Entry 11: The Truman Show: some quotations

We might also ask if the door marked 'Exit' through which Truman goes at the end of the film, leaving behind the world he had known until then, is in fact death. Does he commit suicide? Winnicott remarks that suicide is one possible outcome for the false self personality, even the only way to keep the true self safe. In a more metaphorical sense, though, in the healthiest outcome the old self has to be killed off in order to give freedom to the true self - not suicide then, but a kind of re-birth (see Milner, 1952).

We think similar arguments can come up in relation to psychoanalytic practice. Are we always justified in interfering with our patients' defences, with the lies and deceptions that may have become part and parcel of their identities, and have been put in place to deal with intolerable realities or prospects? If there is too little of a solid kind in place, if there are no good internal objects, no 'going on being' of a true self which can have some sense of this being acceptable or bearable, if there is too much hatred or destructiveness - is it ethical in such cases to begin to dismantle defensive systems that have enabled someone to get by? Is such an enterprise at times arrogance, or even cruelty? Are we always to take the strenuous and heroic side of the courageous Truman himself?

This raises a possibility I had not thought of and that no one so far has mentioned.  Is Truman in going through that door committing suicide?  He disappears, does he not, rather like dying.  The authors of the article interpret this differently.  They suggest that his going out the door represents a symbolic death necessary for emotional rebirth.  But if going out the door is suicide, then this is a bleak film indeed because it suggests that there is no way to be true to one's self, since one has been raised in a world of falsity.

On page 143 of the reader, we find that odd article by Slavoj Zizek.  He would seem to conclude that falseness lies at the heart of the capitalist consumer society.  There is no escape. He writes:

The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him permanently. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia.
So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, "real social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show.

This is hard reading but we have seen suggestions of it before in Lasch's claim that we relate to consumer objects as fantasy objects and that we have lost our ability to tell the inside from the outside, the false from the real.

The article called "Escaping to Reality" about the Truman Show as a search for the truth seems more optimistic.  He writes:

But Truman does discover the truth that turns his live around and paves the way for genuine authenticity.  Jesus Christ, who called himself the Son of Man, offered the promise of an everlasting life--the best kind of life we can hope for.  That kind of life, he promised, is available to anyone who believes in him, for he is "the way, the truth, and the life."  In conclusion, it is fitting for us to recall his words, "you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." (RD 156)

Looking around for readings for next quarter I found a couple of more quotations from "Mapping the Culture of Control: Seeing Through the Truman Show" by J. Macgregor Wise in Television and New Media:

His second defeat is the thought of escape. Scott McQuire (2000) writes, "While The Truman Show provided a safety valve with the possibility that Truman can eventually escape his fishbowl exposure, 'real' television has never proved so easy to step outside" (p. 150). It appears at first that Tru­man has triumphed, defeating Christof and leaving the show. But he is not leaving the society of control, he merely exits from one institution. It is instructive to compare Truman with Number Six in "The Prisoner" who eventually escapes The Village and returns to London, only to have the door of his old flat swing open automatically as those in The Village did (Rakoff 1998). London has become The Village. Perhaps this is a bit of com­fort that The Truman Show provides its audience: that there are limits to the culture of control, that it is only a television show after all and after the show is over everyone can go home. But in showing the world of Truman as an institution, albeit one that seems total, The Truman Show is ultimately a vision of a disciplinary apparatus (while "The Prisoner" ends up being a vision of the proliferation of control). The film provides us glimpses of the society of control to come, but comforts us with the notion that it will soon be over and we, and Truman, can leave. As I wrote earlier in the article, if we are feeling nostalgia for a disciplinary regime, if the idea that "it's only a disciplinary institution" gives us comfort, the society of control must be ter­rifying indeed.

One cannot assume that one can separate oneself from society, for we are social through and through. There is no outside from which to challenge the society of control, though the rise of conservative nationalist and religious movements globally evidence attempts to do so (see Castells 1997; Hardt 1998b). We cannot reject consumerism absolutely because we are consum­ers through and through. What we can hope to do is exercise "the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and

even rarer, thing that might be worth saying" (Deleuze 1995, 129). The soci­ety of control is a smoothing machine that smooths things out, grinds things down, and then striates them again (cf. Bogard 2000). A vacuole of noncommunication is a hiccup in the smoothing process of our everyday lives (for example, events like Buy Nothing Day or Television Turn-Off Week, promoted by the Adbusters Media Foundation). In the society of control, in the branding of everyday life, we are always already complicit: watching and consuming.

In watching The Truman Show, we watch ourselves watching. The first half of the film involves us with the events of Truman's life as television viewers. We then pull back to view (from the point-of-view of the television set) the fictional audience watching Truman. We begin to question our own viewing practice, the fun that we, the audience sitting in the theater, have been having at Truman's expense. This double view (of program and audi­ence) emphasizes our complicity with the society of control, not as victims but as part of its apparatus. This potential discomfiture of the theater audi­ence is an important moment of effectivity for the film, but in the end it is a solitary one. The film presents no solution except for trying to make the society of control disciplinary again. Perhaps this is because we are familiar enough with the disciplinary society that we know what to do, we have our strategies and tactics well in hand, they are familiar. But the society of con­trol is still quite unfamiliar; if anything, it seems to feed off of our old resistances.

How to resist the society of control? Brian Massumi (1998, 61) suggests productive interference patterns both inside and outside the media: excess, deficiency, and humor make one unassimiable; or tactical noncommunica­tion that is joyful and invocative. Deleuze's (1995) final suggestion seems to reemphasize that in a society of control it is with the politics of everyday life (cf. de Certeau 1984), of banality (cf. Seigworth 2000), of the quotidian (cf. Lefebvre 1971) that we must concern ourselves:

What we most lack is a belief in the world, we've quite lost the world, it's been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however in­conspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.... Our ability to resist control, or our submis­sion to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. (Deleuze 1995, 176)