'Determined by an Air Date': The Truman Show's Televisual Logics of Utopia, Intimacy, and Subjectivit

This thesis proposes that Peter Weir's 1998 film The Truman Show presents three subject positions in relation to the television show it dramatizes -- the creator, the spectator, and the performer -- in order to develop a criticism of television that expresses the need to question our media culture and the powers that determine and regulate it. Weir presents Christof, the show's creator, as the autocratic controller of the show whose presentation of Truman's world reveals its neoconservative agenda in its attempts to recreate the world of 1950s domestic situation comedies. This simulacrum, which Christof portrays as an authentic reality, comforts its viewers by providing them with Truman's companionship. Further, Weir's film includes the home viewers of this television program to illustrate the show's omnipresence in the film world. The show engages its spectator in a relationship of intimacy through its conventions of liveness, immediacy, and affect. Through his portrayal of these home viewers, Weir separates the film spectator from the television spectator by allowing and encouraging his film viewers to feel superior to the diegetic television viewers. Finally, the film's attention to the performers on the show -- specifically Truman and his wife Meryl -- develops new conceptions of mediatized subjectivity that exceed other conceptions developed in media scholarship. Meryl presents a televisual womanhood that relies on and fetishizes a nostalgic vision of post-World War II feminine domesticity. Truman's subjectivity is wholly determined by the world he has grown up in, but he reclaims an individual subjectivity based on an interiority that cannot be mediated. These performers' subjectivities illustrate a phenomenon in which media encourage consumers to invest images with emotional and psychological significance, but the film makes clear that the individuality behind the images becomes insignificant; in an endless series of replacements, even the images with which we invest the most time, emotion, and intimacy become easily replaceable. By dramatizing this television show through the three subject positions around which this thesis is organized, Weir prohibits the film viewer from aligning too closely with any of the three. By excoriating television's promotion of ever-replaceable images, moments, and texts, The Truman Show voices an urge for conscious and critical examination of television culture.