You are walking on your empty suburban street, the streetlights casting a soft glow on your beloved neighbourhood. Everything about it is Old Americana, the perfect houses, the perfect people, but you feel ever so slightly disturbed. You have started to feel watched, like your actions somehow dictate something much bigger than you. You are suffocated despite the chill air that is the perfect temperature, and a shrill whine starts to fill your head. Right as you step into the next set of cobblestones, something comes crashing from the sky and drops a metre away from you. Your mind starts to run a million scenarios, is it from those wretched airplanes that are always crashing on the news, is it space junk from a passing meteor? You inch closer to the debris, and you realise it is none of the things you could have possibly imagined. It is a giant light fixture, staring right back at you. Blinking. Masking tape streaks the side of it, and in the messy scribble, you can discern the words “Sirius”, the brightest star in the sky. Your favourite star. 

This is the scene that sets off the action in the dystopian masterpiece “The Truman’s Show”, when the titular character Truman Burbank starts to find anomalies in his seemingly perfect existence. Truman, ironically, is the only “true man” in the town of Seahaven Island. Every other element and person of this quaint and bustling town is fictional, and engineered in a way so that Truman’s actions can be televised as 24/7 entertainment. There are bars dedicated to screening just the “Truman Show”, the actual show is riddled with advertisements and brand deals, and everything you see on screen is available to be purchased by the viewers through a catalogue. Truman is everyone’s escapism, everyone’s fantasy and the perfect capitalist machine to push propaganda. Despite the illusion of autonomy, it is revealed that Truman has been heavily conditioned to be scared of the ocean and flights so he doesn’t leave, but especially conditioned to believe that all he is meant for is his monotonous, claustrophobic life. The viewers know of this due to the regular insights provided by the showrunner Christof, and yet none of this screams unethical to them. In the film, there is a small activist group that campaigns for Truman’s release from the show but the true majority favours the idea of Truman continuing to be a media spectacle. 

This is reminiscent of most modern day reality television enjoyers, we simply do not care what’s being done as long as we are entertained. The Truman Show was released at a time when reality TV had not become the billion-dollar industry it has today (valued at 30 billion USD as of 2022). In fact, the movie’s director, Peter Weir can recall a comment made by the creator of Big Brother after witnessing the popularity of the movie, that he “better get a move on with Big Brother”. The reality tv show where a few select participants have to co-exist and compete in the same house while being filmed 24/7, was released a year later. Big Brother is known for its iconic logo,  the all-seeing eye that is alluding to the fact that the participants are being constantly watched and judged. Prevalent in all forms of literature, the all-seeing eye is famously known for being associated with the Illuminati (the Eye of Providence), Big Brother and Sauron from Lord of the Rings. They are symbols of surveillance, and metaphors for totalitarian control. It clearly takes an unsurprising amount of cognitive dissonance to look at these literary warnings and think to create a surveillance zoo with real human beings. 

The aspect of “reality” or “real human beings” is subjective to the show format and other factors, however it can be acknowledged that actions supported or perpetrated by these shows have real life consequences. In the “Truman Show”, Truman eventually suffers from a psychotic break where he threatens to kill his wife (co-star) just to see how the production would interfere. The same actress who was willing to conceive a child with Truman just for the show, draws the line when the psychological warfare inflicted on Truman finally reaches her borders. Recently, Love Island alumni Jana and Kenny ended their relationship due to the discovery of incredibly racist and violent text messages sent by Kenny about Jana’s identity as a black woman. Black women are the one of the most affected demographics when it comes to intimate partner violence, and Love Island is now complicit in endangering the life of one of their participants. Reality television often platforms people capable of extreme behaviour, which translates better on camera and as entertainment, however it also reveals the extent to which humanity is discarded in favour of the bitch goddess*. 

Truman’s relentless fight to live his life authentically is what gets him out of the perpetual cycle of control and manipulation that dictated his whole existence. We might think of ourselves as Truman, or we might actually be Christof, playing God with the lives of real people by funding despicable reality television. We exert our wills onto them, our needs to vicariously live through them, and that will eventually corrode our humanity until entertainment becomes indistinguishable from sadism. Before the next Love Island season gets released, watch the Truman Show. Even before that, take a walk by the beach and see whether the moon is a bit too bright that night. It might be a studio light. 

*bitch goddess – material success 

Written by Sanjana Rajagopal