THE TRUMAN SHOW: Of Twitter and Surrealism

By now, we're all familiar with the euphemistically-termed "double movies". ANTZ and A BUG'S LIFE. DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON. VOLCANO and DANTE'S PEAK. And while there's a tendency to divide these sorts of movies into "the good killer asteroid movie" and "the bad talking-insects movie", I find that usually both films suffer from the comparisons. A BUG'S LIFE is charming in the usual Pixar way, but there's no Woody Allen snark like in ANTZ. DEEP IMPACT might have a touching human story (and Elijah Wood!), but where's the aw-shucks-look-at-that-explosion joy of Michael Bay's Criterion-worthy effort?

All of which is to say that THE TRUMAN SHOW stands as superior to EDTV in almost every sense (except, of course, for Liz Hurley in full-blown screw-you-Hugh-Grant-I'm-still-hot-mode).

This is less an insult to EDTV (which does, after all, feature Ellen DeGeneres) than a glowing compliment to THE TRUMAN SHOW. Peter Weir's 1998 film is amazingly prescient about reality TV, but it may be even more relevant to things like Twitter, in that it plays on our culture's desire to document every moment of our lives. There's a bizarre fascination with recording the minutiae of our lives that pervades North American culture at the moment, and this film taps into that in a fascinating way.

It's surreal that I want to read about what you ate for breakfast over the internet, and that I want to share over the internet what I watched last night, but this is how our communities are forming. THE TRUMAN SHOW could make a strong case for belonging in the surreal film category, as the entirety of Truman's world is a strange mirror of the real world. There's the great shot of the rain following Truman, the strange biohazard suit chase, and the scene where Truman stumbles upon an unfinished set. The eerie feeling of something not quite right hangs over Truman for the whole film, and the result is unsettling.

This was also Jim Carrey's first serious dramatic role, in what must have seemed like a huge risk. Carrey knocks it out of the park, dialing his normal over-the-top schtick back to just a glimmer and playing a man whose dreams and ambitions are constantly being crushed and is being pushed to the boundaries of paranoia (but, of course, as the tagline to Tony Scott's ENEMY OF THE STATE reminds us, "It's not paranoia if they're really after you.") I'll argue that Carrey showed glimpses of his potential as a dramatic actor in Joel Schumacher's BATMAN FOREVER, where his Riddler had that dark Mr. Ripley-ish undercurrent thing going on, but here he's a revelation, playing moments with an understated subtlety that allow his bigger moments of on-screen charisma to really endear him to the audience.

THE TRUMAN SHOW is a fascinating document of our culture's fascination with documentation, and has what I'd argue is one of the greatest surrealist shots in cinema. What's not to like?