ABSTRACT
In Peter Weir’s award-winning fi lm The Truman Show (1998), we are told the story of Truman Burbank, a seemingly ordinary and happy guy who is leading a strictly routinized and not-too dramatic life in a small, wellordered American town. The only thing that is really unusual about Truman is that he is unaware that every step he takes and every move he makes is being surveilled and broadcast live twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to millions of viewers around the globe; and that the whole town is a constructed stage peopled by professional actors, including his wife, his mother, and his best friend. In the prelude to the fi lm, the fi ctional character Christof, a former producer of documentaries and himself the creator of the successful reality TV format, explains the success of his “extraordinary experiment”:
We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We’re tired of pyrotechnics and special effects. While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare but it’s genuine. It’s a life.1
