An Escape from Sights:
Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) and the Right to Privacy
by Efehan Boyacıoğlu
In The Truman Show, Truman Burbank is the star of a reality television program with the same name, ‘The Truman Show’, yet he is unaware of the fact that he has been watched throughout his life. He is being watched through hidden cameras 24 hours a day and people at their homes witness every moment of Truman’s life. In this sense, the movie gives a replica of our reality in which corporations collect personal data online from social networks, shopping sites, and so on. We are born into a digital world where information about individuals is collected and stored systematically, just as Truman was born into the artificial world of The Truman Show. The producer of the show, Christof, wants to keep manipulating Truman by all means, and the fact that the show gets so many ratings raises questions about the ethics of the viewers. There is very little resistance to the show’s dehumanizing ways other than the ineffectual “Free Truman” campaign in the outside world which Truman is not aware of.
Despite controlling all his life, even Christof cannot predict what Truman’s every action will be. Truman begins to understand what is going on around him and plans to gain his freedom. He uses a makeshift tunnel to disappear from the sight of the cameras and the whole technical crew and the cast start searching for him. After overcoming his fear of water, Truman is seen on a small boat, on the edge of escaping the set. Christof speaks to Truman from the director’s room and says that there is no more truth in the real world than the artificial one he has been in, where he has not had anything to fear. Yet he cannot stop Truman from escaping and gaining his freedom. Truman chooses to have a private life; he chooses the right to be privately unhappy over the artificial televised happiness that is offered to him in the public eye. Truman may not know what he is going to encounter outside of the film set dome in the moment of his decision, since he has not experienced it before, but he knows that he needs his privacy in order to be a free individual.
The fact that Truman’s viewers start looking for something else to watch at the end of the movie tells us that entertainment from television channels can be too transient, and that we should not let them violate certain rights in order to be more attention-grabbing. ‘The Truman Show’ violates Truman Burbank’s privacy through extensive and dehumanising ways. Every person’s individual life is unique and too valuable to be put into a frame. The right to privacy must be respected and understood by members in a society in order to prevent people or manipulative corporations from exploiting the circumstances as we see in the case of The Truman Show.
