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.

The Truman Show is centred on a man-made island called SeaHaven where a man named Truman Burbank has been televised without his knowledge since birth. The show is a 24 hour live tv show where every aspect of Truman’s life is shown. As Truman grows older he begins to notice unsual events that leads him to believe that there is something incongruent with what people are telling him and what he experiences in his day to day life. As Truman begins to test the boundaries he realizes that the town seems to revolve around him and his desire to escape comes to an all time high. Eventually Truman begins on a journey to escape his virtual reality. Despite the boundaries that the director throws at him he eventually escapes and will try to find his way in the real world. This movie made me sympathize for Truman being that he has no privacy and is oblivious to his lack of freedom. This movie shows how it is possible to create an “ideal” community and how New Urbanism can be created and maintained.

The first scene “Introducing Truman- Day 10,909” is an example of one of these scenes as it uses techniques to introduce to the audience Truman’s world as one that is cheerful, happy and bright. As Truman gets ready for his day at work the scene has bright lighting and the costumes are

Without Truman, the Truman show was nothing, so Christof manipulated him to keep him in Seahaven, he manipulated his fears, his love life, and his everyday encounters, just so that the show could continue to be successful and continue to produce millions of views and in turn millions of dollars. An example of when Truman was manipulated shown in the film was when we get shown a flashback of Truman's childhood, we are shown a young Truman standing up in a classroom, he is declaring his want to be an explorer, "like the great Magellan," the teacher, in reply, rolls down a map of the world and responds, "Oh, you're too late, there's really nothing left to explore." By doing this they were trying to quell Truman's dream to explore. Christof and the Network executives worked to stop Truman from ever wanting to leave Seahaven by manipulating the environment around him, in this case his school and teacher, to disregard and stop his want to leave and explore what is outside of the

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.

The media has been able to manipulate people by making them believe what they say. One example that satirizes the media is a movie called The Truman show. Throughout the Truman show, the main character, Truman Burbank, is trapped in a stage set which he perceives as the real world. As he has lived there for around 30 years he starts to get the perception of being in a false environment. The media plays a big role in our lives as Truman is exposed to the corrupt side of them.

The film, The Truman Show (1998) is about the man named Truman Burbank, a first child who is legally adopted legally by the broadcasting company and been unknowingly publicizing his entire life as an entertaining show to the whole world. Although he lives in the world where everything is manipulated, at least for him, he is just like a normal man with own family, friends, and job. The difference between others and Truman lies on the taboo that Truman has attained through the traumatic event of losing his own father. His taboo is that he is incapable of living the city, Seahaven as leaving the city signifies knowing the truth of his life. The film majorly depicts the moment when Truman realized skepticism around his entire life and departs the journey to find the truth and real identity

However, because of some of the situations he encounters and sees, and with his curiosity and logic, Truman is able to work out something isn?t right about the world and manages to escape. Because it is a gradual realization, Truman doesn?t go mad as his make believe world unravels around him. As might be the case with Plato?s cave dwellers, as they are stepping into the light of the real world.

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.

At the beginning of the movie, it was stated that Truman was the very first child ever to be adopted by a corporation, even going as far as saying that he was born on live television. This brings out lots of emotion and opinions about the show. Viewers feel lots of sympathy for Truman because nothing in his life has ever been his own other than his reactions. That is what Christoff said made the show work, "We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We're tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards...It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life" (The Truman Show).

Peter Weir’s 1998 film, ‘The Truman show’ effectively manages to portray the message of audience manipulation both through the internal and external audiences of the show. This essay will be critically analyzing the techniques used to manipulate the audience in ‘The Truman Show”. Firstly, by analyzing the sound techniques, then by analyzing the camera shots used. Finally, by discussing how the symbolism used manages to successfully manipulate the audience’s views. There will now be three critical and analytical arguments supporting the statement that ‘The Truman Show’ manages to effectively manipulate the audience.

Societies, around the world, have always had the desire to control their members and manipulate their reality. With the help of technology, this might be achieved easier than previously believed. Using something as ordinary as your phone will give the government access to one-way constant and unauthorized surveillance. Your phone is also a way for media outlets and corporations to get you to purchase their products by constantly bombarding you with ads about things that you might be interested in. Since using our phones and seeing ads are so familiar to us, we don’t truly realize how the government and media outlets are manipulating and spying on us. Works of fiction such as The Truman Show and Neuromancer, have attempted to defamiliarize these concepts by showing them at work on a larger scale. Both protagonists, Truman and Case, respectively, have fallen victim to manipulated realities and unauthorized surveillance. Authority figures, in these works, are using

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

The Allegory of the Cave has many parallels with The Truman Show. Initially, Truman is trapped in his own “cave”; a film set or fictional island known as Seahaven. Truman’s journey or ascension into the real world and into knowledge is similar to that of Plato’s cave dweller. In this paper, I will discuss these similarities along with the very intent of both of these works whose purpose is for us to question our own reality.