Truman Show Essay Example

The film, The Truman Show centers on the life of Truman Burbank. At birth, a major television network legally adopts Truman, to be the unknowing star of a television series. His entire life is broadcasted, live to an audience of millions, through a complex series of hidden cameras. Christof, the omnipotent main figure behind The Truman Show, constructs an artificial world that revolves around Truman, entitled Seahaven, which is essentially just an extremely large television set. Everyone participating in this created world is an actor except for Truman himself. For the duration of his life, the television network is on a never-ending mission to keep him in ignorance of his situation through the manipulation of his environment. The film then follows Truman’s eventual realization of the true nature of his reality and his dramatic escape from the artificial world. In the film Christof says, “We accept the reality which we are presented.” I strongly agree with this idea. At first, Truman is in acceptance of his odd existence. For example, he does not question why his wife holds products up and describes them, as if she was in a television commercial. He does not wonder why everything happens at the same time every day, since he has not known it to be anything else. He knows the whole world revolves around him, but he does not question it because it has been that way his entire life. Several production mistakes cause Truman to awaken from his beliefs. A stage light falls from the ‘sky’, strange messages are broadcast on his car radio, and he even sees a man who looks like his father who had died several years/episodes earlier. To prevent Truman from discovering his false reality, Christof has invented means of dissuading his drive for exploration, including "killing" his father in a storm while on a fishing trip to instill in him a fear of the water. Not only that, but he made many news reports and adverts about the dangers of travelling, as well as featuring