“What else is on?”

“Yeah, let see what else is on.”

“Where’s the TV guide?”

The Truman Show (1998)

While Rear Window shows us the dynamics of the voyeuristic gaze in relation to private space and reality, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) expands the media-intervened house (9.9) to the totality of an individual’s social reality. Truman Burbank is an ordinary inhabitant of the island town of Seahaven who unknowingly is the center of an enormous reality show that has spanned his entire life, from birth to present-day. However, after a production spotlight falls in front of his house, Truman begins to suspect that his reality is not what it seems. As he connects the dots, he realizes that everything revolves around him and that no matter how much he wants to, he can’t get out of Seahaven by bus or plane, so he decides to flee in a small boat that takes him to the wall of the studio where the show takes place. After going through a storm caused by the show’s producers, Truman reaches the horizon which is actually the boundary of his world. Like Westworld (6.17), The Truman Show is a re-elaboration of the Gnostic myth of the escape from a false to a true reality. Christof, the creator of the show, acts as a demiurge who controls each and every aspect of Truman’s reality, be it the weather, the traffic or the words of each of the actors. There’s also an agent of liberation—which in many forms of Gnosticism is Sophia (wisdom)—in the character of Sylvia, a romantic interest of Truman who in addition to being an actress in the show wants Truman to find out about the true nature of his reality (6.4, 6.17). Sylvia’s pleas to convince Truman that the world is not what it seems (it’s a set, everyone is watching you!), are no different from Howard Beale’s appeals (9.3) for us to return to reality.

On the other hand, in The Truman Show reality TV—the map of the Empire—has completely swallowed the territory. Seen in this way, the television show that presents Truman’s life is a hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense the term, but to achieve this gigantic illusion the television studio where the show takes place must be a completely separate reality, an enormous demiurgic bubble that brings the idea of the paradeisos, the walled garden, to the media sphere: a park where Truman becomes the prey of a new form of media hunting.

Now, if Truman is trapped in a demiurgic bubble/paradeisos, the viewers of his show are not far behind. As soon as Truman escapes through a door on the studio’s horizon and the broadcast ends, two viewers exchange the words of the epigraph. A terrible place within a terrible place.