Lots of movies set out to bash God and religion. But few of those wind up doing the opposite. One of them is The Truman Show, which marked its twenty-fifth anniversary this summer and which I recently re-watched.
For those who haven’t seen it, The Truman Show (TTS) tells the story of Truman Burbank, a man raised since birth in an enormous domed television set as an unknowing participant in an elaborate 24/7 reality program. His entire life—family, friends, education, career—is a carefully executed fiction for the enjoyment of his billions of global fans. Until he begins to get wise . . . and then the movie happens.
TTS is full of Christian allusions both subtle and overt, most of them targeting religion as a suppressive force that locks humanity into a deterministic universe ruled by fear. Only by overcoming that fear and bursting out of the comfortable but fake world in which it imprisons us, the film announces, can we become a “true man” (or woman).
Thus Truman is conditioned from childhood to be terrified of the unknown—especially of the bay bridge that separates his make-believe island town from the “mainland”—and steered into a career selling bogus insurance policies against an exaggerated list of life’s perils. Thus does the show’s producer, “Christof” (it’s symbolism), tell him, after literally making the sun rise on the set and addressing Truman from his throne in a shining cloud, that he is the “creator” . . . of a perfect world in which Truman can remain happy, as long as he plays along with the fiction.
But—spoiler—Truman doesn’t play along, and, after walking on water across the set’s fake horizon toward a hidden exit, he rejects the sky-creator’s universe and goes off into the brave unknown.
It sure seems to check a complete set of skeptical boxes. And yet, from the right perspective there’s little that a Catholic can’t agree with.
We can agree, for example, with the criticism of a deterministic universe. In point of fact, though, Christianity does not put us in one. Indeed, the drama of human salvation is based above all on freedom: the freedom to turn toward God or away from him, the freedom to sin or to love, the freedom to make moral choices for which we alone are responsible. Conversely, it is corrupt modern philosophies or psychological schools that would reduce us to the sum of our genes, or our brain chemicals, or our race or class, making us not free moral agents but helpless pawns of external forces.
Likewise, contra tired clichés about Catholic guilt and fear of hellfire, Christianity is actually the religion of the one who said, “Be not afraid.” It orders us toward concern for the thing that matters most—the fate of our immortal soul—and cheerfully leaves the rest to providence. It even takes suffering and death, man’s great historical foes, and on the cross empties them of their power. Christ does not control us with fear but liberates us from it.
Meanwhile, the world (especially the post-Covid world) offers us an endless menu of anxieties, neuroses, and traumas to wallow in. Pain has no meaning, and death is a terrifying mystery. Mankind is a blight on a planet that is spinning uncontrollably into disaster. Our modern fear-masters are not priests but corrupted scientists, economists, politicians, professors, and influencers whose power over us depends on our timid compliance.
So we can absolutely cheer, then, when Truman breaks free and becomes the True Man. We just have to make a few easy mental adjustments. It’s one of those cases where Hollywood drew straight with (beautiful, funny, poignant) crooked lines.