¶ … Truman Show is unequivocally a postmodern text. The only facet of this production that makes it slightly less unconventionally postmodern is the fact that it is a movie instead of a dedicated work of literature. Still, there are several critical aspects of the plot of this movie that render it postmodern. At its core, postmodernism is about wildly different associations that are jumbled together and which work, somehow. There are also temporal displacements and aspects of reality that are similarly obfuscated. The Truman Show incorporates virtually all of these elements in its plot, which proves that this film is definitely a postmodern text. One of the ways that The Truman Show indicates that it actually is a study of postmodern literature is in the basic premise of the plot itself, which certainly reinforces this notion. This movie is actually a movie in which there are people who are watching the life of another person on television. Thus, the film's audience spends a fair amount of time watching an audience in the movie viewing the life of an unsuspecting reality television star. In this regard, what is reality is certainly transformed within the film. This is not merely a movie in which the audience watches fictional, or even historically reenacted, events. It is a film in which reality is split into three parts. There is the reality of those watching Truman in the show about his life. There is the reality that the various actors on the Truman show pretend is reality to actually fool Truman into thinking that his waking consciousness is preoccupied with life instead of a television show. Thirdly, there is the growing sense of reality that Truman himself engenders when he begins to discover that his life is not as real as it is supposed to be. This blurring of reality with fiction and television is certainly demonstrative of postmodernism's tendency to incorporate wildly disparate elements.

The interaction between the characters in this film also supports the notion that it is actually...

Some of the characters that are closest to Truman, such as his wife and his best friend, help to provide the fodder for a postmodern interpretation of this movie. For instance, Truman is having problems with his wife at one point, particularly when he begins to become aware that there is something that is not quite normal about his existence. The scene in which he is driving with his wife typifies postmodernism in a couple of ways. Truman and his wife are driving along in their normal routine, as he attempts to confide in her about his suspicions. As an actor who is part of the conspiracy to prevent him from knowing he is on television, Truman's wife, of course, denies this fact. He responds by driving erratically in a circular motion, varying his routine. In the process of doing so he gives her a great fright. The dialogue at this point is fairly important, as at one point she screams out "this is unprofessional!" The incongruence of this exclamation with the situation in which Truman's wife is in is quintessentially postmodern. Allegedly she is fearing for her life, but instead of reproving Truman for his reckless driving or screaming for joy that he stopped, she instead yells to the camera crew at the people that are filming this particular episode. This sort of incongruence is typified in a number of scenes and contributes to the postmodern lens with which this film can be viewed.
This scene is also indicative of the same sort of temporal mix-ups that characterize postmodern literature. Truman's point in driving rapidly in a circle is that whenever he comes to that particular intersection, he sees the same things, the same people, engaging in the same activities. However, the crux of this realization of his is that he sees these things almost anachronistically, since no matter what type he goes to that intersection they are always there. Therefore, his erratic driving is actually an experiment to test the temporal inconsistency (or unnatural consistency of the activity of people at…