The Truman Show: A Cleverly Disguised Tragedy

While the world he inhabits is in some ways false, there is nothing false about Truman himself. Hello and welcome back to my channel. Create better media where we discuss and analyze movies and TV

show

s to see where the writing went gloriously right or horribly wrong today. I want to take a quick look at The Truman Show a movie about a man whose entire life has been televised without his knowledge his entire world is a reality fabricated by a single writer and populated by actors a movie that

cleverly

plays with your emotions and makes you question your sense of reality the premise of the film is quite unique the questions it raises are certainly similar to those of The Matrix, but I'm sure most would agree that this film is almost completely different, although it is an interesting question in which I'm sure most people have thought of.

At some point in their lives, what if the reality I see is not the true reality? This is the main question Truman's

show

raises, but is it done well? Is the movie well made? If you still don't agree so be it, hopefully. this video will show not only that it is well done but, more importantly, why it is well done so without further ado let's get started right for me there is no difference between a private life and a public life my life is my life is the Truman Show The Truman show is a lifestyle, it is a noble life, it is a truly blessed life.

The movie starts with a great opening that shows us the credits for the show within the movie and we get these interesting little interviews with the actors playing the characters. in

truman

's life they talk about how being on

truman

's show is not just an acting job but it's a lifestyle and marlon, the man who plays truman's best friend, says that nothing on the show is fake, It is simply controlled, this gives us an excellent appearance. from the beginning about what this movie will be about if there is a difference between true reality and a fabricated reality if we can't tell the difference are you totally fine if you can't tell? does it matter?

This is a great way to set up the premise of the movie, it shows us that the people on the show really believe they are doing something noble, they believe that all they are doing is making a show that gives hope and life to the people who do it. they need. They don't see what they've been doing as a horrible thing to do to someone else, they just want to put on the best show possible after the interviews, it cuts to Truman talking to himself in the mirror and immediately we get great characterization for Truman, it's a dreamer, someone who wants to be an adventurer, but since we know he's trapped when he initially leaves for work, we get his catchphrase, oh, and in case he doesn't see you, good afternoon, good night and good night and Then a light falls from the sky At first I was confused by this.

I thought that this was something that should certainly alert him that something was not right, but then I realized that if this happened to me, the fact that I was on a television show that was constantly broadcasting my life would be far away from me. my mind, but now we see Truman on his morning commute to work and the theory I have and I really hope is true is that when he drives his car, the radio always plays classical music, this could be because the music would be domain public and royalty-free to play on live television, but after Truman gets to work, we get the prelude to his tragic love story with Lauren.

It's something we don't really understand when we first look at it, but it serves to set up your desire to go to Fiji now one of your coworkers gives you a file telling you that you have to cross the bay to close a deal and this is where you also We find Truman's intense fear of the ocean, but this is something that I really don't understand that this is all written down, obviously, so why would they want to put him in a situation where he could potentially overcome his fear of the ocean? Maybe they just want a little more drama for the TV show or maybe they want to put it to the test. to see if he's gotten over that fear so they know if they need to come up with more ways to keep him on the island.

I don't know, it's not really a big deal and there are possible answers to this. I guess that's something I wish we had. I could have seen, however, the efficiency with which this movie characterizes Truman is honestly incredible because right after that, Truman talks to his best friend and tells him that he wants to leave, he wants to leave the island and go to Fiji, but right after this, having flashbacks of Truman losing his father in a boating accident, something that would obviously be tragic, but finding out that not only was it not real, but knowing that it was fabricated, is something no human being has ever experienced. had to deal with.

Really the beauty of this movie, this premise is something that no one has ever been through, but that almost all of us can relate to on a fundamental level because it's something that you can't really prove, it's not happening to you right now. , it is an existential fear. Almost anyone can feel that, but we don't really understand the ramifications it would have if that fear turned out to be true, but after her time on the beach, she passes his father on the street, sees him, and tries to talk to him. but before you can say anything, the people are taken to a bus, this is explained as law enforcement trying to cleanse the city of homeless people, but you can see that it certainly triggers something in Truman, it triggers the search for the truth.

This is when he starts to question the things around him, so he goes and talks to his mother about what happened and she tells him that she sees her father all the time, implying that it was just a hallucination. . I just can't get over the utter lack of morality. These characters have to put someone through the loss of their father when you know it's a lie to pretend to be someone's mother, the person you're supposed to trust more than anyone else and just lie to them for their entire life, it's heartbreaking to watch. , but This Movie creates these scenarios so well that it puts them in an almost funny light, making you not really feel how tragic this all is.

Now we get another flashback, this time it's Truman seeing Lauren and the scene gives us a After that we see a scene of a dance party where he is dancing with Merrell but he sees Lauren in the crowd and it's obvious he wants to talk. with her, but after a few seconds we see Lauren being taken away. people in suits, this shows us that even Truman's relationship with his now wife is something that was manufactured forced to follow a path that Truman did not want to take, then it cuts to Truman being in a university library where he meets again with Lauren and the The fact that she's here and so close to Truman definitely makes it seem like she snuck onto the set.

He also wears a pin that says how it will end. This shows us that she really cares about Truman and wants him to know the truth. she is the only person in Truman's life who has truly cared about him and she is torn away by that fact, because she cares and because she is real, she has no place in Truman's life. We now see the image that Truman is creating by trying to recreate Lauren directly. behind a photo of his wife we ​​cut to Truman in his car and his radio starts to fail and he listens to people talking about his every move.

This is where Truman really starts to realize that something is not right, he starts to feel paranoid, he starts to act erratically as he is trying to find cracks in the world around him, he finds an elevator with nothing behind the door, just people who look like they're on a set, but even now he doesn't realize that his life is fake because, I mean, why would he? I don't think that even if all of this happened to anyone but the most paranoid of us, we would realize that our entire life was fake, every relationship we've ever had has been scripted and every path we've taken was laid out before us by a screenwriter, now we have the sequence where Truman tries to enter the hospital to see his wife and we have the hilarious part of all the ways the showrunners try to organically block his path.

Sorry, okay, let me help you with that after that. although you go to a travel agency to get a ticket to fiji and i love all the little tips they have on how to cut back and try to discourage you from travelling, there's the sign warning about disease and terrorism and the posture of the plane being hit by a wow, it's all wonderful little details now we see Truman realize that the people around him are stuck in a loop and this is where we start to see the beginning of his near psychological breakdown: he traps Merrell in the car with him and starts driving at full speed. speeds and we clearly see that he is trying to get rid of whatever is causing things to block his path, he seems to deflect the showrunners and makes it to the bridge where we see his fear of the ocean when he can't cross . the bridge, but to get over this he grabs Meryl's hand and throws it on the steering wheel, closes his eyes and hits the accelerator.

This is the kind of consistent character writing that I love to see even though he is in the middle of a psychological break that he still has. As for this fear of the ocean, the writers could have made Truman forget about this fear given the situation, but they remembered it, got creative, and wrote about it. It may seem small, but this is the kind of thing that is not appreciated today. the parts of the stories that make these characters so believable and relatable, this is what defines the art form for me. Truman is brought back home after failing to leave the island and he begins to suspect Merrell.

This is also where we get the movie role that always makes me laugh the most, why don't you let me make you some of this numo coco drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper mountain slopes of Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to? I've tried other coconuts, this is the best, what the heck after that? Even though Meryl pulls a knife on him and he grabs her and she screams, do something, this clearly tells him that she's talking to someone other than him and that I just have to do it.

Let's just say that Jim Carrey's casting for this movie couldn't have been more perfect. He straddles the line between being a tragic character and an almost cartoonish character with impeccable precision. I really couldn't imagine how this movie would have turned out if the role had been cast. Someone else, but now we see one of the hardest parts of the movie for me to watch: Truman is sitting at the end of the pier talking to his best friend, the person he should always be able to talk to, always be able to trust. . Truman about the times they grew up together, then cuts to the showrunners telling him the lines and telling Truman that he would walk into traffic for him and the last thing he would do is lie to him, it's so hard to watch because I've had friendships like this, people I could trust with my life and if I found out that throughout the entire relationship they had been fed lines that everything they had told me had been a lie, it would be heartbreaking now. we have an interview with the creator of the show and they take calls and one of those calls is from Lauren.

She calls Kristoff a liar and manipulator, but Kristoff uses this as an excuse to justify what he has done. He tells him that he has given Truman the ability to live a normal life and if Truman was absolutely determined to leave then he could, but Truman prefers his cell and this is the line where I really think the soul of the movie comes from, it's a true triumph of the human spirit where even with a divine figure. that can actually control almost every factor in Truman's life, he is still able to overcome all the obstacles that come his way and still find the truth that he is looking for.

It's really beautiful after the interview, we see Truman return to his normal life. We see it. It follows the routine that happened at the beginning of the movie but at the end of the day we see him fall asleep in the basement and Truman disappears, he ran away and the whole town starts looking for him, but this is where I feel like I need to criticize the movie even if they can find him if they find him like this, what is he supposed to think? How could they hope to save the show at this point now that they find Truman sailing in the ocean? towards the sea, but kristoff still wants to stop him, so they caused a storm to get him back, but Truman is still determined to make it happen.

They went as far as to hit their boat with lightning and make Truman fall into the water and Kristoff gives him a line to show that he is willing to let Truman die chris the whole world is watching we can't let him die in front of a live audience he was born in front of a live audience truman returns to the ship and we get one of My favorite lines from the show are: "The best you can do, you'll have to kill me." This sums up Truman perfectly, the sheer determination of him to escape his manufactured life and enter real life, Kristoff said earlier in the interview, we accept reality.

It is given to us, but Truman has not done it. He has rejected fictitious reality andhe has a desperate need to escape from it. He was not given the option to find the truth. He took her for himself. He didn't want to know the truth. It is necessary after reaching the exit and before leaving, Kristoff talks to him and tells him that there is no more truth out there than here and that nothing bad can happen to him in the world he has created. Kristoff asks him to say something and instead of giving a grand speech or something he just looks at him and says the canned line he's used over and over again in case he doesn't see you good afternoon good evening and good night this is because He understands what Kristoff wants and he doesn't want to give it to him.

He realizes that Kristoff would want an amazing big ending to this show that's been on the air for almost 30 years, so Truman basically gives him the biggest middle finger possible after this movie. It ends on a completely upbeat note with Truman walking out into the real world and all the people watching cheering and applauding, but this is a big part of what makes this movie really great because the best movies don't leave you ready to move on to something. . Otherwise, they'll make you sit and wonder what the hell is going to happen next, because while this movie seemingly has a happy ending, I think a good number of people realize that it's not going to go on like this, this is just a

tragedy

.

cleverly

disguised

afterwards.

Realizing that everything Truman knew turned out to be a lie, how could he ever trust anything again? This is what he was talking about earlier when it came to not being able to fully understand the ramifications of something like this. We have no basis for what will happen to people who go through this, we can only imagine and when you add the fact that Truman is the most famous person in the world right now, I feel like he will never be able to discern the reality of the invention if someone just held If the door opened for him, he would have to wonder why it would be just because they are polite or it would be because he is Truman or some screenwriter told them to do that and that paranoia would seep into every facet of his life. mother, father, wife and best friend were all manufactured relationships, how could you approach someone without wondering if they had received lines from someone else?

And now this is where I want to talk about Truman as a character, the first lines you get from Truman are him pretending to be an adventurer, a man in his late 30s who is still clinging to his childhood fantasy of going out and exploring the world. This opening scene with Truman tells us a lot of what we need to know about him, and it does. So, in a perfectly natural way, he's just a man getting ready for work pretending to be a mountain climber in the mirror, but in reality he's much more, it's his only real desire to escape his normal life and explore the world.

It's just wonderful, but like the movie. continues, we start to see things are less whimsical, less cartoonish, it starts to get darker, it starts with flashbacks of her father drowning, then she sees her father and her own mother lying to her, then we get Lauren's flashbacks and we see that. He's not really happy in the marriage he's in now and for me the awfulness of the situation really begins when it's shown that his best friend is feeding him canned lines straight from Kristoff. This movie takes a person who, I'm sure, most people do. can relate and empathize puts him in a situation that could have been conceived by a Nazi psychologist and pushes him hard enough that cracks start to form, but it never completely breaks him, he clings to his desire to escape. his cage and see the truth that comes with it bursting out.

Now I want to go back to the scene where Truman sails out to sea because, honestly, I'll never finish talking about it. Her quest for knowledge has allowed her to conquer her fear of him. of the ocean and achieve his goal of leaving the island. We know that he has very strong suspicions that something is wrong with the island in his life, but he still doesn't know exactly what it is. This is another part of the movie where we feel like there is a real genius behind this, as Truman sails out to sea we get this strong feeling that he really hopes that he is wrong about everything he suspects, that he will eventually come ashore and be able to see the rest of the world.

Like when you suspect your partner is cheating on you, you hope you're wrong but you still need to know the truth. You won't get better if you know the truth; In fact, it will probably make your life worse at least temporarily, but what I'm saying is that Truman won't be better off either if he learns the truth. In fact, his life is about to get a lot more difficult, but he needs to know if the suspicions he has about his entire life are true. and when he finally hits that wall, it's a one on one metaphor of him crashing into reality, his hope is that he's wrong in all of this, but finding the truth is that he literally hits a wall, that's something that really resonates with me and I feel like it will resonate with a lot of people and this is all made better by the fact that the script is so well written that I have thrown out a couple of minor critiques of this movie and I'm sure there are more like the fact that they have 5,000 cameras and the night Truman escapes have two people watching them, it's a little silly, but still everyone thought he was essentially back to normal.

This happened after his wife left him, so there must have been a fair amount. of time between his last escape attempt in this one where nothing really important had happened and I feel like even without that excuse this is such a minor flaw that it's barely worth mentioning what I'm trying to say, even when objectively looking at this movie. it stands up to scrutiny extremely well, that's why saying things like this, every movie will fall apart when you start to separate them objectively, seems so strange to me because no, I don't think every movie falls apart when looked at objectively, it could be.

It's true that every movie has flaws when looked at objectively, but I still can't be sure because I haven't critically analyzed every movie out there, however, a movie having objective flaws is not the same as falling apart, it's a truly statement. ridiculous and an insult to the writers who actually take the time with their scripts to make sure they are internally sound and as consistent as possible. It may be true that no story will be perfect, but the effort to make it as close as possible should always be fully appreciated. out of the way i will say that this movie is a genuine masterpiece, the writing is absolutely top notch, the dialogue never feels out of place or unnatural, i never noticed any editing errors and the acting is phenomenal, ed harris is fantastic, Laura Lenny and Noah Emrick do stand-up work, but Jim Carrey, my God, the fact that he wasn't even nominated for an Oscar for this movie is a crime.

He goes from being a goofy, fun guy to a man who wallows in sadness over the death of his father. to someone having a nervous breakdown and essentially holding his wife hostage, to a dumb guy, and then to a man who finally broke free of his proverbial chains, all without missing a beat, I said before, I couldn't imagine anyone will play this role. more and I really think Jim Carrey becomes Truman and it's great to watch so if you've made it this far in the video and you haven't seen this movie yet, do it now, I promise you won't be disappointed with even everything. mostly spoiled for you, it doesn't matter, this is a movie you can watch 10 times in a row and still find new things to appreciate and adore.

I don't really like giving numbers to movies because it's very difficult to be consistent with them, but I know that people appreciate them, so I would easily give this movie a 9 out of 10, everything is very well done, so now I think that I've said everything I wanted to say about this movie, so the review is over and I just want to talk a little bit about what I hope to do with my channel. I really enjoy analyzing media and I hope I can continue doing it, but I probably won't be able to continue doing it if I can't grow my audience.

I mean every time you like and subscribe it helps me a lot, it really gives me a confidence boost as you all really enjoy listening to what I say. I'm going to start working a lot harder to get these videos out there. much more regularly rehearsals, you know, but I'm also going to start uploading some commentary videos of my wife and I watching movies, hopefully it'll be something you enjoy, but if not, there will be full video rehearsals. interspersed between them, so feel free to skip the others. Also, if you're more of a fan of really long-form content like my Mandalorian series, I promise there's more stuff like that coming in the future.

This movie is very different from The Mandalorian in that it obviously doesn't have the backstory and giant universe that Star Wars has, so you knew a lot less what to talk about, so I guess that's all I have to say for now. Thanks so much for looking. and I'll see you all later oh and in case I don't see you good afternoon good night and good night