we certainly find it uncontroversial to agree that the rise of social media and reality TV have overall been net-negatives for society), save to add this one little wrinkle: per the theology of virtually every major religious system, we really are all literally being watched constantly, and our lives actively manipulated by unseen divine intercession. Within LDS doctrine in particular, “Before God, angels, and these witnesses” is the language of our holiest Temple rituals, with the implication that even when we are not making these covenants, we are nonetheless still being observed by these same divine actors.
This religious perspective is of course nothing new to Truman Show discourse; the show’s producer after all (as played ably by Ed Harris) is named, rather on-the-nose, Christoff. An argument could certainly be made that the film is not just a clarion call to reject the forms of media manipulation that seek to contain and control us, but the religious ones as well; certainly the rousing final scene wherein Truman finally finds the outer wall of the sound-stage and rejects the plea of his creator—speaking God-like from the skies—to stay there safe with him, can be read as a form of self-liberation from the bonds of religion.
Yet it can also just as easily be interpreted as the opposite: Christoff isn’t just a Christ analogue, but literally an Off-Christ, a simulacrum and bad-imitation of the real thing, trying to prevent humanity from ever growing or advancing or becoming exalted. The Plan of Lucifer (the original Off-Christ), you will recall, was to ensure that “all will be saved”–not exalted, merely saved–by ensuring that no one will ever fall to begin with. This was an approach that required the violation of all our sacred free agency, of our ability to ever seek beyond our limits, to keep us perpetually safe and stultified and trapped and living a lie every bit as egregious as Truman’s (perhaps this is why Satan is called the Father of all Lies). Lucifer would of necessity be given all the glory, because we would all be incapable of achieving any sort of glory ourselves. Christoff similarly seeks to keep Truman safe in his compound, but his motivation is solely to goose ratings, for his own glory, on his own terms, and all at the cost of Truman’s personal agency.
It is significant, then, that Truman rejects the temptations of the Off-Christ in a manner similar to the Real One. Jesus Christ himself, you will also recall, was tempted in the desert to bow down and worship the Off-Christ, and that if he did so, he would be made the ruler of nations—that is, he would become the main character of human history. This site has addressed before Main Character Syndrome, the tendency of, just, so many people to behave as though they are the main character of reality, with catastrophic and oppressive results for the rest of us (everything from being rude to customer service workers and cutting folks off in traffic, to refusing to do the bare minimum to prevent the spread of a pandemic that has killed literal millions).
Both Christ and Truman in their moments of temptation consciously refuse to become the main-character of reality–which paradoxically made them the greatest main characters of all. Christ rejects the throne of the earth to instead become the Only Begotten of the Father, sitting on the throne of the entire Universe, the Savior of the World; and as for Truman, though there was thankfully no sequel to inform us what happened to him once he left the studio, I think we can all safely assume that he became a much more massive celebrity outside the soundstage than he ever was inside it. Yet even if his celebrity swiftly faded after his rousing exit, he became something even greater: a free man. Only the abased are exalted, only the meek are raised up, and only those who walk away from the vanities of this world will inherit all things.
In any case, whichever way we choose, I think one thing remains true: just as the entire TV-watching public was cheering on Truman to free himself in the film’s finale, so too do I suspect that all these celestial hosts are watching us and cheering us on.