What 'The Truman Show' Got Right, 20 Years Later
Peter Weir keeps his webcam covered with tape these days. He doesn’t want anybody watching him.
Can you blame him? Weir, after all, directed The Truman Show, the incisive satire-drama from 1998 that seems startlingly prescient today. Back then, the movie drew acclaim for its imaginative storyline and barbed commentary. Two decades later, it resembles a veiled warning, both as an astute predictor of reality television’s enormous rise and as a cultural forerunner to the age of digital surveillance. So profoundly has the film invaded the pop cultural psyche that there is now a psychiatric delusion named after it.
The film stars as the happy-go-lucky insurance salesman Truman Burbank, a man whose every moment, unbeknownst to him, has been broadcast on television, turning his life into a 24-hour reality show. Millions have watched him grow up, go to school, fall in love, get married, eat, sleep, brush his teeth. Things get interesting when he begins to
