Truman Burbank is just some dude. He lives his life unaware that every moment is being filmed for a grand television show: “The Truman Show”. All his friends and family are actors. His neighborhood is one big set. The sun and stars are stage lights high above the ground on the ceiling of a massive, sky-blue dome.
In the movie, the show portrayed as some worldwide smash hit, but it’s nothing more than a boring webcam. Yes, he’s oblivious to the deception, but I can go online and in ten seconds find ten videos of people unaware they’re on camera, and none of them deserve the kind of mass appeal “The Truman Show” is given by its diegetic audience. If audiences really dug that peek behind the curtain, why isn’t “Candid Camera” the most popular show of all time?
The real-life success of reality TV just digs a deeper grave for this movie. Your Survivors, your Big Brothers; those guys know they’re being filmed, and they’re going to make the best of it. They’re going to put on a show because they know they’re on a show. But Truman? He’s just living. Being there. As long as he’s just a guy getting by, as long as he’s unaware of the show, there’s nothing to watch.
But if Truman were a chick? If the film remained the same, but the gender roles were switched? That would get you a TV show worthy of the global audience. If Truman is a dude, you’re just watching a dude; if Truman is a girl, you know she’s going to get naked sooner or later. Imagine the ratings bonanza during She-Truman’s college years as she sows her wild oats. The producers would pounce on it. The show would acknowledge, expect, and then eventually provoke and script the kinds of situations that produce boobies. It would turn the show into one big elaborate porno, with an unaware star at the center of the fray. There would be outrage, there would be moral condemnation, but there is no doubt the show would be ratings success. Everybody likes nudity. Put on a show where a young woman has a good chance of getting naked each night, and you’ve got a winner. The viewers would pour in.
Morality would finally bring the axe down. She-Truman would be proclaimed a victim of ruthless exploitation, an innocent soul corrupted in the name of ratings, a modern martyr. The show would be shut down and labeled a sick game.
But it’d be fun while it lasted.
Although, once you bring sex into the mix, you can’t just stop. It’s like potato chips or gummy bears. The show’s producers would have to create one hell of a sexy unreality to keep viewers hooked night after night. She-Truman’s daily life would be scripted to allow all sorts of contrived opportunities for nudity. Every car wash becomes a wet T-shirt contest. Every parking ticket ends with a sexual favor. Every birthday party leads to an orgy. Porn stars are hired to augment the normal townsfolk actors. Nudity is made uniform. Sex is made commonplace. But that’s the thing: to She-Truman, it wouldn’t be contrived; it would be normal. It would be the world she grew up in; the way things are. She would know nothing but a modern society in which hyperactive sexuality and nonstop nudity are as everyday as buying groceries or eating dinner. The ratings would soar as her worldview twists.
But if this version of the film follows the same plot, and She-Truman escapes the television show, her fate would be just as uncertain. If she unshackles her legs and climbs out of Plato’s cave of sexy shadows, she would enter a world completely foreign to her expectations of daily life. She would be an unabashed, sexually-aggressive nympho unable to understand why people insist on wearing clothes each day.
And that would be the sequel.
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