Satire and Sci-Fi

This week I watched The Truman show for the first time. Good movie, but to be honest, I would have been so pissed if I was Truman Burbank. As an audience member, I felt catfished along with the main character. My subconscious concentrated on the obvious, and without realising, I'd missed a lot of the main points that would have helped my understanding of the film further. After studying it carefully I started to notice the smaller details and codes that had been added to film, that before I would never have even considered looking for. What was striking about the opening sequence of the film was, there were credits for the film itself, followed by another set of credits for the show Christof directed. It was a very confusing start to the film because naturally after the first set of credits an audience would expect the film to begin. The conventions used in this section of the film were; Invisible filming, when Truman was looking in the mirror there was a camera directly behind. It's a documentary and soap. The aptly-named Christof is a mysterious character with a God complex who uses his omnipresence to control Truman - both physically and mentally for the sake of ratings. Weir and Niccol bring viewers' attention to how far the media is willing to go to gain an audience. Weir has said that he was editing The Truman Show during Princess Diana's death, and while he certainly blames the paparazzi who drove her off the road, he asserts that the audience who consumed her public identity was just as complicit. Similarly, Truman's audiences are complicit in his entrapment, as Christof would be powerless without their attention.