Title: A dark bright light.
Subject(s): TRUMAN Show, The (Motion picture)
Source: Esquire, May98, Vol. 129 Issue 5, p46, 3p, 1c
Author(s): Thomson, David
Abstract: Reviews the motion picture `The Truman Show,' directed by
Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol.
AN: 497423
ISSN: 0194-9535
Database: Academic Search Elite

Section: the screen

A DARK BRIGHT LIGHT

An emerging genre of cheerfully subversive films finds its first
near-masterpiece in The Truman Show

I COULD SAY IT'S Network cut with Blue Velvet or It's a Wonderful Life
on the brink of being Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Those claims are
more than valid; they may even be useful guides to watching this
disarmingly complete fantasy Let's just say that The Truman Show
(directed by Peter Weir and written by Andrew Niccol) is one of the
most startlingly original American movies in years, enough to give one
faith in the salutary and inspiring nearness of the new millennium.
For here, out of nowhere, from the Paramount that is in league with
one of our cable empires (Viacom), comes a picture that knows there is
no subject as weirdly compelling (at once as close to both farce and
tragedy) as our strange relationship with television.

Jim Carrey is Truman Burbank, a slightly goofy, Jimmy Stewart kind of
guy--honest, caring, amiable, hopeful, yet shyly tuned in to some
secret joke that no one else admits to. Carrey's wayward eyes and
lunging comic spirit are Truman's life force, his yearning for
something more. (The project is unthinkable without Carrey, yet it
could have been ruined by the full explosiveness of The Mask or the
Ace Ventura films.)

Everyone loves him in the sunny, small town of Seahaven, where he
lives, on an island just off a Florida-like shore. When he leaves home
for work in the morning, he high-fives grins and greetings with his
next-door neighbors (who are black--this is the idyllic America) and
tells them not just good morning but good afternoon and good evening,
too, in case he misses them later. Then it's off to work--he's in
insurance--in a building that looks out on the butter-bright town
square, where the busy, cheery, are-we-insane-yet? exchanges of
small-town contentment make the day. Yes, this is America, with one
difference: There's no longer any need to pursue happiness; Seahaven
has a lock on it. A lock that lends the place the odd air of a balmy
prison.

The light in Seahaven never falters or fluffs. The sunshine spreads
like butterscotch sauce, coating everything. The town has no
shadows--just a high, pure glow. Everything's dandy, A-okay, and so
relentlessly clean that you may begin to get the shivers.

All the movie textbooks say that extensive shadow or low-key lighting
is oppressive, foreboding, angst-ridden, and so on. That's how you get
the look of film noir, of horror movies, and of everything from In a
Lonely Place to Touch of Evil, pictures whose titles and dark imagery
make you want to reach for Prozac. There's an opposing principle--that
high-key photography, the absence of contrast, and the radiance of
light everywhere make us feel happy and bouncy. That's the way
musicals were lit, as well as a lot of romantic comedies and decades
of TV sitcoms, from Lucy to Seinfeld.

Yet the aura of bright light is increasing]y one of the most sinister
things appearing onscreen. It's the light that pours over produce at
the supermarket, that supplies the sheen of desirability in
advertising. It has become the epitome of fakery, as opposed to
illumination. David Lynch used it in Blue Velvet--in the opening
especially--when he wanted to show us the horrendous complacency of
the little town where prettiness is laid on thick to help us forget
the ordinary cavities in human nature. But never has anyone done
anything as complete as what Peter Weir and cinematographer Peter
Biziou do with the light in The Truman Show.

Film noir crept up on us right after World War II, emerging from a
variety of influences--in imitation of German expressionism, in the
introspective spirit of psychoanalysis (which hit Hollywood in the
forties), as the style of so many craftsmen who had come out of Europe
to Hollywood in the thirties and forties, in recognition of the
shadows in Citizen Kane (maybe the most influential flop ever made),
and as some way of reflecting the terrible expose of human nature in
the era of the war. Film noir was not just a genre but a way of seeing
that said, Sure, there's peace now, with America the most secure
nation on earth in a time of boom, with a car for every house but can
you trust it? Can you trust anything? The paranoia of the films found
its external proofs in McCarthyism, the cold war, the H-bomb, Korea,
and the steady crack-up of so many of those happy family units.

Film noir originally seemed like a return to realism--the dark that
really existed. But now, fifty years later, it looks mannered, and we
find no realism worthy of our trust. Every depiction of us needs to be
ironic, cool, untouched by conviction or belief. We have let our
politics turn into show business; we have urged it. And as we looked
for an image that embodied our detachment, our disaffection, we found
it in the high-key, undifferentiated gloss of television--a look for
those who have given up on the Holy Ghost of believing what they see.

Half a century after the ascendancy of film noir, a new genre may be
emerging. Call it film blanc, film lumiere, film fluorescent, film
flash, or film deadpan. I like the latter two because they convey the
instantaneous oneness of a kind of photography that bombs us with
light just to get a picture. It's the kind of light that exists, like
climate, on most TV sets and shows: a one-dimensional lighting scheme
without depth, shaping, or character; a flood of light that lets you
film without having to pause; a light that, with only a little
heightening, seems surreal, mad, glaring, and unsettling.

The Truman Show is bathed in such light. What makes this so intriguing
is the way it plays off our dependence on and loathing of TV--as if TV
had become the base level of visible existence. The Coen brothers have
played with this kind of light, too--in Fargo (where it can be
mistaken for the wintry glow of the northern plains) and in Raising
Arizona. Such light fills the frames in Trainspotting and in the
recent Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose. In the films of Fassbinder in the
seventies, a surfeit of scalding light stood for his contempt for the
advertised life. Kubrick had a hint of it in The Shining, Paul
Schrader in American Gigolo. And, of course, it's on TV all the
time--so we can see everything.

The great coup of The Truman Show, the knockout, is in the conception.
Seahaven is a location rather than a real place, the site of the
greatest TV show of all time, we're told, and of the live,
twenty-four-hour-a-day ongoing series--the life of Truman Burbank,
10,909 days and counting, which means that Tru is just coming up on
thirty. The island has five thousand cameras to film the show, and
every inhabitant is a character in the series, all the way from
eternally recurring extras to the lead parts, like Truman's mom, his
wife, Meryl, and his best friend. And everyone knows, except for
Truman- but he's beginning to wonder. Yet this is a movie so light on
its feet, so gentle with its lash, that the trap closes before we
realize our own complicity as part of the great audience "out there."

That "there" is our "here." We are already the people who have
averaged 4, 6, 8, or 15.7 hours of TV a day for years of our lives. We
use TV as interference in what otherwise might be our real and private
lives. The audience is shown in The Truman Show in comic-book
asides--old ladies on a sofa, guys wondering what else is on--hooked
on the show but thinking they're in charge because they could always
flip the channel. But the channels are all one sea. And if, nowadays,
we have our sneering joke that the president is just the guy on TV,
why, presidents of all kinds have theirs--that the public, the people,
the electorate, are just those idiots who are watching TV.

The audience in The Truman Show is our own kids grown up--people so
absolutely hip to TV because they've been on it all their lives. Their
household has always had a camcorder; they've seen the footage of
their own delivery--just once (a gross-out!)--their birthday parties,
their vacations, the endless observance of their existence, their
oneness. They take for granted the dead holiness of the screen--not
just the TV but the computer screens that have increasingly come to
dominate their education and their leisure. They are no longer raised
to the deep, potent, private passion of the page, its inquiry and
soaring, or its play upon the imagination. They are schooled in the
slippery blink and the formulaic answers of electronics--of being on
or off and preferring on. They are shy of the great romantic upheaval
bred by books--the thing that says, "But what if I . . ." They'd
rather watch Truman than themselves, because he's neat and all his
program options smooth away that profound, awesome
untidiness--inwardness.

The Truman Show gives away every game there is in moviemaking. For
Peter Weir is able--no, obliged--to expose and mock the very ways he
can move us with film. So we see Krystoff (the great "director" of The
Truman Show, played with brilliantly controlled intensity by Ed
Harris, one of the best actors of our time) working on a scene,
calling the shots and the camera angles, bringing up the music--with
musicians sawing away in the studio beside him--such a manipulator of
"magic moments" that any audience is going to feel edgy.

We know the great events of our time--JFK's young son saluting, O.J.
putting on the gloves--as bits of miseen-scene. It's as if our family
history consisted of nothing but the pointed views, the sentimental
angles, the snapshots, or as if we had become a culture that goes to
Canyon de Chelly or Angkor Wat to return with photographs of them. Our
sense of what experience is has been organized by the underlying
orthodoxy of how things are seen on film or TV.

The Truman Show is going to leave you worrying over the authenticity
of every spun moment on TV. In part, that's because you'll be as
intrigued by Krystoff as you are touched by Truman; by now, our
fantasies are sufficiently bifurcated that we know how to identify
with the characters and the showmen pulling their strings. In the same
way, everything seen onscreen is not just an element in the story but
a dream for sale. (The show pays for itself not through ads--there
cannot be any interruptions--but by skillful product placement: Nearly
everything in it is for sale, and operators are standing by.)

The Truman Show may be the most frightening film you'll see this year.
It's not violent. There's no torture. No leering sex. No "language."
And no creatures more horrific than the kinds of human beings who run
the show at Disney World. The Truman Show is a picture you could take
the kids to. More than that, you should take them. There's nothing
they shouldn't see or hear--why shouldn't they face the great warping
force in their upbringing? The lightness of The Truman Show, after
all, is very like the moderate voice that made many regard Gullivers
Travels as a children's book. An alert kid might see The Truman Show
and get some inkling of islands of placid conformity and hollow bliss
that demand escape.

ILLUSTRATION

~~~~~~~~

By David Thomson
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Source: Esquire, May98, Vol. 129 Issue 5, p46