The Connotation Of The Cave Metaphor In The Truman Show And The Study Of The Modern Dilemma

The progress of the ages has brought about the wasteland of modern man's spiritual world as well as the great abundance in material life.And the development of the media technology has led modern man further and further astray in his pursuit of carnivalization and made it even worse behind the screen in order to satisfy the voyeuristic nature of human and maximize commercial profits.The Truman Show is a comedy with absurdity and black humor.Its director Peter Weir reflects,by the plot of the protagonist running away from Seahaven Island,the obscure means social media utilizes to influence the mass,the ongoing commercialization of daily life and the loss of privacy in modern man.The emergence of the Truman Show illustrates that the aesthetic evaluation of comedy in modern man has suffered extreme deviation and fallen morbid.Nominally,the characters in the show are free men,but as a matter of fact,they are merely slaves manipulated by the mediatechnology.The viewers are repeatedly reminded to contemplate upon the essence of a truly comic program,which should include a whole and distinct picture of subject consciousness,self consciousness,social consciousness etc.,rather than compromising with sensory consciousness and wallowing in vulgar pleasures.Through the discussion of the comicality of the film,the dissertation notes that comic films are growing more and more vulgar in the context of modern society.Capable of bringing huge economic profits as they are,they fail to nourish the spiritual world of modern man.In the history of films,the true value of a comic lies in the sober awareness of the bilateral relations between the world and the comic cosmos,which is also the intellectual depth a real comic should provide to the society.Weir makes use of filming techniques and defamiliarization to reveal completely the media technology behind the screen to the mass.The author examines the modern dilemma from certain details of the film and interprets the source of voyeurism which is innate in human and the direct reason why modern social media brazenly broadcasts it.Voyeurism,collectively practiced,becomes the elephant in the room.In the course of privacy exposition,the mass gain mental satisfaction and a sense of superiority toward the one being condescendingly peeped at.Here the author relates back to the cave metaphor proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato,proves the rooted dependence of human on the externaland then,in comparisons and contrasts,analyzes the differences of men and the times between the ancient and the modern.There is no doubt that the progress of the media technology can expand man's biological abilities such as hearing,vision etc.,however,its most vital function is to reshape the living space of human.Every phase in human history is the development of the last phase,which justifies the approach to seek answers for the modern dilemma from classical philosophy.Thus,the restudy of the cave metaphor aims to find out the disparities between the brand new modern society and the old on the same lasting problem,and accordingly obtain detailed solutions.In fact,it can be drawn from a reinterpretation of the themes of the Truman Show that modern man has lost himself in the fetters of technological control.Human nature is displayed incisively and vividly in the film with issues of the loss of the personal identity,the confusion of the mass,the emptiness of the mind etc.Despite its dramatization and exaggeration,the Truman Show preaches its profound lessons just like an allegory.