Good Morning, Good Afternoon, and Good Night: The Truman Show & Plato's Cave

**SPOILER ALERT**

     “All men by nature desire to know” is how Aristotle begins his Metaphysics. Pope St. John Paul II echoes the Philosopher in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, “All men desire to know, and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, how things really are.” Peter Weir’s now classic film The Truman Show (1998) tells the story of one such individual’s search for “how things really are.”

     The Truman Show follows Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman whose entire reality is a television show and he has been the unwitting star since his televised birth. Everyone in his life from his wife, to his best friend, and the extras walking down the street are actors. The Truman Show “never sleeps - broadcasting live and unedited 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, around the globe...taped in the world’s largest studio, one of only two man-made structures visible from space, [with] the longest running documentary soap opera in history, now in its 30th great year.” But, Weir’s film is not just a masterclass satire about reality television, it is a Platonic parable retold in high-definition.

Christof, the Man-In-The-Moon

     Christof is “the show's conceiver, creator, [and] tele-visionary.” who watches and directs every facet of Truman’s world from the things people say to the very weather. He considers himself a “creator...[of] a show—that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.” It does as much because, as Christof says himself the audience has, “become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We are tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself.”

     Christof is, in Platonic language, the Demiurge: the being who “fashioned and shaped” Truman’s material world (Timaeus, 28a ff.). In later Gnostic traditions such as the early Christian heresy of Marcionism, the Demiurge becomes an antagonizing force who creates the material world against the benevolent spiritual God. It becomes a false dichotomy between the material and the spiritual, between the Old Testament and the New Testament: “Marcion makes his gods unequal: one judicial, harsh, mighty in war; the other mild, placid, and simply good and excellent” (Tertullian, “Against Marcion,” 6). Christof is the latter Demiurge.

     Christof is not a Christ figure, but an anti-Christ who wants to keep Truman in his fabricated world. He wants Truman to remain in “Plato’s cave” where reality is only a shadow of the outside world. When Truman is “released from [his] shackles and cured of [his] ignorance” (Republic, 7) at the studio door on the cusp of the outer world—the real world outside the television studio—Christof speaks to him from the control room in the heavens: “You can leave if you want [but I don’t want you to]. I won’t try to stop you [but I am right now].”

     Christof attempts to keep Truman in the artificial world using fear. He manufactures a traumatic event of his dad drowning at sea to keep him on the island of Seahaven. When Truman faces his fear and finds the door out, Christof resorts to fear once more, “you won’t survive out there. You don’t know what to do, where to go.” When that does not seem to work Christof resorts to psychological manipulation, “Truman, I’ve watched you your whole life. I saw you take your first step, your first word, your first kiss. I know you better than you know yourself. You’re not going to walk out that door.” But Truman does.

The Audience, who Entertains Itself to Death

     When Truman walks out of Plato’s cave into the real world, everyone rejoices except for Christof. The audience who has watched Truman grow up, cried when he cried, slept while he slept, rejoices when he escapes. But, they are celebrating a television show, not the real Truman. The most disturbing character in The Truman Show is not Christof, but the audience inside the film. In the film’s world, “‘Truman’ has always enjoyed top ten status.” They cheer Truman while being entertained by his captivity. The irony is beautifully summed up by a security guard (played by Joel McKinnon Miller) who says, after all the events, “what else is on?” In the film, only Sylvia, Truman’s love interest, rejoices with the real Truman.

Sylvia, the Evangelist

     Sylvia is Truman’s high school crush and long-lasting (though hidden) love interest in the film. She is the bearer of good-news; the first person in the film to try and reveal the truth to Truman. Of course, just like the Gospel, the good news of salvation comes with the bad news of needing saving: “the ‘reverse side’ of the Good News that Jesus is the Savior of all men, [is] that all need salvation” (CCC 389). Sylvia is Truman’s Beatrice. Her love calls Truman and leads him out of Plato’s cave into the light. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “Love is not merely a sentiment. It is a light — in the end the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dark” (Deus Caritas Est §39).

Truman, the Everyman

     Truman is the only “true man” in Seahaven; everyone else is an actor. He is the prisoner in Plato’s cave who begins to notice that something is wrong with the reality presented to him. The sun flickers. The rain falls on only one man. The same neighbors pass him at the same time every day. A light falls from the sky. He meets resistance and discomfort but finally manages to “turn [his] neck around, walk, and look towards the light” (Republic, 7). When Christof is asked why Truman has “never come close to discovering the true nature of his world,” he answers, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.” When Socrates asks the same Glaucon responds, “How could they see anything else if they were forced to keep their heads still for their whole life?” (Republic, 7). But Truman escapes the tunnel vision presented to hum because he longs for more.

     C.S. Lewis names Truman’s metaphysical homesickness — sehnsucht — a homesickness for a place we’ve never yet been to. Lewis’ diagnosis is “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity, III. 10.). Truman is not running from Seahaven; he is running to Truth. When Truman finally faces his fear and sails from Seahaven, Christof unleashes a storm which becomes the gatekeeper of the cave. But Truman does what every man must do: risk everything, even death, in pursuit of Love and Truth.