The Truman Show: The Nature Of Reality

Truman was an orphaned child who was adopted and raised from birth by a large corporation to star in a hit T.V. show entitled ‘The Truman Show.’ The entire show took place inside of an artificial city, and was orchestrated by the show’s producer, Christof. Every single person in the city, except for Truman, was an actor. Christof controlled every aspect of the show, from how the other actors interacted with Truman to the weather of the city. In order to keep this system contained and Truman’s life as realistic as possible, Truman was never alluded to the fact that his entire life up to this point was a T.V. show. Truman’s ignorant nature raises many questions about the nature of reality. Was Truman’s reality ever fully real? Was Truman perceiving
Any actor that worked on the show would believe that they are just that, actors acting out a life written out for them on a stage that isn’t real. However, Truman saw Seahaven island as the real world. Because Truman was never influenced much by outside dissenting opinions, he never learned that his world was fake, at least until the latter half of the movie. The fact that the actors’ and Truman’s views of reality clash so much brings up an interesting fact about the nature of reality. What one perceives as reality is only what they are able to see is their reality. That is, one does not consider there is more outside of the world we see because it is impossible to comprehend an existence that is outside what one has experienced so far. This is a difficult concept to grasp, and is better illustrated by Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In it, prisoners are chained in a cave, never allowed to leave, in a way that they can only face one wall of the cave. Behind them is an elevated walkway, which a fire far behind the walkway. Characters walk in front of the fire, casting shapes and forms that dance in front of the prisoners. The prisoners see these distorted shapes as
Following the fact that Truman never saw reality as it was, the cast members constantly had to warp his perception in order to deceive him like this. The cast did this in many ways, beyond merely acting out their parts and never acknowledging Truman’s true existence. Near the beginning of the movie, Truman begins to get some doubts about the world he lives in. While driving his car to work, Truman’s radio accidentally switches to a frequency that is broadcasting a man tracking Truman’s current location. Truman is perplexed by this, and very quickly realizes what he is hearing on the radio. However, the show’s producers soon realize that Truman is hearing this, and switches the frequency back to music. This means that most of what Truman sees is just smoke and mirrors. Although he truly believe what he is seeing is reality, his reality is warped by the constant efforts of the show’s producers, namely Christof. This is how perception plays into one’s sense of reality. One develop’s what they believe to be reality through their senses, which is further filtered into their perception of reality. Thusly, one’s reality is completely affected by their perception of the world around them. By constantly monitoring how Truman perceives the world around himself, the cast turns Truman’s sense of reality against him to control his reality and in turn make the show more