1 Despite its dystopian outlook on the society of the spectacle, Peter Weir’s Truman Show remains pervaded with a haunting desire to affirm the persistence and the ultimate irrepressibility of the real. However, there is something deeply paradoxical about Weir’s affirmation of the real. For all its palpable efficacy, the latter is never articulated as a positive presence. While throughout the film both viewers and actors remain confined within the unsurpassable horizon of “The Truman Show” and its mediatized setting, the real figures as a negative emergence, an asignifying gap yawning across the surface of televisual space. This is brilliantly evoked in one of the last scenes of the film, when Truman Burbank finds himself feeling his way along the gigantic white wall which turns out to be literally the horizon of the show’s life-size set: the island of Seahaven. After this terrible discovery, Truman climbs a flight of stairs and stands hesitatingly in front of the exit door that will lead him to a life of freedom in the outside world. Of all the dramatic symbols in this sequence, the one that seems most striking is the square opening of the door, which stands out as an unnaturally dark, depthless aperture in stark contrast with the whiteness of the studio’s wall. In many respects, the presence of the real in the film is precisely like that obscure opening on a life after “Truman Show”: it is an ambiguous event that manifests itself in negative terms—an asignifying hiatus on the surface of the televisual imaginary, a tear in its fictional continuum. It is this particular form of negativity which invests the real with its ambiguity as well as the full intensity of its symptomatic power: looming beyond Truman’s counterfeit surroundings (Seahaven as symbolic cave of factitious projections), the promise of a life of authentic experience “in the real world” is a strongly subversive presence even as it remains a hypothetical idea shrouded in darkness. While the Platonic basis of this ambiguity—the opposition between essences and “false” representations, or simulacra—is implicit in my treatment of Truman Show, my problematic here centers upon the status of the real in a film which problematizes it to such an extent that it appears to project it beyond the Platonic dialectic. More specifically, the core thesis that I propose to develop revolves around a central question: how does the real manifest itself in a world where the factitious representations of the televisual have come to be founded not only as a parallel reality, but as the only reality—a closed universe beyond which there is no other referent? My reading of Truman Show explores this problematic by analyzing the three moments that mark the film’s evolution toward an increasingly provocative questioning of the televisual imaginary and an affirmation of its vulnerability to the symptomatic encroachments of a “reality principle” beyond it, however abstract or hypothetical.

2 In dealing with the first moment, I shall focus on the state of méconnaissance in which Truman lives: his incapacity to grasp his identity and his being-in-the-world as televisual fabrications framed in the gigantic set of a (hyper)reality show. At this point, even his apprehension of the real is in fact a mere “effet de réel” in a mediatized world that stands as a model of reality (Barthes 167-174)—a spectacular setting founded on the ultimate law of the hyperreal: the “precession of simulacra” (Baudrillard, Simulacres 9-68). It is a measure of Truman’s unwitting subjection to this law that his very vision of an alternative existence beyond Seahaven echoes the processes that substitute models and reproductions for their material referents. Within this context of modeling and replication, Truman’s cellar figures as yet another symbolic cave of illusory representations—yet another fabricated scene where factitious topographies, reconstructed faces, and metonymic leftovers of the desired other are the only links between the unknowing actor and a putatively better life beyond Seahaven. It is in this imaginary locus of maps, models, and simulations that Truman first envisions his escape to Fiji and his reunion with Sylvia, the woman of his life. As if duplicating Seahaven’s logic of hyperreality on a microcosmic scale, Truman can only imagine life with the former “Truman Show” actress through his secretive work on a collage of her face made from fragments of models’ photographs. Even on the escapist scene which he manages to set up in his reified environment, the world of authenticity that he embodies in the banished woman is premised on a simulacrum of its anthropomorphic index (Sylvia-as-synthesized-image), and on metonymic residues of her material presence (Sylvia’s cardigan and her pin). Seen in light of the Platonic dialectic outlined above, Truman’s cave of simulated projections is, at this stage, like the counterfeit island that he inhabits: it is a projected ideal and a fantasmic universe that he takes for granted—a universe that he does not question, either in relation to an extrinsic world or in terms of its intrinsic attributes.

3 In a similar context, Christof, the show’s obsessional director, admits that “the world [his hero] inhabits is […] counterfeit” and commodified. It is a televisual domain where every detail of Truman’s life is scripted and broadcast with stunning immediacy, creating an unbroken visual continuum, a field of maximum immanence encompassing spectacle and spectator, commodity and consumer (Debray 384). However, recalling Philip K. Dick’s Time out of Joint, Christof often expresses his conviction that Seahaven as counterfeit and commodified world is a better alternative to the “real” world that surrounds it. Staged on the arena of transnational television programming, every quotidian image-object in the island’s suburban landscape—from the monotonously modular homes to the drinks and knickknacks—appears as a filmic simulacrum of its referential double in the show’s master-model: The Truman Show Catalog (Debord 13). Between the representation of the daily as controlled reality and its condensed projection in the catalog, the “pseudo-world” of the “Truman Show” finds itself twice articulated according to the law of the hyperreal and its mediatized models of reality: the televisual framework of the show and the virtual space of the catalog (Debord 10). The infectious hyperreality of Truman’s life revolves around this invisible subjection of both actor and viewer-consumer to the dictates of the modular system. As far as the viewer is concerned, immersion in the visual and existential experience of the show marks a fundamental impossibility to break away from the cross-referential play between the spectacular world on-screen and the modular world of the catalog. As for Truman, it is not the least reifying aspect of his méconnaissance that the environment which he has come to perceive as second nature is only a designed milieu where literally every thing is a commodity packaged with instrumental finality and promoted on a global scale: “Everything […] on the show is for sale,” as Christof puts it, “from the actors’ wardrobe, food products, to the very homes they live in—all of it available in the Truman catalog.” Expressing its ultimate triumph in the “Truman Show” catalog, the modular system thus implies a double movement of mediation: first, the spectacular mediation of social relations between seemingly autonomous and isolated individuals; second, the economic mediation of those relations by means of the impersonal mechanisms of commodification and standardized consumption. The modular system in Truman Show foregrounds this twofold suturing function of the hyperreal spectacle: a binding yet imperceptible body of intersubjective codes, and a collective network of objects presenting itself as second nature (Baudrillard Système).

4 In a second moment, Truman starts experiencing his first confrontations with the factitiousness of his life in a symptomatic fashion—as unexplainable breaches in the facade of verisimilitude: unaccountable blind spots that signal the eruption of the real, its gaps and discontinuities announcing the limits of the show’s trompe l’œil. Truman’s increasingly problematic relationship to the maddening predictability of his suburban environment is further aggravated by his awareness of scandalous discontinuities in temporal sequence, in the field of mimetic representation, and in the sphere of intersubjective communication. It is in this context that Christof’s leading actor resolves to intensify the emergence of the real within the imaginary space of the script, piercing through the mimetic screen of his televisual world. “Somebody help me! I’m being spontaneous!,” he exclaims to his bewildered wife, Meryl—a statement later concretized through his decision to oppose a strategy of contingent action to a world that stands as an unsurpassable horizon of repetitiveness and prefabricated communication.

5 Truman’s affirmation of his problematic subject position is therefore grounded in a twofold movement which is charged with all the symptomatic power of the real: contingent initiative in the field of action; and the dysfunction of discourse in the domains of representation and intersubjective communication. At this point, it is important to recall that the film dramatizes Truman’s radical attitude by first staging his awareness of communicational blind spots in the logical and discursive structure of the show. Not only does he become mindful of such discontinuities in his daily reality and in his dysfunctional relationship to Meryl, he also consciously chooses to exacerbate them in order to subvert the order of his televisual world at two levels. At the level of intersubjective communication, he starts disrupting the predictable movement of the show by aggressively questioning his wife’s discourse when she falls back on rehashed advertisement lines and postures, redundant information, and hollow commonplaces. Contrary to her mode of communication, the new symbolic space occupied by Truman is premised on a strategic use of unpredictable questions aimed at exposing the discursive and logical limits of the script from a metadiscursive point of view. At the heart of his problematic relation to the factitious/fictitious discursive field of the show are the chilling questions that he addresses to his wife and, indirectly, to Christof and his crew: “Who you talkin’ to?… What does this hafta’ do with anything?” By exposing the irrelevance of Meryl’s rehearsed lines, not only does he invalidate her discursive position, he also expresses his refusal to remain within the confines of the script, therefore invalidating the communicational relevance and mimetic pretensions of the entire “reality” show. Stepping out of script, Truman thus initiates two crucial effects: first, he reveals the factitiousness/fictitiousness of his wife’s discursive stance (your words have nothing to do with any reality outside of the show); second, he asserts his refusal to identify with his subject position within the framework of Christof’s pseudo-world (I have no place in your artificial universe). At the level of action, the problematic character of Truman’s new role is epitomized by his spur-of-the-moment decision to take Meryl to New Orleans—a gesture that foregrounds the discrepancy between his systematic reliance on the contingent event and Christof’s staging of pseudo-events in response to his hero’s unpredictable moves (Boorstin). Contrary to the director’s simulated disasters (the pseudo-forest fire and the pseudo-nuclear event), Truman’s strategy of the unpredictable is genuinely catastrophic inasmuch as it is radically exterior to the show’s representational mechanisms: it pierces through its imaginary screen from the outside, as it were, with an explosive, anarchic drive alien to its manic organization, its visual illusions, and its obsessional mimetism. The paradox behind Truman’s recourse to the spontaneous event as a symptomatic mode of signification—a mode founded in the (a)logical limits and failures of signification itself—recalls Maurice Blanchot’s remarks on the “intensity [of] disaster,” its radical exteriority to any conceptual or representational frame (Blanchot 12). By choosing to incarnate the asignifying power of the symptom at the level of action and communication, Truman comes to embody the striking contrast between the imaginary disasters produced through Christof’s cinematic tricks and the profoundly disturbing disasters of logical, material, and discursive discontinuity within the televisual experience. If, as Blanchot puts it, disaster is a symptomatic eruption which strikes with the “intense, [unexplainable] suddenness of the outside,” then the contingent event in Truman Show is an alogical, asignifying disaster looming at the margin of the spectacle—raising metanarrative questions about its authenticity, its strategies of verisimilitude, and its very legitimacy as an instrument of relevant communication (12). With Truman’s choice to almost literally incarnate the symptom as a form of disastrous action and communication, we witness a dramatic shift in the show from the day-to-day existence of the actor to his struggle to expose and subvert the televisual mechanisms underlying it. From this moment onward, Truman’s endeavor to break away from those mechanisms is at the center of the bonding between the spectators and their alter ego. Identification with the actor through suspension of disbelief and the mimetic illusion on-screen gives way to identification with his shattering of the illusion. (Having said that, I would add that it is not the least ambiguous aspect of Truman’s “awakening” that his very attempts at recovering a “reality principle”—a ground of “ultimate” referentiality—behind the factitious/fictitious facade of Christof’s universe are in turn absorbed into the narrative frame of the reality show!)

6 In the final analysis, however, it is only when he crosses Seahaven’s artificial sea that Truman manages to act out the third moment in his coming-to-awareness—literally “travers[ing] the fantasy” of the show (Žižek 140 ff.). Accordingly, his full resolution of his private drama (his confrontation with the Oedipal guilt and the neurotic paralysis that the ocean triggers in him) allows him to uncover the collective drama at the heart of televisual space—this all-encompassing ocean of immanence where viewers and viewed, subjects and objects remain paralyzed in the dialectic of the mediatized gaze. In braving his inner fears, he manages to “traverse and subvert the fantasy frame that determines the field of social meaning” as it has been projected around him by actors, advertisers, and experts of the spectacle (Žižek 140). Only when he reenacts his primal trauma does Truman succeed in revealing the fantasmic vacuity of his simulated world, literally hitting its absolute limit, exposing at once the finitude and factitiousness of its horizon. However, despite the apparent sense of cathartic closure that it lends to the film’s ending, Truman’s emancipatory decision to “perform [the] symptom” does not seem to promise any long-term liberating effect on his audience: in the realm of the spectacle, the projections and illusions of the televisual cave are not confined within a material locus; they are also an interiorized, subjective space (Watzlawick et al. 238). Notwithstanding the viewers’ vicarious excitement and suffering at his escape plans and his Odyssean passion aboard the Santa Maria, at film’s end they remain incapable of exiting their world of mediatized experience. This gap between the actor’s actual break through the objective space of televisual mediation and his audience’s internalization of such a space as a virtual cognitive horizon forces us to face the profound ironies of the film’s metanarrative dimension. Indeed, like the viewers of Christof’s “Truman Show,” the audience of Weir’s own Truman Show find themselves grappling with the ultimate symptomatic truth of his film: the tacit realization that now that Truman has pierced through the fabricated horizon of his phantasmagoric world—literally putting his finger on the substance of Seahaven’s visual chimeras and vanishing through the black aperture of the real—we are left with the burden of an unsurpassable horizon of our own, one that lies beyond our conscious grasp. The ironies of this unresolved diagnosis are expressed at once tersely and eloquently in the exchange between the two security guards, after the abrupt interruption of the show by the television executives:

FIRST GUARD: What else is on?

SECOND GUARD: [L]et’s see. Where’s the T.V. Guide?

7 Which brings me to the twin questions that haunt Weir’s conception of the televisual. Is life with Truman the record of an existential struggle against a godlike apparatus that derealizes the real “content” of a private drama, converting it into a spectacle literally projected on a global scale? Or is it a story of resignation to a hybrid domain that signals an irreversible supersession of the Platonic dialectic of essence and (“false”) appearance (Deleuze 256ff): an “obscene” interstitial space where the boundary between the private sphere of authentic subjective experience and the public sphere of representations and commodified illusions loses all relevance (Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 130 ff)? In this essay, I have implicitly argued that the terms of these two questions are not mutually exclusive. For it is ultimately the viewers’ self-definition in relation to the show that determines its functions. Watching Weir’s film unfold, it becomes clear that there are two main categories of spectatorship which very often intersect: the spectators who experience the show mainly as mediated spectacle (the barroom audience, for instance); and those who experience it mainly as an im-mediate extension of their own lives (the home viewers). In the former example, the limit between the subjectivity of the viewer and the objectivity of the spectacle is to a great extent still intact, notwithstanding the moments of intense identification with Truman. In the second category, however, the relationship between the private lives of the spectators and that of Truman is much more problematic. (Think of the viewer in the bathtub, genuinely struggling with the agony of vicarious experience, clutching the shower curtain while he watches his hero brave the raging sea.) Meryl aptly conveys the ambiguous fading of the spectator into the spectacle when she declares that “there is no difference between a private life and a public life. My […] life is The ‘Truman Show.’” Here, the objective presence of the show as such acquires a secondary function as it becomes an existential adjunct to the viewers’ daily experience—merging uninterruptedly with their lives. “We find many viewers leave him on all night for comfort,” Christof rightly boasts of the omnipresence of his creation, with its power to create a fuzzy conflation between the projected field of representations/simulacra and the sphere of lived reality, between identification with the other’s tragedy and the impersonal consumption of modular objects and lifestyles. Ultimately, however, when Truman vanishes through the door and the television executives order Simeon to cease transmission, when a stunned Christof finds his creation reduced to a blank surface, the spectators’ collective reaction is anything but fuzzy. In an outburst of utopian élan, they express a sort of spasmodic relief at the sight of the most spectacular event of all: the blind spot in the panoptical gaze of the OmniCam atmosphere. For it is this pregnant moment of symptomatic discontinuity which restores the long hoped-for (albeit short-lived) split between two spheres: the televisual universe, now sucked into the grey emptiness of an expressionless screen; and the unfathomable world into which Truman has just exited for a post-televisual life.