Frank Filmwas made the only way it could have been in 1973 , before
the coming of digital technology. Within a few years such labour-intensive
construction would appear nostalgic. A quarter of a century later the
theme returned in Peter Weir’s parable of media spectacle,The Truman
Show( 1997 ). Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man adopted at birth
by a broadcasting corporation. Unwittingly, he grows up as the only
‘authentic’ person in a giant domed town populated by actors. His life is
filmed around the clock as a live realitytvshow for a worldwide audience.
Life in the bubble is essentially an insular and nostalgic 1950 s, with little
sense of the wired planet beyond. He falls in love with an extra, but when
she tries to tell him what is really going on she is hastily removed from the
show. Distraught and confused, Truman longs for her. He buys magazines
every morning and reconstructs her face from cut-out scraps from fashion
and cosmetics ads. It is a quaint resemblance of his lost love, in stark
contrast to the state of the art collage used to promote the film.
The poster and trailer forThe Truman Showfeatured a photo-mosaic
grid of thousands of images from the film.^19 Assembled by computer
from a digitized archive, they conjure up Truman’s face, but it is legible
only from a distance. Quite literally, he is a product of his environment,
a mirage that disintegrates into its parts upon closer inspection. These
two modes of collage – handmade ‘cut and paste’ and digital assembly –
correspond to two technological epochs of the photographic image. The
achievement ofThe Truman Showis to hold them in suspension, mobiliz-
ing both registers at once. In doing so the film is able to dramatize the
two contradictory fantasies of our time: the regressive wish for a small-
town life in a pre-global, pre-digital village and the hope of being singled
out as ‘someone special’ from the electronic networks of globalized anomie.
The Truman Showtake its place in a list of films that have made telling
use of photography at different turning points in its evolution. Often the
nature of a technology becomes clear to us just as it is about to mutate or
disappear. Cinema seems to have been attracted to different forms of the
photographic image at such moments. As we have seen, Hitchcock’sRear
Windowconcerned a wheelchair-bound photographer with nothing to do
in his apartment but look into his courtyard. It was made in 1954 , just as
110 television was beginning its inexorable transformation into the dominant
97 The Truman Show(Peter Weir, 1997),
frames.
