The Truman Show and Behavioral Psychology: Why a Utopian World is Unattainable

Conquering his enormous fear, Truman believes that he is on his way to freedom. However, Christof manipulates the weather and sends a massive storm Truman’s way. Being thrown all around, there is a moment where it seems that Truman may give up. Instead, he raises his courage and continues fighting until Christof’s storm dissipates. Truman’s boat suddenly runs into a wall surprisingly enough for him as he has reached the edge of the studio. With all his doubts and fears running through his head, our hero is able to take his first step into the real outside

The Truman Show introduces us to a man named Truman who is living a fake life, a life in which everything around him has been scripted out by a director of a television show. He was adopted at birth and raised inside a television studio that was made to resemble the real world. However, Truman is unaware that he has been the star of a television show since birth and thanks to free will, he continues to live life as a normal person. Meanwhile, the director, Christof attempts to control every aspect of Truman’s life as if to lead him to take certain actions and to think a certain way.

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.

In the film “The Truman Show”, directed by Peter Weir, many techniques are strategically used to position the audience to respond emotionally to Truman Burbank. Techniques such as lighting, music, camera shots and angles are used in three specific scenes throughout the film co-ordinated by the shows director Christof. He uses these techniques to encourage the show’s audience to believe that what they are watching is unscripted and real.

Everything in Seahaven was operated by machines and computers. These computers were basically controlled my Christof's orders. Early in his life, Truman was traumatized by his father's death at sea. He grew up thinking it was his fault. Because of Christof's planning of the death, Truman was always scared of water. The only way off of Seahaven was by boat, therefore Christof knew he would be able to keep Truman under his control. Christof also did a good job of increasing his audience numbers. When viewers saw the heart-felt moment of Truman reuniting with his father years later, the number of viewers increased. Christof made the scene stand out by changing camera angles and playing background music. In addition, since Truman wanted to make his way to Fiji, Christof strategically planned different events in order to slow Truman down so he wouldn't leave the island. An example of this is when Truman went to purchase a plane ticket, but the flights were all sold out for over a month. Also, when the bus he was going to ride broke down. This proves that Christof manipulated Truman for his own purpose. Christof controlled everything in Truman's life from the weather to who Truman was going to spend his life with. All these points prove how Truman was being used for Christof's benefit; to increase the show's ratings and to gain an income.

Truman Burbank has been living a life of lies. Ever since he was born, every surrounding he sees is an illusion set up for the audience to watch. The people he interacts with, primarily his friends and families, are just actors used to represents Truman's life. Constantly, in order to prevent him from leaving Seahaven from discovering the truth, they made him hydrophobic. Primarily, because they do not have a big enough set for him to leave. Unexpected results begin to make Truman paranoid. Starting with, seeing a set behind an elevator, the car radio mentioning his every move, and even his own wife advertising to the audience which all Truman is unaware of. In order for Truman to escape this fake reality and live up to his full potential of becoming an explorer, he sets out to the ocean. From there, the director of the Truman show advises him to stay as it is safe and that he would get hurt in the real world. But not wanting live a life with a bunch of lies, Truman sets out to the unknown.

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

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

Apart from Willy’s delusion of his own success, he also sees his sons as great successes in the business world, and that they will amount to so much in their lives. These boys cannot be successful because they have been “[blown] so full of hot air [they] could never stand taking orders from anybody” (131). Willy’s illusions about his sons not only ruined Willy’s life, but it caused these boys to have a false sense of reality, which is the theme. This false sense of reality leads to their downfall in the business world because Willy had built them up so high that they believed they should be the one giving the orders, not taking them. When Willy tells his boys “together [you] could absolutely lick the civilized world” (64), this is an example of the way Willy falsely sees his boys and fills their

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 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

However, his reality is now based on these objects vs. what is truly real. In Truman’s second phase he starts to believe that something is wrong with his world based also on his perception and his common sense. First, his father Kirk who had been written out of the show years earlier sneaks back onto the set. This sends Truman into a teenage flashback of his last moments with Lauren a girlfriend that had tried to tell him the truth before she was written off to Fiji. He also notices that the radio is following him around and people all around him are acting very strange. At this point he does not know what is wrong but he knows he is onto “something big” as he tells his “best friend” Marlon.

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