Facticity of such a life - the Truman Show

In the Truman Show, the main character (literally) Truman Burbank live since he’s born in a fake city, under a dome that simulates the world, ignoring he’s living on a reality show. Every single action of Truman is recorded and looked all over the world. And the Show is very famous. But, as the clues and absurdities accumulate, Truman is doubting more and more about his world.

            This movie doesn’t seem at first so existentialist. More like a satire of today’s TV reality-show. But in fact, Truman’s existence is in question since he’s not living in the world. His world is closed and located in one single place he has never left. And yet not a real place at all because everybody there, except him is pretending to be someone else. Everybody around Truman is living in bad faith, as Sartre would say, but in my opinion, in a deeper way. They know they’re playing a role but in front of Truman, they pretend they are what they are not. For Truman, so they have a “reality’ in his world. But mainly for the director of the Show and the public. And in fact it’s not just playing, because Truman thinks it is life for real.

            Also Truman lives in bad faith too. But I would say not because of him, but because of the others. Everybody else : the Show team, the actors supposed to be his friends, the public (because the Show can’t ignore what is the public waiting for). He’s reduced to be what the others decide he is. And because his entire life is not private, he’s constantly negated.

            And by which way? The Look! When Truman ignores, in the beginning, that he’s looked at constantly, he’s making a life on is own. For example, we can take the scene of the face made with magazines photo as an example of Sartre’s power of the look. Truman collects eyes, mouths, noses on magazines in order to recreate a face of the woman he actually loves. He hides it because he knows it would be considered as weird by his co-workers. The perfect example of the shame. What he’s doing for itself is revealed by the look of other. But he doesn’t know that he’s in permanence looked at. When he has doubts in the second part of the movies, which drive him crazy. He begins a paranoia, hides himself, flees or try to. He wants to escape the constant shame. Because that’s what it is, there is no relief when confronted to the others.

            That’s exactly what we get in No Exit, the play of Sartre. The characters are in hell, but a form of hell they didn’t expect. A hell in which they are permanently under the look and presence of others. That’s why they are three : if two are trying to mix and forget who they are, a third remains. There is no escape! That’s why Garcin says in the end that “hell is the others”. And Truman sees it, in his best friend, in his wife, in his father, in everybody in the end. Moreover, their behaviour reflects obviously bad faith and so seems really strange to Truman.

            This movie remind me a personal interrogation : is the world factice? I mean, not totally fake, as in Peter Weir’s film (when even the walls in the house are decoration). But fake in a more “interior” way. If we are beginning from the “cogito”, I’m sure that I exist because I think. But I’m not sure that everything else exists. I feel the things in the world. I touch, smell, taste, hear and see but this is just experience of information, transition of information to my brain and everything is created artificially. So it could be possible that my all world exists in my brain. With a degree of complexion that seems to be incredible, with a past before my consciousness awoke itself and possibilities for the future, a geography, sciences a structure of the world, of human society, of human spirits too. And I’m living in my brain, in total facticity, just like in a Matrix movie, ignoring what is reality. But with some clues, just as in the Truman Show, bell ringing at some points, when I study existentialism for example, studying the “Dasein”, when something irrational happens to me (most of the time because of others), when I see that there is no logic in the underground flow… Could it be it? A fake world?

            A problem remains in the Other. Who created them, with such a complexity and why so would I ignore so much of their spirituality? Me? That doesn’t seems to be that simple… So the other exists to, and we have a relation. I must identify him as “other-as-subject”, like would say Sartre. He behaves on he’s own and what I do in looking at him is making it an object that I can apprehend. I create a body for him and to me he’s that body, that’s easier to understand. I’m sure that the other exist, but I can’t be sure of its representation. That could maybe explain that tastes differ. We are not perceiving the same projection…

            But the specificity of movies like the Truman Show or Matrix is that this world of perception is controlled. By someone or by machines (whatever). And this controls opens a third way of facticity : the control is not the life.

            We are heading back here to Kierkegaard’s lessons. Let’s take the final scene of the movie. Truman hit the bag-end, found the door and he’s on the verge of leaving the reality-show. His creator speaks to him like this : “this is where you belong, this is your world, I can protect you”. Of course, nothing bad will happen to Truman if his world is controlled (that’s why the Show team manage to make him fear living the town). But of course, Truman doesn’t want it. Because it’s not living. As Kierkegaard said : “to live is to takes risks”. It’s the same in Matrix : your not taking any risk in the matrix but that’s not living, that’s not the truth, that’s why Neo choose the red pill.

            But some are not ready to take risks. They are okay to be slaves if they can be sure to survive. But everyone dies in the end. That’s why we must be ready to take risks for our freedom, to avoid facticity.

            I don’t want this to be a political essay but we must ask ourselves what is living, especially after what Paris experienced once more…