ABSTRACT
Weir’s objective narrator does not actively interpret for us as overtly as Hitchcock does in Notorious, yet the story and plot points in The Truman Show are more numerous and complicated. How, then, does Weir allow us to participate in all the twists and turns of the story at the same time he allows us full access to the psychological life of the characters, especially the protagonist? It is due partly to the construction of the screenplay, which juxtaposes actions in such a way that cause and effect are immediately available to us through the narrative device of parallel action. But the screenplay does something else: as in Notorious, the objective narrator has help from another voice in telling the story. This time the help is not supplied by the subjective voice of a character but by an antagonist’s voice that is embedded in the circumstance of the screenplay. (Hitchcock’s decision to give Alicia a subjective voice was a directorial decision. He could have told the story without it, but not as powerfully.)
Although Weir does not take us in such a firm headlock as Hitchcock does with his active narrator, Weir’s objective narrator is every bit as effective in telling this story. The strong articulation of narrative beats through staging and camera, and the artful modulation of the objective narrator’s voice — at times speaking quietly and softly, other times rapidly and with greater volume — maximizes the audience’s emotional involvement. An example of the latter happens in the opening sequence of the light fixture falling from the sky. Its flight and impact is elaborated for us by the narrator in three shots, making the fact of its fall more significant, and of course more dramatic. (A modulation in the voice of the narrator is a significant tool of the master storyteller, and one that a director in the twenty-first century should have in his or her toolbox. But we also see in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story [1953, Japanese; Chapter 16] that strong stories can be told without it.)
ANTAGONIST’S VOICE
In this story, “five thousand cameras” are watching Truman. They are everywhere, and one of the first jobs Weir has to accomplish is to inform us of that. Some of
the antagonist’s cameras are indicated by an irising around the edges and are easily identified. Others are not identified as easily. And Weir cleverly relies on this ambiguousness, this “fuzziness,” to convey which image belongs to the antagonist and which to the objective narrator, to increase the antagonist’s arsenal: by having the objective narrator, at times, serve as the antagonist’s voice. This is because even with five thousand cameras available for the antagonist’s voice Weir knew that voice would be severely restricted if he slavishly adhered to the division of labor implied here: that every shot was either solely the objective narrator’s or solely the antagonist’s POV. So, what we discover is that Weir begins to assign both functions to certain shots, and we accept it — another example of the fluidity of POV.
