The Truman Show The X-Files
Alleva, Richard
he Truman Show is an ingenious toy of a movie, and it's not the fault of its director, Peter Weir, or its writer, Andrew Niccol, that the word "profound" has been attached to their...
...This artistry is in the service of evil since it has forced a human being to grow up within the bubble of a lie...
...Yet it is the visual intricacy of this lie that makes The Truman Show as fascinating to us as to the TV audience within the movie...
...the local newspaper's headlines that speak directly to Truman's puzzlements...
...This brings me to my basic reservation about the movie...
...On the simplest--and for me the most pleasurable--plane, it is a grand justification of paranoia...
...Truman also works as a portrait of the Artist-Scientist affronted by the autonomous life his creation takes on...
...Peter Weir commandeered the actual community of Seaside, Florida, to represent "Seahaven," but he and his staff obviously repainted and reconstructed the place to project smilebutton cuteness on a monstrous scale...
...The rest of the movie shows his growing doubts and his efforts to escape...
...Remember, "The Truman Show" is supposed to have been on the air for thirty years, nonstop, in an era marked by a certain amount of viewer and voter apathy, to be sure, but it is also a time of countless interest groups and Commonweal 2 0 August 14, 1998 government agencies quite ready to spring into action on behalf of all sorts of victims...
...The Truman Show is, of course, a satire of an America enslaved by media-filtered information...
...True, we are told that a minority of Truman's audience has protested on his behalf, but it seems to be an insignificant faction, almost something that can be dismissed as a lunatic fringe...
...His problem is his handsome face, which becomes inexpressive and blobby when magnified, while her vocal limitations are more apparent on large movie stereo speakers than in our TV sets...
...The fascination of the show is, purportedly, Truman's absolutely sincere, unacted response to every situation Christof fabricates and that the other (professional) actors pretend to be involved by...
...That's not the case with The Truman Show in which ingeniousness is all...
...Like Wag the Dog, Truman contains a good deal of manufactured pessimism about our society disguised as stylized satire...
...He's spiritually centered, all right, but his center contains nothing but the hunger to manipulate...
...For thirty years the show captivates audiences, but then various accidents arouse Truman's first suspicions that he is living in an unreality...
...Of course, it's Jim Carey's work that has drawn publicity and predictions of an Oscar nomination, and, yes, Carey is generally good at portraying Truman's innocence and yearning...
...The air of smug calm t h a t t h i s show-biz Dr.Frankenstein exudes must have come from many sessions with a "spiritual advisor" or yoga instructor, but it's not the c a l l of compassion...
...This view, which makes Christof the real protagonist of the story, is reinforced by the tacit power of Ed Harris's performance...
...The Truman Show is not refulgent: its wit, invention, charm completely fulfill the script's design but only fulfill it...
...he Truman Show is an ingenious toy of a movie, and it's not the fault of its director, Peter Weir, or its writer, Andrew Niccol, that the word "profound" has been attached to their production...
...But in order for this satire to work, we have to suspend an awful lot of our awareness of the way our world really behaves...
...Intriguingly, the artistry of the movie is almost at one with the artistry that the television people have employed in confecting Truman's world...
...As an unwanted foundling, Truman Burbank was adopted by a media corporation, and a television producer named Christof (Ed Harris) created "The Truman Show" around the child with actors portraying his parents, friends, and fellow townspeople in a community, Seahaven, that synthesizes every small town you've ever seen on Norman Rockwell covers for the Saturday Evening Post...
...The rest is noise...
...Harris, on the other hand, makes Christof a real piece of work...
...Perhaps both actors will come across to better advantage when this galumphing movie is reduced to video...
...The X-Files joins the pack: one rhythmless, unmagical stunt after another, practically no narrative coherence, Alien-type monsters, wisecracks instead of literate dialogue, and--worst of all--a soundtrack that pulverizes the audience with sheer volume instead of making its collective skin crawl...
...Christof is an empty vessel, and Harris's performance beautifully conveys how frightening a shallow person can be...
...But the comic charge of this film comes from the way Seahaven benevolently takes charge of Truman's life: the traffic that all too carefully spares our hero when he recklessly runs into it...
...I liked all the episodes that had nothing to do with Agent Mulder's search for the Unseen Forces that Control the Universe, but instead were autonomous little creature features with ingenious sci-fi updates on vampires, Loch Ness monsters, and doppelgangers, as well as a guy who could pour himself through keyholes and into toilet bowls...
...The fact that he is screaming proves Truman's inherent canniness, for he already senses the complexity awaiting him in a real world not constructed with him as its coddled center...
...In the real world, as cruel as it is, Christof would have Senate committees breathing down his neck as well as Mike Wallace and Katie Couric...
...Groundhog Day, to cite another comedy with an ingenious premise, had precisely this aesthetic abundance...
...Truman is a bauble, but let's not underrate it just because the initial critical response has overestimated it...
...Then they enclosed the place under an artificial sky with a theatrical backdrop on which they painted (or computer-generated) sunsets and stars...
...Does that make me an oxymoron...
...But there is also a residue of whiz-kid knowingness and slickness that keeps his performance from being as directly moving as it might have been...
...Its texture transcends its ingeniousness...
...the travel bureau that discourages travel whenever our hero contemplates it...
...You absorbed its ingenuity at the first viewing but at later screenings basked in the richness of the performances and the unflagging rightness of the dialogue and the visuals...
...Their bedroom moments are off-camera, but if they're really having sex, the show would be the first squeaky-clean pornography in history, and the wife's portrayer the first known prostitute to be a celebrated primetime player...
...screams our hero as he gets ready to careen his car out of Seahaven, "I'm being spontaneous...
...The Truman Show suggests three kinds of parable...
...This beggars belief because everyone watching Truman knows that he has been brought up to be a corporation's puppet...
...Since the movie The X-Files is, alas, one more installment in the ongoing struggle by Mulder to prove that The Truth Is Out There (Mulder, meet Truman), the film started off on the wrong foot with me, but I would have liked it anyway if it had been done with the low-level, simmering intensity of the televised mother lode...
...Nevertheless, Anderson still strikes me as the thinking woman's action heroine...
...ic fantasy I've ever seen on the tube...
...As many of you know already, the movie is about a TV program that stars a young man (Jim Carey) who doesn't even know he's on camera...
...This film almost never displays the sort of generosity of being that makes you want to see it not once but three or four times...
...Somebody help me...
...Is Truman's actress-wife really sleeping with him...
...Most gratifying when that particular predator got squished by an escalator...
...Why can't a bauble be a little work of art...
...As screenwriter Paul (Quiz Show) Attanasio has observed, "So many films today address not the mind and heart, but the blood pressure...
...I found myself surrounded by X-Files fans who are even more pathetic than Trekkies, When some poor slob (not me, honest) muttered an idle comment during the opening credits, a quarter of the audience rounded on him with a collective, vicious "s-sh-h-h...
...I'm sure articles are even now being written to explore this angle, and I'm equally certain that I don't want to read them...
...Only the opening sequence, involving an attempt to locate a bomb in a federal building has any real zip to it...
...We get to watch it as well as the show...
...The episode with Peter Boyle giving the greatest performance of his career as a clairvoyant insurance salesman was the best-executed piece of tragCommonweal ~ | August 14, 1998...
...More doubtfully, the movie may also be a parable of Man (Truman) protesting against the limits God (Christof) has set for him...
...Shouldn't that posture be reserved for church...
...Some of the sexual chemistry between the stars survives, but both David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson seem to register better on the small screen...
...m a calm admirer of "The X-Files" on TV...
...But getting onto the big screen seems to have convinced creator Chris Carter that he must emulate current blockbuster strategies...
...Nevertheless, if The Truman Show suggests at least four levels of interpretation, why do I call it a bauble...
...In Seahaven, not only human relations but also nature itself is something that exists only within quotation marks...
...What makes the movie dramatic is that Truman gradually becomes aware of those quotation marks...and then struggles to remove them...
...Paranoiacs believe that all the Powers That Be are concentrating their energies on the paranoiac himself, usually to malevolent ends...
...They were watching this movie on their knees, so to speak...
...When I saw this movie in Washington, D.C., the audience struck me as even more obnoxious than the movie...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
