The Truman Show: A Cleverly Disguised Tragedy

while the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit there's nothing fake about Truman himself hello and welcome back to my channel make better media where we discuss and analyze movies and TV shows to see where the writing went Klaw really well 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 being a reality fabricated by a single writer populated by actors a movie that expertly plays with your emotions and makes you question your sense of reality the premise of the movie is fairly unique the questions it poses are certainly similar to the matrix but I'm sure most would agree this movie is almost entirely different it's an interesting question though but I'm sure most people have thought about at some point in their lives what if the reality I see isn't the true reality this is the main question The Truman Show poses but is it well done is the movie well made well if you don't already agree that it is then hopefully this video will show not only that it is well-made but more importantly why it's well-made so without further ado let us begin well for me there is no there is no difference between the private life in a public life my life is my life is the Truman Show Truman Show is a lifestyle it's a noble life it is a truly blessed one the film starts with an excellent opening showing us the credits for the show within the movie and we get these interesting little interviews with the actors that are playing the characters and Truman's life they talk about how being on The Truman Show isn't just an acting job but that it's a lifestyle and Marlon the man who plays Truman's best friend says that nothing on the show is fake it's merely controlled this gives us an excellent look right at the start about what this movie is going to be about is there a difference between the true reality and a manufactured reality if we're unable to tell the difference are you real well if you can't tell does it matter this is an excellent way of setting up the premise of the movie it shows us that the people on the show truly believe they're doing a noble thing they believe all they're doing is making a show that gives hope in life to people who need it they don't see what they've been doing is an awful thing to do to another person they just want to put on the best show possible after the interviews it cuts the Truman talking to himself in front of the mirror and right off the bat we get excellent characterization for Truman he's a dreamer someone who wants to be an adventurer but as we know he's been trapped as he's initially leaving for work we get his catchphrase oh good afternoon and then a light falls from the sky I was initially confused by this I thought this was something that should certainly tip him off to something being not right but then I realized that if this would happened to me the fact that I was on a TV show that was constantly broadcasting my life would be so far from my mind but now we see Truman on his morning commute to work and the theory I have that I really hope is true is when he's driving his car the radio always plays classical music this could be because the music would be public domain and royalty-free to play on live TV but after Truman gets to work we get the prelude to his tragic love story with Lauren is something we don't really understand when first watching but it does serve to set up his desire to go to Fiji now one of his co-workers gives him a file telling him that he has to go across the bay in order to close a deal and this is where we also get Truman's intense fear of the ocean but this is something I don't really understand all of this is scripted 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 some more drama for the TV show or maybe they want to test him to see if he has overcome that fear so they know if they need to concoct more ways to keep him on the island I don't know it's not really a huge deal and there are potential answers to this I guess it's just something I wish we could have seen however the efficiency with which this movie characterizes Truman is honestly incredible because right after that we get Truman talking to his best friend telling him how he wants to leave he wants to get off the island and go to Fiji but right after this we get flashbacks of Truman when he lost his father and a boating accident something that would obviously be tragic but to find out that not only was it not real but to know that it was manufactured that's something that no human has ever really had to deal with that's really the beauty of this movie this premise is something that no one has ever actually gone through but we can almost all relate to on a fundamental level because it's something you can't actually prove isn't happening to you right now it's an existential fear that pretty much anyone can feel but we really don't understand the ramifications it would have if that fear turned out to be true but after his time at the beach he walks past his father on the street he sees him and tries to talk to him but before he can really say anything people take him away onto a bus this gets explained as the law enforcement trying to clean up the city of homeless people but you can see that it certainly sparked something in Truman it sparks the search for truth this is when he begins to question the things around him so he goes and talks to his mother about what happened and she tells him that she sees his father all the time implying that it was just a hallucination I just can't get over the absolute 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 crafts these scenarios so well it puts them in an almost fun light it makes it so you don't truly feel just how tragic all of this is now we get another flashback this time it's true Minh seeing Lauren and the scene gives us one of those love at first sight looks after that we get a scene of a dance party where he's dancing with Meryl but he sees Lauren through the crowd and it's obvious that he wants to talk to her but after a few seconds we see Lauren being taken away by people in suits this is showing us that even Truman's relationship with his now-wife is something that was manufactured forced a path that Truman didn't want to take then it cuts the Truman being in a college library where he runs into Lauren again and the fact that she's here and so close to Truman definitely makes it seem like she snuck onto the set she's also wearing a pen that says how is it going to end this shows us that she truly cares for Truman and she wants him to know the truth this is the only person ever in Truman's life that is genuinely cared for him and she's ripped away because of that fact because she cares and because she's real she has no place in Truman's life now we see the picture that Truman is creating trying to recreate line directly behind a picture of his wife we cut to Truman in his car and his radio begins to malfunction and he hears people talking about his every move this is where Truman truly begins to realize that something is not right he starts feeling paranoid he begins acting erratically like he's 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 even if all this happened to anyone except the most paranoid of us that we would fully realize that our entire life was fake every relationship we've ever had has been scripted and every path we've taken was laid before us by a screenwriter now we get the sequence where Truman is trying to get into the hospital to see his wife and we get the hilarious bit of all the ways the showrunners try to organically block his path after that though he goes to a travel agency to get a ticket to Fiji and I love all the little hints they have around Truman trying to discourage him from traveling there's the poster warning about disease and terrorism and the poster had the plane getting struck by lightning it's all just wonderful little details now we see where Truman realizes the people around him are pretty much stuck on a loop and this is where we start to see the beginning of his near psychological breakdown he traps Merrill in the car with him and begins driving at high speeds and we clearly see that he's trying to throw off whatever is causing things to block his way he seems to throw off the showrunners and makes it all the way to the bridge where we see his fear of the ocean kick in as he's unable to cross the bridge but to overcome this he grabs marrows hand and throws it onto the wheel closes his eyes and stomps on the gas pedal this is the kind of consistent character writing I love to see even though he's in the midst of a psychological break he still holds on to this fear of the ocean the writers could have just as easily made Truman forget about this fear given the situation but they remembered it and they got creative and they wrote around it it may seem small but these are the kinds of things that are unappreciated nowadays the parts of stories that make these characters so believable and relatable this is what defines the art form to me Truman gets taken back home after failing to leave the island and he begins to get suspicious of Merrill this is also where we get the part of the movie that always makes me laugh the hardest why don't you let me fix you some of this Nemo cocoa drink all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of mountain occur agua no artificial sweeteners what the hell are you talking about who are you talking to I've tasted other Coco's this is the best after that though Merrill pulls a knife on him and he grabs her and she yells do something this clearly tips him off to the fact that she's talking to someone other than him and I just have to say the casting of Jim Carrey for this movie could not have been more perfect he straddles the line between being a tragic character and an almost cartoonish character with flawless precision I really couldn't imagine how this movie would have turned out had the role gone to anyone else but now we see one of the hardest parts of the movie for me to watch Truman is sitting on 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 he talks to Truman about the times they had growing up together then it cuts to the showrunners feeding him the lines and he tells Truman that he would walk into traffic for him and that the last thing he would ever do is lie to him it's so hard to watch because I've had friendships like this people that I could trust with my life and if I were to find out that they'd been fed lines through the entire relationship that everything they had ever said to me had been a lie it would be soul-crushing now we get an interview with the show's creator and they take calls and one of those calls us from Lauren she calls Kristoff a liar and a manipulator but Kristoff uses this as an excuse to justify what he's done he tells her that he's given Truman the ability to lead 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 believe the soul of the movie comes from it's a true triumph of the human spirit or even with a god-like figure that can actually control pretty much all the factors of Truman's life he is still able to overcome all the obstacles laid before him and still find the truth that he's seeking it's really beautiful after the interview we see Truman go back to his normal life we see him go through the routine he went through at the start of the movie but at the end of the day we see him fall asleep in the basement and Truman goes missing he's escaped and the whole town starts to look for him but this is where I feel like I need to give the movie some criticism even if they are able to find him if they find him like this what is he supposed to think how could they possibly expect to save the show at this point now they find Truman out on the ocean sailing out to sea but Christoph still wants to stop him so they caused a storm to get him to turn back but Truman is still determined to make it they go as far as hitting his boat with lightning and causing Truman to fall into the water and Christoph gives a line to show that he's willing to let Truman die 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 makes it back to the boat and we get one of my favorite lines from the show to me this perfectly encapsulates Truman his pure determination to escape his manufactured life and into the real one christophe said earlier in the interview we accept the reality were given but Truman hasn't done that he's rejected the fictional reality and has a desperate need to escape it he wasn't given the option to find the truth he took it for himself he didn't want to know the truth he needed to after he makes it to the exit and before he leaves Christoph talks to him he tells him that there's no more truth out there than in here and then nothing bad can happen to him in the world he's created Christoph asks him to say something and instead of giving some grandiose speech or anything like that he just looks at him and gives him the canned line he's used over and over again say something god damn it you're on television you lied to the whole world [Music] in case I don't say yeah good afternoon good evening and good night this is because he understands what Christoph wants and he doesn't want to give it to him he realizes that Christoph would want some amazing grand finale to this show that's been on air for almost 30 years so Truman basically gives him the biggest middle finger possible after this the movie ends on an entirely upbeat note with Truman stepping out into the real world and all the people watching cheering and clapping but this is a big part of what makes this movie truly great because the best movies don't leave you ready to move on to something else they'll make you sit and wonder just what the hell is gonna happen next because while this movie seemingly has a happy ending I think a good number of people realize is not going to stay that way this is simply a cleverly disguised tragedy after realizing that everything Truman is known turned out to be a lie how could he possibly trust anything ever again this is what I was talking about earlier when it came to not being able to fully understand the ramifications of something like this we have no baseline for what will happen to people that go through this we can only imagine and when you add on the fact that Truman is the most famous person in the world at this point I feel he will never be able to discern reality from fabrication if someone were to just hold the door open for him he'd have to wonder why would it be because they're just polite or would it be because he's Truman or were they told to do that by some script writer and that paranoia would seep into every facet of his life his mother father wife and best friend were all manufactured relationships how would he get close to anyone without wondering whether or not they'd been fed lines from someone else and now this is where I wanted to talk about Truman as a character the very first lines we get from Truman is him pretending to be an adventurer a nearly 30-year old man still hanging on to his childhood fantasy of going out and exploring the world this opening scene with Truman tells us so much of what we need to know about him and it does so in a perfectly natural way it's just a man getting ready for work pretending to be a mountaineer in the mirror but it's really so much more it's his one real desire to escape his normal life and explore the world just it's just wonderful but as the movie goes on we start to see things be less whimsical less cartoony it starts to become darker it begins with the flashbacks of his father drowning then he actually sees his father and his own mother lies to him then we get the flashbacks of Lauren and we see that he isn't truly happy in the marriage he has now and to me the awfulness of the situation truly sets in when his best friend is shown to be feeding him can line straight from Christoph this movie takes a person that I'm sure most people can relate to and feel empathy towards puts him in a situation that could have been conceived by a Nazi psychologist and it presses him just hard enough for cracks to start forming but it never breaks him through all of it he holds on to his desire to escape his cage and see the truth that comes with breaking out now I want to get back to the scene where Truman is sailing out to sea because honestly I'll never truly be done talking about it his search for knowledge has allowed him to conquer his fear of the ocean and achieve his goal of making it off the island we know 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 I feel like there was a real genius behind it as Truman is sailing out to sea we get this strong sense that he really hopes he's wrong about everything he suspects that he'll just eventually reach land and be able to see the rest of the world it's like when you suspect your significant other of cheating on you you hope you're wrong but you still need to know the truth you won't be any better off from knowing the truth in fact it will likely make your life worse at least temporarily but what I'm saying is Truman won't be any better off from learning the truth either in fact his life is about to get much much harder but he needs to know he needs to know if the suspicions he has about his entire life are true and when he finally crashes into that wall it's a one-to-one metaphor of him crashing into reality his hope is that he's wrong about all of this but him finding the truth is him literally hitting a wall that's something that really resonates with me and I feel like it would resonate with many people and all this has made so much better by the fact that the script is so tightly written I've thrown a couple minor criticisms at this movie and I'm sure there are more like the fact that they have 5,000 cameras and the night Truman escapes they have two people watching them it's a little silly but even then they all thought that he had essentially gone back to normal this happened after his wife had left him so there must have been a good amount of time between his last escape attempt in this one where nothing truly of note 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 is even when looked at objectively this film holds up extremely well to scrutiny that's why saying stuff like this every single movie will fall apart when you start picking it apart objectively seems so strange to me because no I don't believe every movie will fall apart when looked at objectively it might be true that every movie has flaws when looked at objectively but even then I couldn't be certain because I haven't critically analysed every single movie in existence however a movie having objective flaws is not the same as that falling apart that's a truly ridiculous statement and an insult to writers that actually take time with their scripts to ensure that they're internally sound and consistent as possible maybe it's true that no story will ever be perfect but the effort to make it as close as possible should always be appreciated now with all that out of the way I'll say this this movie is a bonafide masterpiece the writing is absolutely top-notch dialogue never feels out of place or unnatural I never noticed any editing mistakes and the acting is phenomenal Edie Harris is fantastic Laura Linney and Noah Emmerich do a stand-up job 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 a goofy fun guy to a man wallowing in sadness over the death of his father to someone having a nervous breakdown and essentially holding his wife hostage back to a goofy guy and then to a man who's finally broken free of his proverbial chains all without missing a single beat I said before I couldn't imagine this role being played by anyone else and I really believe that Jim Carrey becomes Truman and it's magnificent to see so if you've made it this far in the video and you haven't seen this movie yet to it now I promise you won't be disappointed even with everything mostly spoiled for you it doesn't matter this is a movie you could watch 10 times in a row and still find new stuff to appreciate in the door I don't really like giving numbers to movies because it's really hard to stay consistent with them but I know people appreciate them so I would give this movie at nine out of 10 easily everything is just so damn well done so now I think I've said everything I wanted to say about this movie so the review is over and I just wanted to talk a little bit about what I hope to do with my channel I really enjoy analyzing media and I hope to be able to keep doing it but I likely won't be able to keep doing that if I'm unable to grow an audience so I want to say every time you guys like and subscribe it helps me a lot it really gives me a confidence boost that you all actually enjoy listening to what I'm saying I'm going to start working a lot harder on getting these videos out a lot more regularly the actual you know si ones but I'm also going to start uploading some commentary videos of my wife and I watching movies hopefully that'll be something for you to enjoy but if not there will be full-blown video essays interspersed between them so feel free to skip the other ones also if you're more of a fan of the really long content like my Mandalorian series I promise more stuff like that will be coming in the future this movie is just a lot different from the Mandalorian as it obviously doesn't have the background in giant universe that Star Wars has so there was just you know a lot less for me to talk about so I guess that's really all I had to say for now a big thank you for watching and I'll catch you all later oh and in case I don't see you good afternoon good evening and good night

Channel: MakeBetterMedia

Views: 1,678,476

Rating: 4.9543395 out of 5

Keywords: The Truman Show, Jim Carrey, Movie, Criticism, critique, ed harris, video, essay, film, drama

Id: MAX9qWiJxvU

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020