The Truman Show as a Postmodern Text: Film Analysis

Introduction: The Truman Show as Postmodern Film

The Truman Show is unequivocally a postmodern text. The only aspect of this production that makes it slightly unconventional within that category is the fact that it is a film rather than a dedicated work of literature. Nevertheless, several critical elements of the plot render it postmodern. At its core, postmodernism involves wildly different associations that are jumbled together and which somehow cohere. Temporal displacements and deliberately obfuscated representations of reality are equally characteristic features. The Truman Show incorporates virtually all of these elements, which confirms that this film is a postmodern text.

Three Competing Layers of Reality

One of the ways The Truman Show demonstrates its postmodern character is through the basic premise of its plot. The film is a movie in which characters within the story watch the life of another person on television. The film's audience therefore spends a considerable amount of time watching an in-film audience observe the life of an unsuspecting reality television star. In this regard, the concept of reality is fundamentally transformed within the film.

This is not merely a movie in which an audience watches fictional — or even historically reenacted — events. It is a film in which reality is split into three distinct parts. First, there is the reality of those watching Truman in the show about his life. Second, there is the constructed reality that the various actors on The Truman Show perform in order to convince Truman that his waking life is genuine rather than staged. Third, there is the growing sense of authentic reality that Truman himself begins to develop as he discovers that his life is not what it appears to be. This blurring of reality with fiction and television is characteristic of postmodern literature's tendency to incorporate wildly disparate elements.

Character Interactions and Postmodern Incongruence

The interaction between characters in the film also supports a postmodern reading. Some of the characters closest to Truman — particularly his wife and his best friend — provide particularly rich material for this interpretation. At one point, when Truman begins to sense that something is not quite normal about his existence, tensions with his wife come to the surface. The scene in which they are driving together typifies postmodernism in several ways.

Truman and his wife are traveling along their normal route when he attempts to confide in her about his growing suspicions. As an actor participating in the conspiracy to keep him ignorant of the fact that he is on television, his wife denies everything. Truman responds by driving erratically in a circular motion, deliberately breaking from routine. In doing so, he frightens her considerably. The dialogue at this moment is significant: at one point she screams, "This is unprofessional!" The incongruence of this exclamation with her situation is quintessentially postmodern. Ostensibly she is fearing for her life, yet rather than reproving Truman for reckless driving or simply expressing relief when he stops, she directs her outburst at the camera crew filming the episode. This kind of incongruence appears in a number of scenes throughout the film and contributes substantially to the postmodern lens through which it can be viewed.

Conclusion: Postmodernism and the Presaging of Reality Television

The Truman Show is undoubtedly a postmodern text. The principal way that viewers become aware of this quality is through the film's presentation of several conflicting and jarring versions of reality. What Truman believes is reality is not real. What characters such as his wife portray as reality is equally false. What the in-film television audience watches is the closest approximation of actual reality available within the story — which in turn leaves the film's own viewers occupying an obscure third-dimensional perspective, watching others observe a reality that is, in actuality, entirely fictional.

Certain temporal qualities of the setting and the dialogue of key characters reinforce this reading. Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the film is postmodern, however, is that it actually presaged the reality television phenomenon that subsequently emerged in the real world — the world of the film's creators and of anyone reading this analysis. That prescience is itself a postmodern gesture: a work of fiction anticipating, and in some sense producing, the reality it depicts.