chapter 5 Beyond the Moving Images: A Plotinian Reading of The Truman Show
Giannis Stamatellos
Let us fly to our dear country plotinus Ennead i 6, 8, 16 ∵
Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives a happy life in an artificial “cave;” an idyl- lic, ordered and peaceful place, “Seahaven Island,” the largest studio ever con- structed, conceived and designed by a “televisionary” and eccentric director Christof (Ed Harris). Truman is the “star” of the show, broadcasted for thirty years non-stop and unedited for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to millions of people around the globe. His life is “live” through an “intricate network of hidden cameras” all over Seahaven studio. Truman is not yet aware that he is the main “role” in a tv reality show, that wife, friends, colleagues and relatives are just “actors” in the show. However, after a number of unpredict- able anomalies in the flow of the show, Truman realizes the counterfeit nature of his reality and escapes his virtual realm of Seahaven. Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), written by Andrew Niccol, has been approached from various philosophical perspectives particularly in relation to Cartesian skepticism and the question of the external world (Blessing 2005), Sartrean existentialism and the affirmation of individual freedom (Falzon 2014), and some accounts of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Gilabert Barberà 2003; Foley 2006). However, despite the aforementioned philosophical approaches, no Neoplatonic interpretation of the film has been offered. In this chapter I aim to offer a Plotinian reading of The Tru- man Show with special reference to Plotinus’ dual-aspect theory of the soul and human freedom. I shall argue that The Truman Show can be interpreted as a discourse on selfhood, self-determination, and individual freedom in self-transcendence.
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1 The Allegory of Seahaven
The Truman Show has been discussed in terms of Cartesian doubt and skep- tical challenge of reality. It has been suggested that a Cartesian perspective shows the importance of leaving behind the disingenuous elements of our world and the comfort of the real, in order to risk in the unknown; as Kimberly Blessing notes, it is this decision to explore the unexplored “like Truman hang- ing over the edge of the boat, that we come to know who we truly are, and for Descartes, that we truly are. It’s here that we find ourselves. It’s here that we find truth, it’s here that we begin to find meaning for our lives” (Blessing 2005: 14–15). Descartes’s doubt of reality takes us back to ancient skepticism (7), as well as to the two schools of the Hellenistic Age: the first being that of the Pyrrhonian Skeptics or the school of Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–c. 270 bce), and the second being the school of the Skeptical Academy or the critical dialecti- cians of Plato’s Academy such as Arcesilaus (316/5–241/0 bce) and Carneades (214–129/8 bce). On the one hand, Pyrrho maintained the idea of negative epistemology; he thought that “knowing anything for sure is impossible,” and proposed that a speechless attitude (ou mallon) and suspension of judgement (epochē) lead us to the balance of mind and therefore to the true tranquility of soul, detached and free from any disturbance (ataraxia). On the other hand, Arcesilaus and Carneades abandoned the positive metaphysics of the Academy and devoted themselves to a destructive criticism and skepticism of Plato’s teaching, tak- ing the Socratic claim of ignorance in the early Platonic dialogues literally by stating their own famous affirmation of ignorance: “I know that I do not know” (Armstrong 1966: 138–140; Wright 2009: 139). Arcesilaus questioned the Stoic criterion of truth by rejecting “cognitive impression” (phantasia katalēptikē) and so accepting the suspension of judgment about everything (Vogt 2014). In The Truman Show suspension of judgment seems to be an inherent ele- ment of human cognition expressed in our rejection of doubting what is real, as Christof himself replies to Mike Michaelson, the journalist of TruTalk (Tru- man Show’s tv forum):
MIKE: Christof, let me ask you, why do you think that uh, Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now? CHRISTOF: We accept the reality of the world with which we’re present- ed. It’s as simple as that. (Transcript)
The latter statement encapsulates Christof’s main conception for the cre- ation of the Truman Show. Christof suggests an “uncritical state” of human