Birthpsychology at the Movies

The Truman Show
Reviewed by Marcy Wineman Axness

"The Truman Show", this year's blockbuster from Australian director Peter Weir, makes an eloquent allegorical statement about the experience of many adoptees.

The tale told in "The Truman Show" is set in mythical Seahaven, a spotless, pastel fantasyland, where one day a klieg light drops out of the sky and crashes down in front of Truman Burbank, a cheerful fellow of 29, played by Jim Carrey--an astonishing actor, able to express powerful emotions even with his back to the camera. Truman soon begins to examine more closely his ultra-routine life with his ultra-chipper wife (Laura Linney), and comes to suspect that things--and people--in his life are conspiring to keep him confined to his tidy little island life.

The back-story to "The Truman Show" begins with an "unwanted pregnancy", as Ed Harris' character Christof bluntly puts it. Back then, Christof was a young phenom of a television director with a revolutionary idea: have OmniCam Corporation televise the birth of a baby to be put up for adoption. There were several contenders for the role of Truman; the day and time of birth consigned this particular Truman to his televised fate. OmniCam then legally adopted the baby and proceeded to televise his unfolding--but highly engineered--life with the use of thousands of tiny cameras placed everywhere in the "town" that serves as really a giant television studio. All of the people in Truman's life, including his best friend, his adoring mother, and his doting wife (she receives an extra ten grand for each lovemaking session) are paid actors, appearing in what turned out to be the most popular, long-running TV series in the history of the world!

Personally, it deeply nourished the soul of this adoptee to witness the deconstruction of a life that is supposedly happy, has all the "right" trappings, but is based in artificiality, a life in which everyone else knows something basic that the hero doesn't know, a sanitized life in which the hero's pursuit of his soul's desire--authenticity--threatens his heretofore numbly cheerful existence. L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan comments on "the poignancy of seeing Truman feeling trapped and desperate, hiding behind a painted-on smile but deeply unsatisfied for reasons he can't manage to put his finger on."

This story beautifully captures salient themes of the adoptee's life, such as the "child-as-miracle" phenomenon in which the adoptee (or, for that matter, the technologically-conceived child, the against-the-odds-pregnancy child, the born-after-many-reproductive-losses child). The miracle child in whom parents have invested so much time, money, and emotional buffeting becomes the consuming, overly-precious focus of the family. As Truman slowly begins to awaken to the fact that everyone seems to be focused--literally--on him, we get an icky sense of how discomfiting this "Christ-child" role might be.

Whether it's "omni-cameras" or over-invested parents who are trained on a child, what a terrible burden it would be to have to live up to that level of implicit (and often explicit) expectation.

The adoptee's forbidden fantasy of the birth mother is captured beautifully by Truman's secret but abiding obsession with the "girl that got away", that is, the girl who was fired from the cast. She represents Truman's connection to truth, to who he really is, to his essence that is shamefully ignored--and worse, systematically subverted--by the production that is his life. Harris' Cristof is perfect as the paternalistic, mercenary adoptive-father figure/director: "What I've created for you is better than what you would have had 'out there'."

For those who didn't discover until later in life that they were adopted, this story is hardly even symbolic of their experience. But even for those who knew all along that we were adopted, there is so much in this film that speaks to us. How many of you, upon declaring your intentions to search for birth parents, got the message that nothing that you would find "out there" would be of any more truth or value that what you had been so generously given by your adoptive parents? How many of us adoptees have felt like children in perpetuity, shielded from the truth, "for our own good"? How many have felt stranded on some kind of contrived, engineered island which could only be left with Herculean acts of bravery or mutiny? Or that everyone else knows something that we don't, as if we aren't in on some great, cosmic joke that's going around? And for those of you adoptees who have ever felt just plain forlorn and forsaken, the shot of Truman left sitting at the back of the empty bus that was to ferry him to freedom will simply break your heart.