Art and Life

I was 21 and living in Cornwall. One night we made the trip from Falmouth to Truro to go to the cinema. We missed the start of the film and I had a miserable cold. It was an inauspicious start to say the least. But the film was The Truman Show (1998) and at the end of it I was convinced as I have ever been that I had just seen a masterpiece.

In the ten plus years since it was released it has, if anything, become deeper and more resonant. This was, remember, a few years before Big Brother. As happens so often The Truman Show was part of a trend of films that came out of Hollywood at the time; The Game (1997) and Edtv (1999) also looked at the theme of an individual being constantly watched and whose actions are being controlled by external forces. The subtext of this is the metaphor of cinema; how a writer and director dictate the movements of protagonists, how editing subtly changes the meaning of events and how lighting and photography can alter mood purely through the way things look.

But only The Truman Show (and considering that Edtv is actually about a man having his life filmed by a video crew, it's strange that it is so light on this) begins to hint at the implications which would become apparent with the rise of the reality television genre. Peter Weir's film suggested how we the audience would turn real life into soap opera and how, like a soap opera, our interest would be fickle and changeable.

In the end the film focussed on those creating the story behind Truman's (Jim Carrey) life and didn't quite realise how he could become like the reality TV contestant Jade Goody who, for non UK readers, has moved from a figure of fun and derision to aspirational status symbol to pariah and now with the news of her terminal cancer, a latterday saint. I feel uncomfortable comparing Goody's real pain to fiction, but as a member of the audience which has watched and followed her journey, I am complicit in creating (and encouraging) the Big Brother industry and media creation of her. The article that most sums up my feelings is by the sports journalist Martin Samuel, who may just be one of the best writers around.