I imagine the majority of Alfie Deyes viewers
have never watched The Truman Show, released in 1998 vloggers biggest audience
probably weren’t even born yet. However
after recently re watching The Truman Show I have to come to the conclusion
that it predicted vlogging.
The Truman show is a science fiction,
comedy drama film. Jim Carrey plays a normal guy who is unaware that he is the
main star of a constructed reality show watched by millions.
The public is invested in Truman’s life and
find his mundane life routines interesting not too different from YouTuber’s
Morning Routine videos.
Vloggers love lives are often speculated in
YouTube comments with the most successful YouTuber’s being in very public
relationships. Being in a relationship on YouTube can be very beneficial with
Mr. and Mrs. style videos being very popular and sweet moments being captured
on video. The ‘producers’ of the
TV series in The Truman Show also recognised the importance of a relationship
at drawing in a big audience.
My favorite aspect of the Truman Show is
their sneaky sponsorships, the way his wife will stop mid conversation to hold
up some hot chocolate powder and claim how great it is and repeat the brand
name. The random close up of brand logos and speaking like an advert. This is
also now a regular occurrence in vlogging , the spontaneous baking tutorial and
spending a little too long talking about a certain product.
I do honestly believe that the majority of
Vloggers had no idea of the amount of people their videos would reach. I
doubt Zoe Sugg filming a video of herself in her bedroom going through a
Primark bag back in 2009 would ever of thought she would be watched by 9
million people.
At the end of the day aren’t all the big
vloggers the unassuming celebrities of the real world?
Part 1
ReplyDelete_The Truman Show_ is prescient in many other ways, ways which are not often discussed because we usually want to look at only the seemingly positive aspects of the film itself, the Internet, social media, Vlogging, and the like. _The Truman Show_ is a very dark film, that is, if you cut off the final two minutes of concocted fantasy that nullify the entire film's ethos. End the film with Truman pounding with his fist the perimeter wall of his occluded life. That's it. Pull the camera back until Truman is just a speck. Then fade to black. That is how the film should end. Escape is a fantasy.
The reality show in the film, in which Truman is the unwitting center of attention, is how corporations simultaneously advertise and dictate life and lifestyle for everything between the cradle and the grave. Truman's entire sense of who he is and his relationships with the people around him have been manipulated to keep Truman functioning on what appears to be his own accord. It is Truman's assumed "authenticity" that is his supposed appeal and what attracts viewers (clicks, likes, tweets, and retweets, to bring the comparison up to date). It is this artificiality that constructs an economic system of unquestioned consumerism. This is the only reason for The Truman Show reality show to exist: to produce, sell, and consume stuff. This is an economic system that provides employment for people. It is a small-scale consumer-oriented neoliberal society that must obscure any defects in the system so as not to taint the advertised image, thus tarnishing the optics of desirability.
Truman begins feeling that his life is artificially constructed and yearns for a more substantially felt reality that is not all smiles and jokes. He wants a real life with real consequences, good and bad.
The ending of the _The Truman Show_ is deeply ironic. After finally confirming his suspicions that his entire life has been artificially constructed and never really his own, Truman believes he simply can leave for some presumed "better," more "real" world. What is the world Truman escapes to? It is a world that does not want a reality that has not been artificially constructed. It is a world that blows things up for kicks (or destroys them in some other manner), cannot find joy in non-material consumer "stuff" not shipped from Amazon and opened on camera, and recognizes only the most superficial aspects of human relationships and squeezes these for saccharine emotive appeal. This is a narcissistic, market-oriented, neoliberal, world that does not want Truman, does not want to hear his complaints and grievances. This is a world filled with people who want to be superficially entertained so they do not have to take responsibility for creating their own authentic lives. They want their lives constructed for them.
Part 2
ReplyDeleteYou should read the original screenplay of _The Truman Show_, which Hollywood considered too dark, angry, and pessimistic and had rewritten about ten times. In this original screenplay, Truman escapes from the domed soundstage that had been the setting for his fabricated existence up to that point. He climbs to the top of the dome on the outside. He looks around and sees several other domes just like the one in which he had existed for the previous 34 years.
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From the original screenplay:
EXT. SOUNDSTAGE. DUSK.
TRUMAN finds himself on the roof of the soundstage. Outside.
Really outside for the first time in his life.
He looks frantically around him. Nowhere to hide. The
soundstage stretches for miles in both directions as far as the
eye can see, an interminable expanse of roof.
Facing him, a colossal Burbank. Several other soundstages
almost as gigantic as his own. The palm trees lining the
streets, dwarfed by the mammoth barns.
The Hollywood Freeway in the distance, carrying its ribbons of
traffic, twenty lanes wide. Gargantuan office buildings
eclipse any skyscraper Truman has ever known.
Directly below him, a dizzying drop to the studio lot and its
arched entranceway.
Above him, a large yellow moon in the twilight sky. The real
moon, not the planetarium projection he has been contemplating
for the last thirty-four years.
Truman wheels around, suddenly realizing he is not alone. A
GROUP has emerged on the rooftop, standing still and silent
in a semi-circle, cutting off any escape.
Along with the STUDIO GUARDS, keeping their distance in the
background, are CHLOE, SIMEON, and the two studio executives,
MOSES and ROMAN. In front of them, the co-stars in his life -
MARLON, MERYL, sister RAQUEL, mother AUDREY and supposedly dead
father KIRK. No one moves or speaks as Truman scans the
familiar faces. Marlon, in particular, cannot look him in the
eye.
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Part 3
ReplyDeleteIt used to be that companies were created to manufacture products that people needed. These companies advertised their products to generate sales and keep the company in business. In this reasonable capitalistic environment, inferior products didn't stand up to the competition and went the way of the dinosaur quickly. This is fine. This is normal business. Some companies even invested so much into creating such good products that they provided a lifetime warranty for those products. That model is gone. The model of production and consumption that we have now is about lifestyle manufacturing, the advertising of lifestyle, or at least assumed lifestyle, that is populated with certain things. Back in the older, more reasonable consumer system, the only people who would buy a four-wheel drive vehicle were the people who would actually use such a vehicle for its intended purpose, off-roading, for either fun or work. Today, eighty percent of four-wheel drive vehicles are never taken off-road in any considerable manner. The owning of such a vehicle is largely a cosmetic lifestyle posturing. Advertising is now about a future-oriented promise of how a consumer would like to see himself or herself. It is a narcissistic fantasy. Perhaps with advertising, this has always been the case. But the point is that today this aspect of advertised lifestyle has become the overriding principle, not the utility of consumer products themselves.
Vlogging channels and videos are supplanting the more traditional more conventional notions of advertising. To quote _The Truman Show_'s Christof:
We've become increasingly frustrated watching
actors give us phony emotions, bored with
pyrotechnics and special effects. While the
world he inhabits is counterfeit, there's
nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts.
no cue cards. It's not always Shakespeare but
it's genuine. That's how he can support an
entire channel.
The problem with this understanding is that Truman's life IS actually scripted. He is surrounded by actors and impulses both direct and indirect that push and prod him into the predictable and the sellable, as is the case with Vloggers in the "real" world. And this gets to the germ of the profoundly dark aspect of both "The Truman Show" and Vloggers, especially those Vloggers who have managed to make full-time incomes off Vlogging and ancillary ventures: identity itself has become commodified in a rarely questioned feedback loop. If viewers cannot decipher what is being sold, then it is likely that they themselves and their data are what is up on the auction block.