Live Transmission REVISITING THE TRUMAN SHOW IN A PANOPTIC WORLD
In 1998, when it first came out in cinemas, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show would have appeared to many viewers a canny statement about privacy and modern broadcasting. The film, in which mild-mannered suburban husband Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) gradually comes to understand that his entire existence is a wholly manufactured television program broadcast to millions (in which he, the sole unknowing participant, is the star), seemed to double as a media critique, skewering both the mass audience that laps up the minutiae of Truman’s life and the unscrupulous producers who exploit him.
In his review, American critic Roger Ebert was keen to argue that the film’s obviously fantastical premise had a clear foundation in the contemporary media landscape:
Television, with its insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into ‘content,’ devouring their lives and secrets. If you think The Truman Show is an exaggeration, reflect that Princess Diana lived under similar conditions from the day she became engaged to Charles.
Just six years earlier, in 1992, American broadcast network MTV had begun airing the long-running documentary series The Real World, in which, every season, a group of young adults, eager to become celebrities, agree to live together and have cameras record their soapy interpersonal dramas – a kind of proto–Truman Show concept, and an early entry in the then-burgeoning genre of reality television.
One year after release, in 1999, the Dutch reality TV franchise , for which contestants agree to live under continuous surveillance in a carefully constructed house, began airing. The show soon became an international hit, with fifty-four regional versions across the globe, including Australia. It was then obvious, if it
