Review of The Truman Show (1998) by Jake C — 16 Aug 2017

Prescient as a panoptic satire of our omnipresent technocracy, the deeper lesson of "The Truman Show" is not how the ideological fiction of reality can be crafted through our media-as the more popular, less penetrating "Matrix" movies also highlight-but how that picture of reality functions even more subtly to interpolate and indoctrinate the viewer who perceives herself as outside the fiction.

While Truman might be the star subject of his world, in the final analysis it is the show's viewers who are subjugated even more, learning the lessons of that reality-good Protestant work ethic, happy monogamous heterosexuality, and so on-without the hope of escape that Truman enjoys (an escape which in fact only confirms the closure and significance of his narrative).