The Truman Show is showing at NFSA on 22 September. Photo: NFSA.
It wasn’t so long ago but 1998 seems as far as a distant solar system: a provincial pre-millennial world where Spice Girls dominate pop charts, ER and The X-Files are on telly and Titanic sells 20 million copies on home video. There is no such thing as The Kardashians, Real Housewives or Big Brother. But there is The Truman Show.
Played by Jim Carrey in his first critically acclaimed dramatic role, Truman Burbank is the unsuspecting central figure in a round-the-clock reality television program. When tech equipment literally falls from the sky, Truman notices other unusual happenings in his carefully curated town of Seahaven, triggering a series of questions about his seemingly idyllic existence.
Upon its release, Peter Weir’s darkly comic and satirical forecast of future media landscapes pushed concepts surrounding ethics and entertainment to the very brink of the absurd. But these far-fetched notions – once thought only possible within the realms of science-fiction – were clairvoyant in their visions and have since become crystallised.
The exploitation of Truman as a central character is – like many great works of satire and sci-fi – a prescient rendering of 21st century consumerist appetites. The perverse irony that nobody could have predicted is that on the other side of Truman’s fabricated existence was a world in waiting – one where the individual would enthusiastically embrace the very thing that Truman was desperate to escape.
Presented on a 35mm film print from the NFSA collection.
See more films in the series Fright Night: Cult Cinema Classics at the NFSA with Venus Mantrap.
The details
What: The Truman Show screening
When: Friday 22 September, 8 pm
Where: National Film and Sound Archive, McCoy Cct, Acton
Cost: $10-12. Book tickets.
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