The Truman Show (1998), a dramatic movie with many documentary elements

I watched The Truman Show, a drama film with many documentary elements, and wrote a movie review.

 

The movie we’re going to analyze for documentary elements is The Truman Show (1998). Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the movie, is an ordinary working man. He is married to a woman named Meryl, works for an insurance company, and has a phobia of water after watching his poetic father drown as a child. But one day, he meets his father in the street, whom he thought had drowned, and watches him being dragged away by an unknown person, convinced that something is not quite right with his life. He is the star of The Truman Show, which is broadcast live 24 hours a day. Viewers around the world have watched him from birth to the present day, when he is nearly 30 years old. He’s a star, but he doesn’t realize it. His main characters are all actors and he lives in a studio, but he doesn’t know it until he meets Sylvia. When Truman meets Sylvia, the woman of his dreams in college, he is told by her that everything is a fake, created for him, but when he hears that she is going to the Fiji Islands, he decides to go in search of her, even if it is too late. After several failed attempts to leave with his wife, he realizes that he cannot trust even his family and friends and tries to escape his home alone. Finally finding Truman, who has gone to the sea to escape the cameras, the producers of the program try unsuccessfully to bring him back by capitalizing on his fear of water. Finally, Truman sets out into the world in search of true freedom.

 

 

The theme of the movie can be summarized in the sentence, “If your life is full of lies, if everything you’ve ever believed in is a handful of fun to others, can you laugh? I remember watching this movie at a very young age and being shocked. I couldn’t easily shake the thought that the world I was living in was a lie and that my family and friends might be actors hired by the government. The movie had a strong sense of reality, and it made me wonder if the world I was living in was as well.
I think there are many documentary elements in The Truman Show. First of all, the opening sequence of the movie. The movie opens with an interview with the producers of The Truman Show. This part of the movie takes the form of an expository documentary. There are also interviews with the actors who participate in The Truman Show. They talk about Truman’s life being broadcast live around the world, calling it a noble and blessed life. But is Truman’s life sublime and blessed? It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to realize that everything you know about reality is a lie, and that the people you trusted are fictionalized in the medium of broadcasting.
If the opening sequence of the movie The Truman Show can be compared to a narrative documentary, then the footage of Truman that makes up the majority of the movie is an observational documentary. By its very nature, The Truman Show is unscripted. The cameras are hidden all over the place, and the people acting around Truman try to make sure that Truman and themselves are as visible to the camera as possible without Truman realizing it. The way Truman is captured on camera is similar to an observational documentary, where cameras are set up all over the place and the action is captured as it happens. The Truman Show is full of documentary elements. It’s a combination of several documentary elements that come together to create a movie that feels like a documentary. In a way, The Truman Show can be said to be a movie about making a documentary, and the process of making it makes the viewer recognize it as a documentary that records reality rather than a scripted movie.
We can continue to think about the theme of the movie and the issues raised by the documentary by showing Truman who was deprived of his freedom when everyone is given one right, freedom. We can watch the movie and think, “We set our direction, look ahead, and expect change through the will to choose. However, there is no hope in a choice without will, there is no hope in a future without expectation, and there is no effort in a human being without hope. Choices have consequences, and consequences require responsibility. This movie can be said to be a drama with a lot of documentary elements, as it raises a single issue: ‘Taking responsibility and making choices are our own affairs, not anyone else’s.’