“Good afternoon, good evening and good night”

by David Benjamin

“An entire human life recorded on an intricate network of hidden cameras, and broadcast live and unedited, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to an audience around the globe. Coming to you now from Seahaven Island, enclosed in the largest studio ever constructed, and along with the Great Wall of China one of only two man-made structures visible from space, now in its 30th great year … It’s The Truman Show!”
—TV announcer, The Truman Show

MADISON, Wis.—It’s entirely coincidental that I happened to watch the 1998 Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show, just before the Republican National Convention (RNC) over in Milwaukee. But throughout the week, the intimations were veritably screaming in my ear. For 2,500 delusional Donald Trump acolytes, Fiserv Forum became Seahaven, the vast domed counterfeit town in which Truman Burbank, from birth to age thirty, lived obliviously in an alternate reality built, managed and choreographed by a megalomaniac TV producer with only one name, Christof (Ed Harris).

Of course, the difference between Carrey’s Truman and the zealots in Milwaukee, is that Truman evolves from naïveté to skepticism. He schemes and fights to foil the towering narcissist who holds him—and an audience of millions—in thrall. The walleyed Trumpists at their convention betrayed no concept of dissent or autonomy. They hallucinated in a solipsist ecstasy, only wiping the smiles off their faces long enough to issue a scripted “boo” at teleprompted mentions of their deity’s demons.

The fictional Seahaven and the grimly real RNC are particularly parallel in their demography—overwhelmingly white, virulently Christian, universally bourgeois, pleasant, homogenized and crushingly dull. In both productions, the protagonist stands out from the crowd because he’s interesting. He cuts against the grain of the intimates who cocoon him in diversion and indulgence, and he is distinguishable from the masses who project onto his two-dimensional facade a mirror image of needs and hungers, joys and fears, lost friends, gloating enemies, roads not taken and loves not loved.

In the movie, writer Andrew Niccol and director Peter Weir allegorically created the ultimate TV reality star, one who contrived to escape the prison of his pretense. Truman risks everything in defiance of Christof’s Calvinist dictum that “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.”

In contrast, the producers of “The Apprentice”—launched six years after the release of The Truman Show—offered no allegory, and their star came naturally to ruling an alternate reality that has empowered him to lure from the dark corners of the body politic, like rats to the Pied Piper, a motley procession of the willingly duped and habitually disgruntled.

The differences between the movie and the TV show, are instructive. Unlike the Trump faithful, the viewers glued to the screen watching the life of Truman know that everything is fake. Significantly, the film predated smartphones, a technology with which Truman might have reached beyond Seahaven and sussed out the scam, thus scuttling the show and killing its ratings.

(Ratings, as we know, are a Trump obsession.)

However, even if smart telephony had existed in real-life 1998, the fictional Christof would have recognized its danger and banished it from Truman’s hermetic hamlet. Unlike his viewers, Truman lives a simplified, Leave-It-to-Beaver existence. His worst troubles are so trivial that they can be allayed by a six-pack with his counterfeit best buddy Marlon (Noah Emmerich).

Truman is engineered to live in denial. Yet, he makes trouble for himself and poses challenges for the control booth. He seeks out complications that don’t fit the narrative. He tries to assemble, from magazine clippings, the face of Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), the most exotic woman he has ever seen—a Seahaven supernumerary who’s been snatched up and banished from the show, lest she screw up Truman’s scripted existence.

(Remember Omorosa Manigault?)

Truman escapes, only to be dragged back. But rather than disapprove of Truman’s quest for self-determination, his audience cheers his mad flight across the bridge and into the unknown.

Trump, however, is not merely immersed, thoroughly, bodily and psychologically in his alternate reality. He is its architect and star. He’s Christof and Truman all rolled into one. Were Trump to admit to a single lie—that he defrauded thousands with his phony university, that he forced himself on Stormy Daniels and paid for her silence, that he lost the election and incited thousands of trusting morons to attack the Capitol in his name, that most of his money came from his old man, that he cheats at golf, that he doesn’t know dick about running a business much less a nation—his cultists would be lost and crestfallen. They would sink into a funk so deep that many would walk off the bridge and into the drink …

… unlike Truman’s fans who cheered, teared and hugged one another when he finally found the door from Seahaven into America, turned, bowed and said, “Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!”

Suddenly, a thirty-year television hit was over and Truman’s fans, casually, asked, “What else is on?”

Of course, until Truman effects his liberation, his fans gladly watch him cavort in captivity. It is his persistence—like the caged bird who pecks at the bars until its beak bleeds—that brings viewers around to celebrate Truman’s defiance. Truman offers a lesson in freedom that none of his fans had bothered to ponder. He made himself real and taught them, poignantly, that human exploitation for the sake of other humans’ amusement, that trapping someone in a maze of deception without exit, is a crime against humanity. Christof’s immersive pretense made it almost impossible for Truman’s fans to grasp the immorality of their hero’s confinement until their devotion to his spectacle threatened his death.

The Truman Show’s creators knew—as did such prophets as George Orwell (1984) and Philip K, Dick (Minority Report), that a crisis in perception was coming but couldn’t predict that social media would be the engine of mass delusion and paranoid conspiracism that now pervades our society, our media and our politics. He could not imagine tiny that addictive phones circulating fabulations, propaganda, barefaced lies, slanders and kitten videos would spawn a religious fanaticism whose messiah is a combed-over charlatan in a priapic necktie.

Unlike Truman, Trump “prefers his cell” and will never plot to escape his prison of pretense. To make himself real would be to literally undo himself.

Minutes after an outcast kid with an AR-15 pinned a sardonic red badge of courage on the orange ear of Cadet Bone Spurs, one of his fans was interviewed. She’d had a front-row seat at Trump’s worship service. She was an impressive witness, describing the incident with journalistic precision and cool objectivity. But when the dialog turned personal, the woman entered an altered state, like a Deadhead on peyote. She recounted pilgrimages to previous Trumpaloozas, each the most transcendent experience of her life. To see Trump, for her, was to see everything not as it is, but the way it oughta be.

Or, as Christof explained condescendingly to Sylvia, “I have given Truman the chance to lead a normal life. The world, the place you live in, is the sick place. Seahaven is the way the world should be.”