The Truman Show is a movie about a man who tries to find himself in a life scripted for him since birth. Watching The Truman Show for the first time the other night, I began to see how most of us in society are puppets or prisoners in some fashion or another. We go about our daily lives performing tasks we learned from the moment we could speak and walk. Our way of thinking is skewed because we are brainwashed to see things the way others want you to perceive them. Our parents, our employers, advertisers and let us not forget big brother, our government with its no good politicians push their own agendas.
Our minds are bound by the information given to us. Instead of exploring the world outside ourselves, we are chained to the lives which have been given to us. Women, for example, were taught to believe that the only jobs they could obtain were housewives, cashiers or seamstresses in a man’s world. Now they have jobs as CEOs of corporations. They own their own businesses and they manage as single parents in families. Even now as an employee of the City of New York, I know I am bound by the rules and regulations that are forced upon me. These rules inhibit me from helping people because if I don’t enforce them, I could lose my job.
The Truman Show is a reflection of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Both Truman and the captives are prisoners in their own world; a world that was made for them. When one day, they realize that there is another world outside the world they know. In Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners only know life presented to them by the shadows on the wall. When one prisoner was freed from his chains, he left the cave and saw the sun, sand and trees. He was awed by the magnificence of the landscape so he ventured back into the cave to tell the other captives to come with him. However, they thought he was crazy so he left them in the cave because he knew there was a better world outside.
Like the freed prisoner in Allegory of the Cave, Truman also believed that there was a better world outside.
No comments:
Post a Comment