‘Cultural garbage’ is produced by Hollywood all the time. May it be in the form of sci-fi movies or love westerns, we all agree that most of these films have no significant benefit to the intellect. In fact we all are left awestruck when amongst this ‘garbage’, an intelligent movie is released, that too with a philosophical theme. The Truman Show released in 1998 was one of such movies. Despite following a typical Hollywood progression i.e. introduction, buildup, conflict, climax, the movie introduced and highlighted some key philosophical issues. At the heart of the movie especially is a philosophical character, Truman Burbanks who helps in exposing some of the philosophical depth to this fascinating film.
After watching the movie, many may say "What a hilarious character Truman was!” But few may commend his philosophical qualities. Indeed, Truman is a very wise philosopher who questions everything around him. He is rational, sceptical, has a fluid mind and a knack for seeing things in new ways. He is tough minded as he uses his sensual experience to make conclusions but is also tender minded as he questions the underlying reality. More specifically, Burbanks is both an empiricist and a rationalist. He encounters many oddities such as the camera falling from the sky, the radio pinpointing his exact location and his ‘dead’ dad meeting him. And since it is from these experiences that Truman is infer the nature of the true reality and move a step closer to it, he makes for an outside-in or empirical philosopher. That being said, experience isn’t the only tool used by Truman. For example, Truman could have ridiculed all the above incidents as mere coincidences. Yet the fact that he chooses to stress the role of intellect or reason and make something meaningful out of his experiences goes to show that he is also somewhere an inside out or rational philosopher.
Next, the movie has a philosophical theme loosely based on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as we see that both have a number of similarities. Just as the prisoners in the Allegory are ignorant of what is actually real, Truman is ignorant of the fact that his reality, Sea Haven, is an illusion. It is as if both the prisoner and Truman dwell in this world of being that seems to them to be the only world that exists simply because it follows a logical system; to the prisoners it is logical that shadows wander across the cavernous walls, to Truman it is logical that people act the way should act in a society. Thus we see that, none of the parties expect for there to be any light beyond the illuminated, as what they see can be perceived by them, and thus has to be the only reality. Next we can also compare the people surrounding Truman to the men who have held the prisoners inside the cave. Everyone close to Truman including his ‘mother’, ‘wife’ and his ‘best friend’ are actors who have agreed to conspire against Truman and ‘chained’ him to a pseudo reality just like the jailers in the Allegory of the Cave. Another thing that is common to both the prisoners in Plato’s allegory and Truman in The Truman Show is that both have this inherent fear of exiting their version of reality. The prisoner’s fear originates from the fact that the path to the exit is an unfamiliar one, and may thus be full of dangers. Truman's is fearful of exiting Sea Haven as it is an island surrounded by water. Being a hydrophobic he is afraid of escaping ‘reality’. It is worth mentioning at this point that although the prisoners fear is inherent, Truman’s fear is more or less induced. The prisoners are afraid of the light because they choose to be whereas Truman’s childhood incident with his dad was arguably an orchestrated one. Also another difference as one may observe is that Truman is aware of what exists out of Sea Haven and aspires to discover the unknown knowing there is something beyond the known. The prisoners on the other hand think that everything they know is the known, and since
