It 's too rich in the staging, too perfect in the picture and editing, Jim Carrey's rubber face too, is, well, too Hollywood, "The Truman Show", because you can love. However, the movie deserves an alert to the issue of script and some situations clearly legible in key psychopathological.
Truman, a typical American boy at the age of thirty years, he realizes that his life is a giant soap opera produced by a large network television cameras positioned ognidove achieved by 5000, hundreds of actors and extras that show the products many sponsors, and directed by a spaceship from an all-powerful director-named Christof. The key experience of Truman is not dissimilar from those frequently found in clinical psychosis: feelings of strangeness and unreality environmental, delusional interpretations and insights of some ambiguous events, the birth of false beliefs about the identity of those surrounding the patient, including close relatives, of being spied on and monitored by cameras placed in the walls between the hedges of the garden and so on, but often ephemeral terrifying experiences reported by those patients, who in the film are transfigured into a science fiction story beautifully crafted down to the details of content and form. The story of Truman is also open to an interpretation indicating the symbolic and metaphorical in the excessive power of television over who does and who benefits from the agent of social control formerly operated by religions, but especially by highlighting the transcendental character of the structure of the relationship with This media: Truman was created, directed and supervised by the director Christof, and eventually will have to freely choose whether to remain faithful. In this background we find metaphorical transcendental themes dear to Peter Weir, especially in his masterpiece Australian "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (1975), and there Symptom Complex derealization-depersonalization-panic - metamorphosis was analyzed in a precise historical context, the symbolic and mythological 2, here shows the development of delusional experiences of depersonalization in a size seemingly all day, but in fact no less symbolic and metaphorical.
The likelihood of psychopathology "The Truman Show" does not stop at the descriptive level, but also sinking some points of interest in psychodynamic, particularly in structured around a real own family romance: the leitmotif of soap opera is in fact the death by drowning of the father of Truman, a child, I had witnessed and that remembrance with clear shades of guilt, this fiction, believe Truman made by all , including his mother, is debunked by the same father who occasionally reappears in the guise of a homeless man, to the point of deciding to use Christof melodramatically the meeting and the final embrace between father and son "raised".
"The Truman Show" confirms the current trend of cinema to reflect on itself is no longer with the classic trick of the film in the film or the play in the film, but whose stories show characters are not real characters but virtual images on television viedeotapes, in what is perhaps the prototype of this genre, namely "Videodrome" (1982) by David Cronenberg 3, the image of a character in the movie phone White in "The Purple Rose of Cairo" by Woody Allen (1985), image-memories in videotapes women in "Sex, lies and videotapes" of Soderbergh (1989), a cartoon in "Want to Fly" by Maurizio Nichetti (1991 ), the video game character in "Nirvana" by Gabriele Salvatores (1997), the character in a virtual life guaranteed by an insurance company in the recent English film "Open Your Eyes" (1998). All the protagonists of these films, with various accents emotional persecution trapped in mechanisms that allow them to discriminate between real and virtual images perceived by everyone making them defenseless, helpless and bewildered, desirous only to back down to normal beings of flesh and bone.
While these films the dual hyper-realistic character of a fiction film and voyeurism that meets the other depict a widespread social condition in which people live more and more like appearances and personalities, inflation in the imagination that comes from a perception of reality devoid of emotional depth: in the absence of a nucleus of identity strong, "internalized personal images" firmly amalgamated with the affective-matrix drive, no one can know what their identity and ultimately identify the images that are socially imposed and / or proposals. Life is more of a dream, which we are the characters, but only sometimes dreamers. The screw 24 of 24 live broadcasts on the Internet (and the interest it aroused) seem currently the most radical example of this tendency of anthropology. At the end of the movie Truman will rebel against his fate and pre-public, but no one knows what will be at the dark side of the door that will cross: as the girls disappeared on nymphs-Hanging Rock, maybe nothing.
E 'in this fascinating final "The Truman Show" finally escapes to sociological readings to raise the ontological question of' they percipi east, brilliantly intuited as essential to the cinema film in the one devised by Samuel Beckett and will be remembered, played by man-puppet / picture par excellence, Buster Keaton: "Film," 1960, "the greatest Irish film" as he recalls Deleuze 4.
Actor almost unique, Buster Keaton, one-eyed (with a black patch in one eye), runs alongside a wall to avoid being seen, and is locked in a room where it provides with systematic way to eliminate, cover, veil, every window, every hole, eye, human or animal, real or effigy that is, in a kind of armor PARANOID. When the accurate operation, which is the whole movie, and in which there grotesque gags worthy of Beckett no less than Keaton (for example, the cat that persists in the back door through which is brought out), there is , here is the discovery of horror: the only eye that was not shut down is that, narrator, the camera, which hitherto had followed slyly from behind the unsuspecting protagonist: "As long as the perception remains behind the main character is not dangerous because it remains unconscious " 4 , when revealed in the optical field of the unaware actor shows his character insopprimibilmente linked to self-awareness. Self-consciousness, consciousness of the ego, whose unreality is traditionally considered a disorder, is self-observation. The circle seems to close: if you have not received you are not, if you received it is better to be a character at all. Without you, without your eyes, without being something for you, I am nothing, says the lover to the beloved, but also the patient to the therapist. But if they refuse to be characters of ourselves, then comes the desire to disappear Keaton and Truman, and all other above mentioned heroes who realize they are processed into images, united by the tropism deadly horror that comes from appearing. We are, I believe, the fundamental question about the fate of the madness that sometimes even the author is able to restore cinema: where the patient embodies the desire not to perceive the radical, that is no longer perceived, has abolished the prerequisite for any therapy .
References
The notion of a fantasy of disappearance , as is known, is by M. Fagioli. See Fagioli M (1972), Death Instinct and knowledge, the new Roman edition, Rome 1996 VIII
2 Maggini C, Dalle Luche R: "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and líevidenza enigmatic myth. In: M. Betti, E. Marks, G. Zanda, psychiatric experience in Video, Proceedings of the conference on, Bagni di Lucca 12-13/4/1991, Ed Maxmaur ñPsichiatria and Territory.
3 From Luche R., A. Barontini: Transfusion. Sage of psychopathology from the cinema of David Cronenberg. Mauro Baroni Editore, Viareggio, 1997.
4 G. Deleuze: The biggest Irish film ("Film " of Samuel Beckett). In: Critical and Clinical, Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 1996.