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Essay on Truman Show

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The Truman Show

Manipulation and delusion are at the heart of the movie The Truman Show. Carefully crafted, this movie portrays television and its producers as producing a fake environment with a “real person” designed to appeal to the American masses. The smooth packaging lulls the audience into being in on the joke, but perhaps the joke is on the audience to even sit through the almost two hours of bland entertainment.

In fact, the story of Truman Burbank is small town boring, taking place on Seahaven, a diminutive island. Truman believes that he is an insurance broker with a loving wife, Meryl, a nice suburban home, and a best friend. Slowly through a series of unusual events, Truman becomes aware that this quiet, tame life is …show more content…

Certainly, television is capable of being able to bring that immediacy into the viewer’s space.

But most viewers are interested in excitement in their entertainment, which translates into the format and content of the “news” as well as direct entertainment. It is difficult to imagine that television viewers would have watched Truman grow up over almost three decades when even the most engrossing “soap” can not sustain a third of that time period.

Perhaps there is a message here about the content of television. Much of what appears daily on television is boring. Every season, television producers try to sort through what programs will capture the audience – once they define who that audience is. The Truman Story television audience is presumed stupid for being engrossed in the everyday life of an everyday person – perhaps the subtle question is Truman representing them? (Or us?) Why is Christof, the producer of this empty story, considered brilliant for reflecting this vacuum of television programming?

Christof is the epitome of the concept of television media executives selling products to an audience, and securing directly, or indirectly as in The Truman Show (where product promotion arises from the use of products by the “residents” of Seahaven), commercial sponsors to pay for the air time. Christof manipulates all of the components of Truman’s life, and the movie audience feels that they too are

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