Guy Maddin | Brand upon the Brain! / 2006

everything happens again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guy Maddin and George Toles (screenplay), Guy Maddin (director) Brand upon the Brain! / 2006

 

Since the mid-1980s Canadian director Guy Maddin has been conjuring up low-budget-expense and high-budget-concept films that combine surrealist-like images, outsider stories, and amateur actors to create films that tower over most Hollywood productions. For Maddin film history is not something to be studied but a treasure to be exploited, used time and again in his own celluloid fantasies. Early works of the silent films, of the horror genre, and exploitive sexual flicks marry sophisticated comedies and psychological documentaries in Maddin’s oeuvre, nearly always creating something arresting and fresh.

 

    His 2006 mockumentary Brand upon the Brain! tells the horrific tale of a figure, also named Guy Maddin (Sullivan Brown/Erik Steffen), who after growing up and abandoning his childhood island-home, Black Notch, is called back 30 years later by his monstrous, yet still beloved Mother (Gretchen Krich/Cathleen O’Malley/Susan Corzette) in order to repaint the lighthouse home in which he was raised. As the older Maddin whitewashes his strange “home,” so he imagines he is covering over the wretched past; but, in fact, in attempting to paint it over, he calls it up for himself and his audience, revealing a series of psychologically tortuous childhood experiences that, in 12 chapters of fractured flashbacks, serve as almost a catalogue of cinematically conceived boyhood terrors. Both Mother and Father (Todd Moore/Clayton Corzette), who run their lighthouse home as a home for orphans within which they also raise their two children, Guy and Sis (Maya Lawson), are involved in something clearly sinister. Although Mother is doting and loving—often to the point of a pederastic-like fondling of her son—she also regularly rages against the two children and her orphan charges, demanding their complete celibacy and gender non-differentiation. With the help of a telescope atop the lighthouse from which she spies on their outdoor activities, while trumpeting her love and rage through an “aerophone,” a radio/loudspeaker contraption invented by Guy’s Father.

     One day, the famed serial movie star, detective/harp-playing Wendy Hale shows up on the otherwise empty island, immediately creating a bond with both Guy and Sis in order to help her solve the secret to their parents’ nefarious activities and to explain why the island children have holes bored into the backs of their heads. Guy falls in love with the beautiful Wendy, while Wendy quickly falls in love with Sis, determining to disguise herself into her twin detective brother, Chance, in order to get closer to Sis.

      Between strange nightly processionals of the orphans, up and down the metal, spiral staircase to Guy’s Father’s laboratory, the periodic transformations of Mother from a middle-aged harridan to a young beauty, and the secret plotting and ritualistic meetings of the orphans led by their eldest member, Savage Tom (Andrew Loviska), Sis and Chance/Wendy establish a near-sexual relationship, while the lonely Guy, missing his beloved Wendy, develops a “boy crush” on Chance. 

   Thus does Maddin, the director, establishes a near lunatic story involving nearly every subject forbidden for filmmakers in the decades prior to his film: lesbianism, homosexuality, pederasty, cannibalism—Savage Tom seeks to serve up the heart of the poor orphan Neddie (Kellan Larson)—and medical experimentation on children, the last revealed when Chance discovers that Father is harvesting a “nectar” from the children which provides his wife and others with a temporarily restoral of youth, almost as if their sexual essences, blood and sperm might permit them eternal life.

 

    Everything ends badly as Sis kills Father. Mother like Frankenstein, restores him to life and formerly victimized orphans return on a rowboat, killing him yet again. Mother, desperate for nectar, is discovered devouring little Neddie; Sis and Chance/Wendy, now married as lesbian couple, force Mother and Savage Tom from the island; and, finally, Guy is sent away in foster care.

      Is it any wonder that grown-up, Guy, in his attempt to whitewash his horrific past, appears sad and depressed as he now wanders Black Notch still in search of his fleeting love? The return of the elderly Mother merely rekindles some of the horror he has suffered. She dies, furious with her son’s inattention—at the moment of her death he is distracted by his fantasy of Wendy—and he is left alone, caught between his memories and a vague future that promises nothing but emptiness.

    Poor little straight boy, the “brand” imposed upon his brain, a mark or indelible lesson, is, obviously, the madness of his childhood, a time in which everything has been inverted and perverted in relation to what most might describe as “normality.” If nothing else, every figure with whom he has been connected has self-destructed. Even his Sis, the ghost of Wendy reports, grew evil, continuing her parent’s experiments with the orphans; when Chance/Wendy left her, she circled the lighthouse lamp like a moth, combusting in her rage over her lover’s flight.

 

     But the brand Maddin suggests by his title is also a kind of lens through which he (the director) has come to see the world, a kind of “product,” the hokey grade-B horror and adventure stories he has grown up with, helping him—in the most positive sense—to pervert his vision of bland notions of normality.

     In early showings of this film around the world, Maddin presented the mostly silent images accompanied by a live orchestra, Foley artists (sound artist, recreating the film’s sound effects), and an “interlocutor” or narrator (in the released CD, spoken by the wonderful Isabella Rossellini), a role performed live by various figures, including Crispin Glover, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, John Ashbery, and Maddin himself—transforming the whole into a grand theatrical event that might make an impression on anyone entering the dark territory which the flickers of Poe, the Frankenstein story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Hardy Boy tales, images of Dali and Buñuel, and hundreds of other such work projected onto our generations’ consciousness, actualizing the film’s unresolved truism: “everything happens twice.”

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).

Justin Simien | Dear White People / 2014

circles of desiring

by Douglas Messerli

 

Justin Simien (writer and director) Dear White People / 2014

 

     Coco is ultimately represented as being far more perceptive in her belief than in helping to organize a racist-themed party through which she has helped to give white folks their hidden

desires to share in the black experience. And Lionel, suddenly is transformed by events and his own journalist recording of them, into the Black activist, outsider spokesman who Sam pretends to be. In short, in a span of the cinematic convention of a few brief weeks, these figures and others in the film circle each other in various forms of desiring (not desire, which would mean a specific “other,” but in the act of desire, “desiring”) that is so implausible that, although this film pretends to naturalism, turns the work into a kind of cardboard representation of the truths it seems to be trying to honestly reveal to us.

 

     Yet the actors are so utterly convincing in their young thespian efforts and committed to their chameleon stick-figure representations that it is hard to be offended by the script’s deficiencies. And finally, we must remind ourselves, that the wonderful thing about an undergraduate college or university education is that it is precisely during these years when young and men are allowed to do precisely what the film portrays them as accomplishing: the exploration of ideas as if they were nothing but a change of clothing and, even more importantly, to challenge identities while attempting to define their own. In a world in which decisions in what to major in get confounded with the attempt to lay out plans for an entire future life, radical shifts in reality sometimes occur overnight. If nothing else, Semien’s film reveals to us that black identity is perhaps even more subject to the daily cultural challenges than any white, given the social pressures of suddenly living in a “real-world” environment from which they might previously have been ostracized or, strangely, protected.

 

    Indeed, one of the first questions these characters are forced to ask of themselves is whether or not they want to remain within a kind of segregated community (presented in the film as an all-black living facility) as opposed to, as the university president desires, a randomization of location, blacks being assigned to formerly all-white facilities. For Sam and her friends, the seemingly anti-racist stance simply strips away any attempts the blacks may have to retain their college identity and allows them respite in an often dizzying new world. Sam, who also performs as an on-line computer commentator in her own “Dear White People” broadcast, sees racism everywhere, from the predilection of certain whites to delve their hands into black hair and their insistence that they have many black friends (she argues that they can no longer make that claim with only one friend), to being slighted by waiters who presume blacks will not tip as much and the secret signs behind the TV cartoon series, The Gremlins.

      Given the several incidents Simien satirically points out through the events in the film, it does sometimes appear that everything might be read much in the same way that the paranoid Woody Allen reads anti-Semitic behavior in so many of his daily encounters with the world around him. And then there are the true racist values of many of the university students, exemplified by the blackface party organized, oddly enough, by Coco and Troy in conjunction with the President’s clearly bigoted son—the film’s primary villain—Kurt.

     It is here, however, that a larger encounter between righteousness and racism rears its head in a manner that almost overwhelms the important issues which Simien has already raised. Even if we’ve been able to forgive the “students” for their various skit-like poses, it is hard to buy into the film’s argument that the university president, Kurt’s equally racist father, and the school’s black dean, Troy’s envious and disillusioned father, attempt to use their children as pawns in their own life-long battles to gain and keep control. One son with school administration ties might have been allowable, but two in one film, along with Kurt’s sister Sophia, who is dating Troy, simply take it over the top.* Yet, like the young people who surround them, they seem to speak in flat-screen projection, playing out roles seemingly assigned to them from youth.     

     Again, the younger generation as represented in this movie seem to save the day, particularly in the confused—not only sexually but in every possible way—Lionel who builds up a dossier through his covert reporting, makes Sam’s daily complaints seem like quibbles. Lionel, who has been traveling in the wrong direction on a one-way street, is somewhat inexplicably courted by the school’s major newspaper (he has previously been writing from school’s least-read publication) by a young man who sexually toys with him as a way to gain credence with his New York Times advisor. The fact that his seduction takes place at a blackface party, the surreality of which seemingly only Lionel perceives, suddenly forces him to overlay realities in his mind which equates racism with sexual abuse, a tissue of lies by everyone with university and personal ambitions and greed. Lionel and his formerly ineffectual allies are the only ones in this often too-well-crafted tale who utterly lose control, violently confronting the evils they recognize on every level. Even more importantly, however, is that when his destruction of objects is met with personal violence against his very body, he recognizes that everything is linked, and he reacts accordingly, meeting Kurt’s aggression with a long, seemingly impassioned kiss, suggesting the thin line that exists between hate and love, between violence and desire. It can only result, obviously, given the circumstances of that act, in further violence, but his passive embracement of it gives him the advantage of truth-telling as opposed to the lies all the others have told and maintained in their own minds. 

      After being chastised for her lies and manipulation of the truth, Sam realizes the error of her ways, and, revealing her own difficulties of assimilating her mixed-race parentage, accepts the love of her white admirer. Even Coco perceives the shallowness of her materialistic desires. Troy returns to his more assimilating position, attempting to run as student president. In a sense, although all have been chastised, they have gotten something they desired: Sam, filming the melee has finally been able to finish her movie; Coco is chosen as the central actor in the reality-T.V. film about university life, which thanks to the University President’s greed, may even get made; Lionel is now a reluctant hero. But Simian’s work, alas, fails to answer the most important question it raises. As Coco again encounters her one-night lover, Troy, she asks: “I understand why everyone else might want to vote for you. But do you want it?” 

      The problem remains that nearly everyone at this pretend “Ivy-league” Winchester University presumes that graduation alone will provide them with what they are seeking, which statistics seem to support: most university teaching jobs, business, and other workplace positions do, evidently, go first to Ivy-league graduates. Yet as their few years at the university should have taught them, that doesn’t mean the identities they have forged will remain the same. Or, if they do become locked into a persona with graduation, one is forced to think of what unhappy lives, evidenced by the President and Dean of this very institution, they will surely face. Dear Young People: the horror is that when the university door closes behind you, the racism, sexual bigotry, and chauvinism you have left behind, alas, may begin all over again, perhaps with even more serious consequences. Shifting identities may be the only way to survive. **

      

*At the University of Wisconsin, I attended classes with the University Provost and later Chancellor, Robben Wright Fleming’s son, Jim, who was, as I remember him, humble and quite likeable. I also have a close friend in Bruce Andrews, whose step-father, Wilson Homer “Bull” Elkins, was President while I attended the University of Maryland. I can accept the reality, accordingly, but dismiss the dramatic artifice.

**The movie hints at this, but only with regard to the outside reality of the university world, by intercutting its closing credits with headlines from newspapers announcing just such racially-charged events at several real universities. 

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2015).          

 

Jamieson Pearce | Adult / 2017

viewing the evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamieson Pearce (screenwriter, adapted from a short story by Christos Tsiolkas, and director) Adult / 2017 [12 minutes]

 

Jamieson Pearce’s short film Adult begins with a telephone call nearly any gay man can imagine, a voice saying “Mum” twice before the phone goes dead, the mother (or father in other cases) refusing to speak to the child because of his sexuality. But here the issue goes further, since the son his not simply homosexual, but is a 1990s pornstar on the adult bookshop gay porn tapes (no CDs in those days), perhaps the worse time imaginable to be regularly engaging in the unsafe sex of the AIDS era that the viewers of these tapes generally preferred.

      Australian director Pearce commented to interviewer Serafima Serafimova about how he came to adapt Greek author Christon Tsiolkas’ story Porn 1:

 

“I found it thrilling the way it incorporates such loaded ideas around motherhood, grief, sexuality, guilt and shame into such a tight dramatic premise. And this character of the mother… I found her heartbreaking. At the time of reading this short story, I’d recently lost a friend to suicide, the reasons for which were linked to his sense of shame of being gay. And so the depiction of grief in Porn 1 resonated with me particularly strongly and further motivated me to tell this story.”

 

     The mother in this case (played by Victoria Haralabidou), is a hard-working single woman who raised her son alone and whose conservative values are obviously are what made her life possible, but evidently had an opposite effect on her son, whose perspective is never represented in this film. Rather than the usual approach in such films wherein we see almost everything from the viewpoint of the gay child’s point of view, in this case we are left, as Serafimova puts it, with “his mother who, despite harboring prejudice[d] views, still manages to win our sympathy.”

      The action of the 12-minute film is simple. We see the mother waiting for a bus, and then walking the familiar site of so many adult porno stores, up a long lit-up staircase to a room filled with magazines and movies, dildos, and sexual devices. In the 1990s there was usually a back room for viewing films or for having sex with others, depending upon the restrictions of the establishment. Until the mid-1990s there were seldom any restrictions. For a conservative woman we might imagine this figure to be, entering such a world would be a bit like entering into the gates of hell.

 

      But the mother of this story has an even more daunting goal here, she must attempt to find a tape featuring her own son engaging in gay sex with others. After a painful search through heterosexual tapes, posters of cum dripping from a woman’s face, and violent scenes depicted on movie covers, she finally finds the right tape and pays $20 of her hard-earned money to the amused gay cashier.

       As she descends the stairs she almost runs into a young gay boy, who from the look on her face, might almost be the image of her own son.

       Memories suddenly flood her mind as she recalls the police telling her of her son’s death through a combination of drugs: heroin, Viagra, marijuana, and cocaine. Another officer asks her did she know what her “Did you know what type of acting work your son was doing here in Los Angeles?”

       She returns home, closes the blinds, and puts the tape titled “Men at Work” in the player. We see the players, and again her mind falls into the past, this time a memory of her scolding her very young son for playing with a child named Jason, reminding him again that only she loves him more than anyone else in the world. What she has against Jason is never revealed, but we can only suspect that she is responding to rumors about the young boy’s sexual proclivities or has caught the two playing innocent sexual games together.

        As she begins the porno film, she now takes out a cigarette. Watching this woman watching gay porno, her face constantly shifting from looks of pain, horror, and fascination, there is a strange temptation to ourselves, LGBTQ individuals like me, to want to turn away from the so familiar images of linguistic tropes, the employee apologizing for showering at work—unless, as he puts it to his boss, “you want me to come to work dirty.” Hot sex almost immediately follows between the boss and worker.

       Such images were never more apparent as pornography as in this film, the mother looking on at men engaging in male-on-male sex. But is the next scene that takes place in a public bathroom, where a plumber is fixing the sink and her son enters that is the most touching and horrifying simultaneously. Suddenly she looks up with deep love in her eyes in seeing her son, as he goes over the urinal, the plumber soon stripping of the boy’s shirt as they engage in sex. Memories of her own gentle love of her pre-teen son as she tickles him to his delight in bed, as she dries his with a towel, etc. come in a wave out of the past. Can the two variant worlds come together without an explosion of the heart?

 

  

   

      Putting mercurochrome on his childhood knee, she demands he not cry and be a man, as on the screen, her son is clearly now a hairy-chested man being sucked off, revealing ecstatic pleasure of the act. She puts her hands over her eyes.

       Does she see on the tape as an adult male receiving sexual satisfaction from another grown man, or does she perceive him as a freak, an effeminate figure which the image totally denies? It is impossible to say. But she is terrorized clearly by what she is witnessing.

       Images from the past collide: a return home where she is obviously violent scolding him for his behavior, the phone call in which he calls to her as she hangs up. She switches off the tape and breaks down into bitter tears.

       She sets the tape on fire. Sitting alone, she fondles what appears to be the only childhood photo of her son left, while a child’s hand reaches out to her. But the next moment it is missing. She is forever alone.

       We cannot know whether viewing the tape has been a sort of redemption or merely a confirmation of the horrors she has long feared for her son. But in watching that tape, in nothing else she has made an attempt to understand, or at least to discover the man into her son had grown up to be. And in that fact we can no longer condemn her even if she perhaps will forever condemn herself.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

Alfred Hitchcock | The 39 Steps / 1935

thanks for the memories

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bennett and Ian Hay (screenplay and dialogue, based on a novel by John Buchan), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The 39 Steps / 1935

 

As in so many of later Hitchcock films, his early masterwork of 1935, The 39 Steps, involves spies, mistaken identities, and recalcitrant beautiful women who, nonetheless, work with the hero to save the day. Loosely based on a 1915 spy thriller by John Buchan, this film is far more coherent than the original’s series of coincidences (by having the spy Anabella ask for a map of Scotland and circle the Scottish village of Alt-na-Shellach, for example, Hitchcock makes plausible the outrageous coincidence of the original tale, wherein Hannay accidentally stumbles into the ringleader spy’s Scotland mansion), even if, at times the series of events seem somewhat implausible. Perhaps the most inexplicable element of Charles Bennett’s and Ian Hay’s script is simply the fact that Hannay (Robert Donat), who becomes involved with Anabella Smith (Lucie Mannheim) through a chance meeting at a music hall, continues throughout to pursue the foreign (presumably German) spy ring leader (Godfrey Tearle). Even if one can simply slough it off as necessary to prove Hannay’s innocence in murdering Anabella, it doesn’t quite explain why he moves in the very direction of capture rather than escape. But then Hitchcock’s figures are nearly always slightly altruistic and accidental heroes who spend most of the action running directly into the nets they proclaim they want nothing to do with: the societies, authorities, and sexual involvements in which they become entrapped.

 

    In nearly all of Hitchcock’s movies the local police, the military, and even government authorities are nearly inseparable, and often more dangerous in their inabilities to even see the evil surrounding them, than are the criminals and foreign agents whom they have been invested to protect us from. In The 39 Steps it is the so-called “good citizens” of the world that are more dangerous to Hannay—a Canadian outsider—than are the spies who are out to kill him. In this early film, Hitchcock teases us by taking his character into even more minefields by forcing him, again by complete accident, to participate in a political rally where, in trying to loudly explicate his situation, he becomes a kind of local political hero; and in an to attempt to prove to a deliciously frigid (and in this case, slightly scatter-brained) blonde, Pamela (Madeleine Carroll)—Hitchcock’s favorite kind of woman—that he is the innocent man on the lam. Unlike Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, who knows better than Cary Grant that he is an innocent caught up in a vast conspiracy, Pamela is as dense as the societal figures around her, successful in getting Hannay arrested at least two times before she finally learns the truth by overhearing a telephone conversation between the conspirators themselves. But even then, she slows down his pace by several hours and nearly leads him—once more—into capture by trusting the assurances of Scotland Yard.

    Although the 39 Steps to which the film refers is the name of the foreign agency which plans to steal secret documents about British airplanes, it might as well describe all the “steps,” the various moves, ploys, and declarations that Hannay has to take in order to prove his worthiness as a loyal companion to his would-be lover. Only after Mr. Memory (Wylie Watson) finally gets all his knowledge off his chest, so to speak, does she truly permit the faithful “foreigner” to hold her hand.

    Memory plays an important role in this film, as Hitchcock, somewhat clumsily, reiterates in an early scene, when after discovering a knife in Annabella’s back, several bits of conversation between Hannay and his mysterious night-time visitor a few moments after we have just heard them. It is Hannay’s intuitive memory—the bits of music he can’t get out of his head (an important motif in so many of Hitchcock films), the use of mysterious words such as “the 39 Steps,” and vague image of a man with a missing forefinger—that solves the dilemmas of the central characters and saves the country. But rote memory, on the other hand—the kind of knowledge Mr. Memory puts to work in his music hall routine—is dangerous and destructive, a thing likely to get into the wrong hands or simply be misused.

     History as collected in memory in The 39 Steps is a truly terrifying thing; while history as a force to move forward, is not only something positive, but necessary to regenerate the world. In 1935, when the English might already have perceived that the events of World War I had resulted in a series of new circumstances which would threaten their world, Hitchcock’s lesson in “memory” was not only revelatory, but was prophetic.    

      

Los Angeles, May 31, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

Peter Weir | The Truman Show / 1998

the end of reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Niccol (screenplay), Peter Weir (director) The Truman Show / 1998

 

Andrew Niccol’s provocative script, which apparently went through 16 drafts before it was finally shot, has become, in the years since its 1998 premiere a kind of open mirror into which literary and film critics, sociologists, psychologists and numerous others have cast their images, often with quite distorted visions, regarding this work’s significance. Certainly the work, in its uncanny prophetic abilities to perceive the direction of television and other media toward live “reality” broadcasts, is startling. The film’s obvious links with and satire of utopian visions is equally fascinating for anyone, like myself, who has a literary bent—particularly, in this case, since many of the scenes were actually filmed in a kitsch-like picture postcard, newly-minted, “master-planned” community in Seaside, Florida; today, of course, there are such communities and Disneyfied shopping centers throughout the world; in my own neighborhood, the most popular shopping destination is the charming “old village” creation, “The Grove”. What is represented in the film, accordingly, as a retrograde absurdity in which the central character, Truman Burbank (Jim Carey) in entrapped, is now repeated throughout the nation and the world, flash-freezing, possibly, millions of individuals, even if only temporarily.

     As Joel and Ian Gold’s study, Suspicious Minds, details, moreover, numerous psychologically deluded individuals have developed what has been dubbed as “the Truman delusion,” believing that, like the film’s character, they have been entrapped in a world in which everyone else is involved in deluding them about the reality of the world in order to manipulate them for the purposes of entertainment or for other secretive and often coded goals. In short, what the figures of Truman’s world attempted to define as his delusion has actually become, in the real world, a delusion infecting others.    Finally, a movie in which the character is required to “read” subtle messages and codes in order to finally perceive that something is not right in paradise, and, a work in which that figure himself expresses many of his actions in coded messages scrawled upon a mirror with soap, encourages movie devotees to read in their own series of codes and secretive messages. The film, even if unintentionally, encourages those who believe in conspiracies.

 

    For those readers who have not seen the film, let me just begin by explaining that Truman Burbank, born an unwanted baby, was adopted while still in the womb by a television corporation, and has grown up and lived his life on a set of gargantuan proportions (embedded in a vast dome) in which he is the only unknowing figure surrounded by hundreds of paid actors who perform as his family friends as he daily goes about his life, broadcast 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Almost everyone on the planet watches the film which financially survives through the strategic placement of products in his home, on the street, and in other locations throughout the small island home where Truman resides.

     Although Truman’s world is portrayed, at first, as one in which everyone is so neighborly and friendly, a world which is quite literally centered around the individual—Truman—that it seems pointless to doubt one’s love and safety, it quickly becomes apparent that everything is too good (too sickeningly beautiful and cute) to be believed. Yet Truman has been trained from birth to believe in and respond to precisely the kitsch-like images, costumes, behavior, and values systems that surround him, so that it is nearly impossible for him to even comprehend a reality outside of the one he has known. Habitualized to be terrified of bodies of water (forcing him to remain in his island community) and frightened of dogs (which the TV producers use as guards to intimidate entrance to verboten areas), Truman is trapped in the fantasy paradise that ritualizes his reality. The major issue of the film, accordingly, centers upon how Truman might possibly begin to imagine another reality when he has had nothing but intimations of anything outside of his Seahaven paradise. For Truman all other realities are embodied in one word: Fiji; and he is determined that in that word he will find everything that is apparently forbidden him in his personal life, particularly the woman whom he truly loves, Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), an extra on the TV set who has accidentally gotten too close to Truman upon at least two occasions, and was hurried off the set and series.

    The only other “events” that might suggest the existence of other realities to Truman—the sudden fall from the skies of a spotlight (explained in the course of the day through a radio broadcast that suggests it came from a passing airplane); an odd radio interference wherein he hears what appears to be stage directions; the sudden appearance of his “dead” father (Brian Delate) who is quickly whisked away by authoritative beings; and his discovery of an elevator serving merely as a prop, behind which sits individuals snacking on “offstage” doughnuts—are, frankly, not really enough to explain his sudden “suspicions,” particularly given the fact that he has never needed to employ the system which in our society we outsiders need in order to survive by determining the difference between what’s true and false. Since everything Truman believes inherently is a lie, how might he possibly be expected to even imagine what “truth” might look like? And that is a question the film never explores.

     In other words, if we truly were forced to perceive reality the way Truman might see it, the suspicions which lead him to perceive the timed approaches of neighbors and passersby, that make him suddenly doubt the nearly always friendly intonations of his wife’s (Laura Linney) consumer-friendly voice would be absurd, signs of real delusion which the television characters accuse him of. How does one develop a system of suspicions in a world which automatically allays them as quickly as they arise?

    Of course, as some psychologists argue, it may be that suspicion is hard-wired into us as a protective structure, that our suspicion systems are in-born to us as a species. But the film, quite obviously, does not argue this or even hint of that possibility. Indeed, it argues for a series of values that are taught by the studio executives and actors, overseen by Christof (Ed Harris), and through learned Pavlov-like reactions imposed on the mind through traumatic events such as the storm at sea which supposedly “killed” Truman’s father. Indeed, the reason why Truman is so “watchable” to the millions who tune him in every night is that he is a true innocent, a gullible and likeable being unlike everyone in real world. In short, Truman is not a human like us, but is, metaphorically speaking, Christof’s baby, visually made clear through Christof’s stroking of the sleeping image of his “child.”

    The reason why we allow for Truman’s sudden suspicions has little to do with the character, I would suggest, and everything to do with us. We naturally suspect and, accordingly imagine that Truman should also gradually uncover the delusions imposed upon him. Like the television audience that The Truman Show portrays, we want Truman to discover the lie, to escape into our soiled world and become one of us instead of remaining the gullible innocent he has been bred to be.

    Truman’s suspicions seem reasonable because they accord with our own. Even the lying characters such as Marlon (Noah Emmerich), reiterate to their “friend,” Truman, our shared childhood imaginings, perhaps the earliest stirrings of our suspicion systems: our doubts about our parentage, our imaginings of association with worlds outside our own, and our individual relationships to faith-based hierarchies such as God. If Truman’s disbeliefs have no ground in which to grow, our own full-grown patches of doubt make the character’s occasional wonderments seem absolutely justified. And thus, associating with the stick-figure character with which we’ve been presented, we easily project our own selves into his situation. This, indeed, may be the reason why so many individuals have taken Truman’s delusions on as their own, and have brought them from their encounter with a Hollywood movie into real life.

    But while we cheer, along with the pretended television audience of this film, for Truman’s final ability to turn his back on his creation and, simultaneously, his creator Christof with his stock phrase “good afternoon, good evening, and good night,” it somehow doesn’t dawn on us that, having hit the photographic imitative wall of his world, Truman has come to the end of reality. The black door into which he “escapes,” is not “our world,” but a world in which reality can now have no meaning. And, in that respect, our world can now be only his fantasy world. Which, of course, is the truth of the situation, since Truman is not a real being in any event. When a character exits the book, so to speak, what he enters is not “reality,” but the end of everything, death itself.   

    Or, let us look at it another way, as did Woody Allen in The Purple Rose of Cairo in 1985: if a figure of film fantasy where to step down from the screen, chaos would ensue, not only affecting the “real” figures it encounters, but would threaten us as a species, possibly converting us into figures of fiction as well. In Allen’s movie, the hero of the fantasy returns to his film, and reality is restored to its proper position, while art regains its power—as Oscar Wilde would have had it.

 

    Is it any wonder that if we might believe that Truman has escaped his Seahaven fantasy that we may fear that we too must not be completely real, that we might suddenly feel endangered by all others who control and moderate our lives? As the Golds well argued in their study, Suspicious Minds, sickness can truly be influenced by products of our culture. And in a world where so much of so-called art is described or defined as “real,” how is anyone to comprehend what we might describe as life? What is truth in a world of pretense? It just may be that, ultimately, our own realities will come to an end. If I cannot think (imagine), perhaps I do not exist.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015).