The Truman Show: How's it Going to End?

Australian director Peter Weir's work shows a variety of thematic interests and includes such original films as The Cars That Ate Paris , Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Witness , Dead Poets Society , Fearless and Master and Commander . He is particularly skilled at exploring characters who find themselves in isolating or alienating conditions, where normal situations get confused with others quite beyond our understanding, thus often creating a disturbingly ‘uncanny’ feeling in his spectators.

The Truman Show, which Weir directed in 1998, tells the story of Truman Bur-bank (the splendidly well-cast Jim Carrey), a person who has been chosen as a new-born baby to be separated from his parents and ‘legally adopted by a corporation’, a television network, in order to become the subject of a bizarre experiment: a real-life soap following him from birth to death. We, the spectators, gradually discover that, unbeknownst to him, everyone in his life is in fact an actor, and that the whole story is masterminded by the sinister director-within-the-film, Christof (Ed Harris). So what hits the audience is not just the surprise of such a discovery, but also the horror of realizing its implications for the man who has unwittingly become its victim.

Adopted children, even under the most favourable of circumstances, always have to deal with issues about their origins and therefore about their ‘real’ identity. In Truman's case, the combination of growing up without biological parents and the bizarre experience of living a life entirely taking place in the context of an artificial environment, a fact reminiscent of what also happens to many children in abusive families, may give us a sense of the traumatic effect all this must have had on his emotional development. Furthermore, as is often the case with only children like Truman who cannot rely on the reality testing and support provided by siblings, he had to become more dependent upon the external adult environment, a malevolently f