Cruel reality vs “sweet dreaming”?
The Truman show was released in1998 as an American drama film directed by Peter Weir .The movie is a chronicle of a young man, called Truman Burbank who discovers that, he is living in a perfectly constructed soap opera, watching by billions of people around the world. Everything he has been ever doing on the show was created, actors, the crew, so the whole show-set .At the end of the movie, he’s asking: “Who am I?”, but the question is what he is looking for to get an answer is this: “Is it the real world or where am I?”
In this film Truman was a “real” hero, there is no doubt about that. He lived his whole life in front of cameras, not even know about that. Nowadays, we have lots of reality shows going on, and we can easily believe that, this movie was the base to some of them. The Truman Show questions our perception of reality and closely parallels Plato’s famous same topic, “The Allegory of the Cave”. At the onset of the film, Truman is trapped in his own cave, a fictional island known as Seaheaven .Truman then ascends into reality by sailing towards freedom and discovers that fact, his life in nothing else but fabricated TV program, made by a human being. His journey into this new knowledge is very similar to that cave, where Plato’s cave dweller who escapes his shackles, steps out of the cave, and faces the light of the reality. Truman’s world is the cave and Truman is the individual who escapes the restrictions of the cave. Thus, The Truman show presents a modern-day manifestation of Plato's allegory, yet the film goes one step further and presents a bitter reflection on modern-day masses who are trapped in their own kind of cave. In Truman's artificial world, the island Seahaven is his cave, to which he has been confined since birth. He begins to break away from the chains that imprison him, as he starts to see errors in the production of the reality show, so the “production starts to fall apart.He sees his wife's crossed fingers in their wedding photo and notices her breaking into some outbursts about household products, and all those things takes him closer to the truth, that is where he lives is not the real world. Truman ultimately escapes from his cave by a boat, named Santa Maria, a reference to Christopher Columbus’s boat and his journey towards discovery. Similarly to the allegory, the journey to the truth is not easy. Christof, the program's creator, orders an artificial storm towards Truman to pull him off away to discover the truth, almost killing him, because Truman was about to drown. When Truman reaches the end of his journey as his boat hits a wall painted as a sky, well that is, literally the end of his artificial reality.
I got really excited at the end of the movie, because I wanted to know, what is going to happen by the end. Is he going back to his “safe”, immaculate world, where everything is perfect or take the risk to enter to a world which he is not familiar with .There was a picture in my mind while I was watching the final scene, how I imagined the end. Truman enters the exit door and on the other side suddenly he is having the biggest spotlight ever and people start to clap their hand as a sign of their ecstasy. The Truman show is a movie that worthwhile to watch. I t was a financial and critical success, and earned numerous awards.
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