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Truman Show
Sometimes perfection can be perfect hell.” Utopia: the seemingly perfect world, one that combines happiness and honesty with purity, equality and peace. However, in George Orwell’s novel, 1984 and The Truman Show, readers and viewers are presented with a clever contradiction, dystopia. In both 1984 and The Truman Show, there are dystopia. Both the novel and the film have a “controller”, an all-powerful force who controls every aspect of the dystopia. In 1984, this dystopia is The Party, the force who will not even let its citizen’s have freedom of thought. In The Truman Show, the force is Christof, a man who makes an outwardly perfect world where one man is separated from the outside world completely.
No hope lies in a world with any freedom. The dystopia presented in 1984 is one that has no freedom whatsoever. The Party is the force that controls everything, similar to The Truman Show, where a man, Christof, creates the “perfect” world. This world contains one helpless man, Truman, who is trapped in a world where nothing is real. The utopian society in The Truman Show presents many good things, such as a comfortable lifestyle, happiness and no war. However, Truman is separated from the outside world, and the entire outside world is watching his every move on television all day. There is no sense of “real”; no real relationships, no privacy, and no trust, all of which Truman is blindly unaware of. However, in 1984, Winston experiences constant discomfort, much fear and suffering, low living standards and no freedom. A utopian world seems pleasant to the viewers of the Truman Show because they don’t know of any true suffering, whereas Winston has vague memories of another life which, in comparison to his constant suffering, seems amazing. All Winston truly knows is war and chaos, whereas all Truman truly knows is peace, happiness, and comfort.
Orwell’s 1984 and The Truman Show are similar in some aspects, one being that neither the citizen’s of 1984 and Truman

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