All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
— William Shakespeare, AS YOU LIKE IT
Imagine growing up with a best friend, only to discover that your parents had secretly been paying him to spend time with you. Would that make your entire friendship a lie, or could something genuine have developed along the way? For Truman Burbank, the situation is several thousand times worse. Adopted as an infant by a corporation, Truman has spent his entire life surrounded by people paid to be his friends, his family, and even his wife.
The movie seems to anticipate that reaction, and its first few minutes push back against it. Before we see a single morning in Seahaven, the people around Truman are on camera describing their jobs. Christof acknowledges that Truman's world may be counterfeit, but insists there's nothing fake about Truman himself. There are no scripts or cue cards, and if it isn't always Shakespeare, it's a life. Meryl says there's no difference between her private life and her public one. The show is a lifestyle, a noble one, a truly blessed life. It's a sales pitch, obviously, and I still caught myself half-believing it. Part of the reason is that I'm not convinced a paycheck necessarily spoils a relationship. There's a crude saying that you can always learn to love a rich woman, and plenty of marriages have started on less romantic terms than that. Friendships begin at work all the time, too, and nobody asks whether the friend would have shown up without the salary. For all I know, the relationships on Truman's show were less transactional than a lot of the ones people have in real life. The difference is that everybody else on the show got to read the terms.
If any relationship in the movie can answer that question, it's Marlon's. Truman, convinced the whole world revolves around him, sits down with his oldest friend and asks whether he's losing his mind. Marlon's answer is the warmest scene in the film. He has been Truman's best friend since they were seven. They got through school cheating off each other's test papers, which he remembers as a comfort, since they were right or wrong together. He stayed up all night in Truman's tent so Truman could play North Pole, and he got pneumonia for it. Truman remembers that Marlon was out of school for a month. Truman is the closest thing he ever had to a brother, and he would gladly step in front of traffic for him. Meanwhile Christof is in his ear, feeding him the words. Christof says "walk," and Marlon, repeating the line, slightly flubs it into "step." The line about never lying to Truman goes through the same relay: Christof says it first, and Marlon echoes it with a hesitation. Seconds later he assures Truman that he isn't in on anything, because there is no "it." After two minutes of sounding sincere, he delivers the most dishonest sentence in the movie. What I can't get past is the tent. If Marlon has been in Truman's life since they were seven, someone decided that for him as a child, and he still sat up all night and got sick for his friend. The circumstances were manufactured, but the hours weren't. I made a version of this argument about Henry, the chauffeur in BLANK CHECK, who is on the payroll and is still one of the few people who seems to care what happens to Preston. The difference is that Preston knows what he's paying for. The question with Marlon isn't whether he's lying to Truman. It's whether he's lying about everything.
Meryl is where my argument runs into trouble. With Marlon, you can wonder whether the person is leaking through the job. With Meryl, it's the job leaking through the person. One of the first things we see her do is show Truman a Chef's Pal she got free at the checkout, which she pitches like an infomercial: dicer, grater, peeler, all in one. Later, when Truman studies their wedding album with a magnifying glass, he finds his bride with her fingers crossed behind her back. By the time he's cornered her, he's asking why she wants a baby with a man she can't stand, and she answers by offering him Mococoa, natural cocoa beans from Mt. Nicaragua, no artificial sweeteners. When he asks if she's part of this, she tells him he's scaring her. Soon Truman is threatening her with a kitchen utensil, asking, "Dice me, slice me or peel me?" Then she begs someone off camera to do something, and when help arrives she complains, "How can anyone expect me to carry on under these conditions? It's unprofessional!" Her fear is real, but it's difficult to find much genuine affection underneath it. The possibility of a baby makes the arrangement even uglier. Christof announces his determination to stage "TV's first on-air conception," as though bringing another human being into this world were simply a programming decision. Sylvia offers the other side of the arrangement. Christof refers to her as a former member of the cast, and when Truman first speaks to her, she says she isn't allowed to talk to him. Then she goes out with him anyway, tells him everybody is pretending, and gets written out with a story about schizophrenia and a move to Fiji. Both women were cast. One risked her job to reach him, and the other hid behind hers.
Marlon and Meryl at least get speeches. Most of Seahaven has to make do with a greeting. Christof says it takes the population of an entire country to keep the show running, and the question I kept asking is why anyone would stay for thirty years. If I were an actor who hated Truman, I don't think I could swallow it for a paycheck. Surely some of the people who've spent decades on that set have grown fond of him, even if others are simply earning a living. The town plays like a 1950s sitcom, cheerful and conformist, with neighbors so pleasant that you don't notice they're a perimeter until Truman steps out of line. A businessman and a woman with a dog force his supposedly dead father onto a bus. Traffic blocks every turn he tries. When he disappears, the townspeople organize a search, and even the Dalmatian joins in, snarling as they look for him. The commitment has a skill ceiling, though. When Truman sails off, the production wants another boat out there and discovers that its ferry crew can't sail. They're actors. Kirk, the man who played Truman's father, raises another question. Christof says Kirk was disappointed when he read the synopsis, and after he broke back onto the set, the production decided to write him into the show again, with amnesia to explain twenty-two missing years. Whether Kirk missed Truman or merely missed his job, the result was the same. The control room applauded the reunion.
Truman is the only person in the cast who doesn't know he has an audience, and Weir builds Carrey's performance around that. The rubber-faced bits survive, but they've become Truman's habits: a finger to his pulse for "Vital signs are good," a spacesuit drawn on the bathroom mirror to proclaim the planet Trumania, a panicked "Somebody help me! I'm being spontaneous!" He's a natural entertainer who doesn't know he's entertaining anyone. When the comedy stops, so does he. His last exchange with Christof, "Then who am I?", is nearly motionless. His later dramatic turns in MAN ON THE MOON and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND are hard to imagine without this one. Everyone around him has the opposite job, playing a person and an employee at the same time. Noah Emmerich has the hardest assignment, since Marlon must convince Truman he's a friend while leaving us uncertain how much of the affection is sincere. Ed Harris makes Christof frightening by making him gentle. The man who says "Cue the sun" also comforts Truman like a child. Philip Baker Hall, my favorite of the bunch, plays the studio executive who finally demands that Christof cease transmission. Even his objection is a broadcast problem: "He can't die on television!" Christof's answer is "He was born on television."
Asked why Truman never came close to discovering the true nature of his world, Christof gives what amounts to the thesis of the movie: "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." That goes for the audience, too. The film asks us to buy into two fictional worlds. One is Seahaven, with its painted sky, its 5,000 cameras, and a studio large enough to be seen from space. The other is the society that made Seahaven possible, where a corporation can adopt a child and 1.7 billion people watch his birth. The logistics make my head spin if I think about them, so I try not to, and the movie counts on that. What interests me more is how the premise differs from THE MATRIX, which arrived less than a year later and took a similar idea somewhere colder. In THE MATRIX, the world its inhabitants experience doesn't physically exist as they perceive it. In Seahaven, everything is real, even the fake parts. The sea is real water, the sky is a real wall, and the people are real people. Truman's surroundings and relationships all exist. It's his understanding of them that has been manipulated. That puts him closer to the rest of us than any simulation story does, because most of us were handed an account of the world early on, and nobody ever walked us out to the edges to check.
The early draft shows how differently this could have gone. Andrew Niccol's Truman is thirty-four, thinning on top and soft around the middle, and the first time we see him as an adult, he's crying in his car in Queens. A few minutes later he empties a miniature bottle of Jack Daniels into his coffee. The ending is equally bleak. Truman confronts Christof on the roof of the enormous studio, screaming, "Something was real! Something had to be real!" He escapes, finds Sylvia, and has a daughter, but the show goes on without him as ZOE: "Total Record of a Human Life," with Marlon playing the new baby's father. Truman turns off the television. Weir keeps the desperation but gives us a man his own viewers call kind, maybe too kind. I think that's the right trade. A film asking whether the people around Truman could love him is more persuasive when we can understand why they might.
Surveillance gets most of the credit for this film's prescience, but the viewers are the better prediction. They aren't villains. Christof says many of them leave Truman on all night for comfort, and the movie shows them in bars and on sofas, tuning in for his first step and that stolen kiss, attached to a man who has never met them. BIG BROTHER premiered in the Netherlands the next year, and a whole economy now runs on strangers who feel they know someone they have never spoken to. Someone in the control room points out that Truman has the world's most recognizable face, and he walks into a life where everyone knows far more about him than he knows about them. I think of Britney Spears, whose fame brought extraordinary scrutiny while other people exercised control over her life. Escaping the studio won't mean escaping his audience. In the early draft, Truman gets to switch the television off himself. In the finished film, the last word goes to two security guards: "You want another slice?" "No. Let's see what else is on."
The film's last argument is about who gets to claim they know Truman. Christof asks Sylvia, on the air, whether batting her eyes at him once means she knows him. Then he tells Truman himself, "I know you better than you do," and lists the evidence: the birth, the first step, the first day of school, the lost tooth. Truman's reply is "You never had a camera in my head," and it holds up. Christof has nearly thirty years of footage and still can't predict what Truman will do when he's offered a door. The farewell that follows is the one Truman gives his neighbors on the first morning we see him: "In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night." Except this time it's an actual goodbye. My answer to the question I opened with is that the people around him could care about him and still not have earned his trust, because he never agreed to any of it. Thirty years is a long time to know someone. It might not be long enough to know them completely.
Final Verdict: 91 out of 100