The Truman Show

These days, our society has become overrun with technology and the media. Everywhere you look, it is easy to spot. At this rate, it is fearful to think about what our future might hold. Similar to this, The Truman Show, is a film that presents a strong message about the negatives of this. Extremely unethical, this movie follows the life of Truman Burbank who, since his birth, has been the star of his very own reality television show. However, Truman is not privy to this information and believes that he is just living a normal life. Through watching, viewers watch as this hero struggles to discover the truth and gain his freedom.

Although cinema is now a priority, some feel as if cinema is no longer the cinema when it was first established. Movies no longer have that special feeling like viewers once had. Today, films are not only shared within a theater, if one pleases they could always have the same experience elsewhere. Moreover, with technology expanding, it takes away the importance cinema once had. “The

The Truman Show, is a film starring Jim Carrey, directed by Peter Weir. The film revolves around Truman Burbank, who is the star of The Truman Show, the show within the film. The Truman show is a live stream of Truman's life, filmed by hidden camera's capturing his everyday movements. Truman is a key character in the film, who helped me to understand the important message of the film. Truman's developments during the film and the manipulation of him and his surrounding environments helped to understand how the media and big corporations have excessive power and control over society and people's opinions.

Utopia - A perfect world. Truman's world was an utopia. Everything, including the weather, was controlled in a huge Hollywood dome. Truman grew up having no idea he was being watched every hour of the day, and that every step he took was being viewed by millions all over the globe. As the show progressed, it became clear how much media influenced Truman's life, and also how Christof played a huge role in Truman's well-being.

Throughout this journey to find the truth, lots of similarities between the life of Truman and Siddhartha can be found. By depicting his life as a parallel version of Siddhartha’s life, the idea of spiritual journey and enlightenment is indirectly shown in the film. Furthermore, The Truman Show can be analyzed as the

The film uses special effects to highlight the camera’s constant gaze on Truman. For example, when black circles are created at the edges of the screen, indicating the circular lens being focused on Truman. As the TV show becomes more forceful in its attempts to keep its star on the set for the tv show audience, the camera dominates the screen more and the circle that Truman is visible within becomes smaller. This visually evokes the oppressive nature of the omnipresent camera for us as the film audience. Christof, the director of “The Truman Show” is a character with a God complex which is drawn from his name when we break it into “Christ” “of”. This gives us a sense of understanding of how Christof has control of this “Tru” “Man” (Truman) whose life he has created. Weir shows this in order to bring viewers’ attention as to how far the media is willing to go to gain an audience. The media nowadays often twists the truth by exaggerating events or even by orchestrating them by these special effects which will trigger a play on the emotions of the tv show audience so that they will react to the media’s advantage. In today’s society the media also show us only what they want us to see in order for us to feel a certain way and to keep us wanting more of it. In this show, Christof has the audience on our toes and giving us the hope and the questioning to ourselves of will Truman find out the truth one day or not?” or “will he leave one day to pursue his love for Sylvia?” This makes the audience want to watch more of it so that they are able to find out what will happen next. In

Peter Weir’s The Truman Show features the ideas of a utopia, commercialism and the power of media through various film techniques. Mise en scen is used by Weir to show the idea of a utopia. The cinematography is utilised by weir to demonstrate commercialism. Weir also uses editing to convey the power of the media.

In the Truman Show, the theme of audience manipulation is demonstrated through the use of sound. Non-diegetic sound is used when Truman is too scared to go on the boat that will take him to Harbor Island. Heavy repetitive beats are used in the background to showcase Truman’s fear of the ocean. These sounds manage to give the audience a similar feeling to what Truman would be feeling at that moment. However, diegetic sound is also used effectively throughout the film in order to inform the audience about the sounds used in the story itself. Diegetic sound is used in the scene where Lauren (Sylvia) is taken away by her so called father. In this scene, the actors are in distress and start shouting and sharing their emotions, whilst still manipulating the audience through these very emotions. The use of non-diegetic sound in the Truman Show is highly manipulative as it takes the audience into the world of Truman by making them feel the same emotions of fear as Truman. The use of sound in the background makes it evident that its main purpose is to manipulate the viewers’ emotions. It is then evident that the use of sound in the Truman show is highly manipulative over the audience as it forces them to also feel the same emotions as Truman. It is highly effective as the non-diegetic sound is merely focused on affecting the viewers.

Twenty- nine years ago, Truman Burbank was adopted by the Omnicom corporation and was set to be the star of a worldwide reality tv show that would film his entire life existence. Christof, the creator of the tv show built a world inside a dome and controlled every aspect of Trumans life and even mind without his knowledge. As Truman slowly discovers the real meaning of his life, he must decide whether or not to make a change. The purpose of this film is to explore the effect of reality tv has on people.

The Truman Show is a film which has been developed through a range of images. Peter Weir has creatively directed a film portraying the media and its impact on society. Within this film we see the effectiveness of techniques, which include camera angles, framing, shot types, camera movement, style of music, costuming and sequencing. By using a range of different techniques Weir is able to create emotive images and portray three different worlds to the audience.

'The Truman Show' is the story of a baby who is bought by a television

    Film and literature are two media forms that are so closely related, that we often forget there is a distinction between them. We often just view the movie as an extension of the book because most movies are based on novels or short stories. Because we are accustomed to this sequence of production, first the novel, then the motion picture, we often find ourselves making value judgments about a movie, based upon our feelings on the novel. It is this overlapping of the creative processes that prevents us from seeing movies as distinct and separate art forms from the novels they are based on.

In the movie called; The Truman Show the main character named Truman finally comes to terms that his reality has been created for the purpose of a TV show in which he unknowingly stars in. For Truman, this is a dystopia, because he lives under constant surveillance, and was led to believe that Sea Haven was an ideal,perfect place.However for someone like Christoff;the director it could be considered a Utopia.

The Truman show is a story about a man named Truman Burbank, a normal man that doesn’t realize his entire life is staged, fake and streaming live every moment of every day. Within the first few minutes of the movie starting you think everything is perfect in Truman’s fake world with is nice welcoming neighbors, friendly businessman and people around him. What you don’t know and realize is that Truman’s 1950’s utopia is scripted and controlled by another mini village of people behind the scenes of the world’s largest studio every built. Everything seems to be perfect for Truman, he has a successful job as an insurance sale mans with a sweetheart wife who is also a nurse and his best friend from childhood who loves to stop by at random time with a cold six pack in hand to help distract Truman and keep him on track. However, Truman is a smart man and slowly starts to see things out of place and puts things together, while he still doesn’t know he’s living in a studio he’s slowing realizing something just isn’t right. Than he begins his quest to answer his question and break out of

The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.5 Historically, the rhetorical criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema, attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level. But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006; Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in rhetorical studies,6 for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily “reflects a merger of reason and emotion” (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007). Rhetorical