Sunday, March 16, 2008

the Truman Show: How the character of Truman tells us about the influence of the media

Truman Burbank, abandoned at birth, was chosen out of a pool of unwanted babies who were all coincidentally born around the time production for the show began. As a sort of ‘charity case’, Truman is sent to the media constructed universe of Seahaven, where he grows up to a ‘normal’ suburban life as the clueless star of the eponymous popular and long-running reality TV show. Despite making him a *star* and providing him with a seemingly wonderful life, the media company had actually just taken advantage of an innocent, powerless against them to say ‘No’, and moulded his life into something they required in order to make the most out of taking advantage of him.
Through the character of Truman and how he lives and interacts with people, The Truman Show tells us as an audience, about the pervasive nature of the media on our lives, and the ways we can unwittingly be controlled by it should we not possess a certain level of media literacy.
A happy-go-lucky optimist by nature, Truman lived and breathed saccharine clichés (Very Pleasantville-esque clothing, tending to his own garden plot in his spare time, generally being very handy around the house) all his life in the clean-cut (and highly manufactured) town of Seahaven. Quietly being fed what’s construed as acceptable human behaviour (Like excitedly greeting his picture perfect neighbours at the other side of his picture perfect street every single day without fail), Truman happily soaked it in for years until he went against the story line, and fell in love with a supporting cast member. We have to examine how much of his life is dominated by the amount of product placements shown to him, the way he was brought up (as dictated by the show producers) and which actions taken by him are truly his own, and not caused by other influences. Truman is by and large a strong person if only he sets his mind to it (Like how he ignores all the information he’s being fed in a single minded attempt to escape out of Seahaven and see the world outside, and how he overcomes his fear of the water during the climax of the movie). We can see that major events have a tendency to leave long-lasting impacts on the way Truman lives, and how he views the world. Because of the trauma he suffered from witnessing the staged “death” of his so-called father by drowning, Truman is so afraid to go across the water that he would rather walk away than go across it to get an assignment done. One mention of “Fiji” from Sylvia (the woman he’s madly in love with) is enough to warrant Truman to harbour dreams of going to this exotic locale in order to find her. Occurrences that shake up his normal, day-to-day humdrum existence are so few and far between that he winds up obsessive about them. (Buying magazine after magazine in order to try and piece together the features of Sylvia to try to remember her by) But at the same time, he still finds it in him to share all these hopes, dreams and fears with the best friend he trusts explicitly.
It is very easy to label Truman as the ‘everyman’ and cheer him on. Outwardly he’s the ideal gentleman with a cushy desk job and the same set of financial woes (mortgages, car loans) as your average Joe, but he still has his own oddities and imperfections that make him seem realistic in his courageous fight for the right to live with the truth. The media influences us through showcasing such idealism in a respectful and nicely packaged manner to appeal to our sense of justice and empathy: People root for Truman, because let’s face it; he’s the one we’re supposed to feel for anyway.
Truman is kept utterly in the dark so successfully, because of the circumstances that he lives in. He doesn’t seem to be able to access radio channels that tell him anything about life outside Seahaven, never appears to have watched any television programmes that show him the world, etc. This shows that the type of media that we are exposed to does play an important role. The propagandist nature of everything in Seahaven paints such a glorified picture of it as compared to the relative media blackout on places outside: There’s no sense of going out since it’s all so messed up. Stay inside! By keeping him locked up within the fishbowl studio, Truman is unable to access any clues that might lead him to discover that his life is actually a sham. All the paid actors don’t clue him in either, or if they do, they’re quickly terminated by the show, and the normalcy of daily life creeps back in to gloss over the incident and bring Truman back to ‘reality’. If we are constantly exposed to so many messages, instead of just one, it makes us all the more able to pick and choose (discernment) what we want to live our life by. But if we’re constantly just fed the same old thing over and over, we won’t stop and notice if there’s anything wrong with blindly following that. Truman doesn’t realize the impact of Sylvia’s words “It’s all pretend” until so much later, because he has no reason to believe it.
The ways in which Truman is influenced by the media seems humourous to us because of how blatantly he’s given instructions by it: The voice on the radio gives clear directions as to how Truman is supposed to drive, his wife, mother & best friend shamelessly plug products through advertisement placements to an audience through him etc. But in truth, the media does that to us too, albeit more commonly using subtler methods. The role of glorified personalities in selling us goods, services, causes and ideas is really nothing new. Neither is the use of constant rephrasing or repackaging the same item, in order to achieve a greater appeal or impact on the consumer.
Much like Truman, we’re essentially living inside a world where the media is everywhere, even within our public toilets. While they might not be watching our every move (we hope), they’re still tracking us through demographics, and trying to shape the way we think and feel in order to market their goods to us. The media can influence us through many different ways: through print mediums (like Truman’s airplane warning poster, and our WANTED TERRORIST posters), through the people we trust and listen to (like our peers. In Truman’s case his six-pack wielding best friend, plus his wife AND his mother), through messages being broadcast to us (commercials, radio jingles, Drive Safely, Be Courteous!) etc. It’s really up to us what we choose to believe, and what we should filter away as trash.
By: Abby Kang, Zhefei, Timothy & Justin (09S07A)

No comments: