The Truman Simulacrum (Week 11)
When I first watched The Truman Show, I immediately sympathized with Truman. I felt his misery, I perceived his will to escape and find a new course, a new life. I despised all the characters that had made a show is “real” life. I despised the public that spent his life looking at what Truman was doing in his world.
Then something strange happened to me: I started thinking about whether my life was real or it was all set up by an enormous machine that is able to control everything that exists around me. I questioned people I considered friends, even family, but then I smiled and I realized I had simply fallen into the vicious cycle of falsity that the movie presents. It may seem crazy to think that our lives are fake, that every person in our life is simply a paid actor: who can we trust? Can we trust our eyes and our feelings?
With the prigress that media and information sources have reached, we may never be too sure. As Baudrillard claims, we live in an hyperreal world. Nothing can be defined as objective and consistent anymore. We are surrounded by representations, or better, by simulacra, which go beyond representing objects. Simulacra deny existance. Simulacra deny essence.
What is real in The Truman show? If we pay attention nothing is real. The movie itself is fake, it is the fruit of the director’s imagination. The life that pretends to be real in the movie is fake as well. The actresses who work at the coffee shop and watch Truman’s life on the screen are paid actresses and they represent a role in the movie. Then Truman’s life comes along. The ultimate set up of a “Big Brother”-like show. The life of a man portrayed on the screen. The life of a man ruled by strangers and over his own will. What is painful, and what appears not to hurt the public is the fact that Truman has no rights. His destiny is written on a screenplay and everyone has to follow these directions.
Is Truman real as it is claimed in the movie? I do not think so. As Baudrillard talks about the Loud Family show in 1971, Truman is Truman because of the fake environment he has lived in. If the show did not exist, he would have probably had long hair, dressed like a hippie, never married a “barbie”, earned money by selling his paintings! Who knows?
If we stop for a second then, we see how we (I) have fallen in the same loop: The Truman Show is a movie. The story is fake, and yet we(I) are here commenting about it. We sympathize with movie characters because we forget that they do not exist. We immediately find common feelings, common values, common experiences and we incarnate their role. As Baudrillard says, TV (and the movie industry) is a kind of genetic code: it creates our essence as we identify, and influence at the same time, with its content.
Is it a way to keep us under control? Is it a way to keep the status quo? Is it a way to sustain the current balance of power, economic and social one? I believe so. Maybe the theories about the end of our system( or world) in 2012 are correct and a new phase is approaching. Will it be a war, aliens or climate change that will cause the planet revolution, we do not know, or we could picture it by watching 2012, the movie that just came out… oh well, but that’s another movie so it is not real!
Giorgia