Released in 1998 and directed by Australian filmmaker Peter Weir, The Truman Show is a genre-blending cinematic work that occupies the space between satire, science fiction, and psychological drama. The film was written by Andrew Niccol and stars Jim Carrey in a dramatic role as Truman Burbank, a seemingly ordinary man who slowly comes to realise that his entire life has been the subject of a meticulously orchestrated television programme. Broadcast live 24/7 to a global audience, Truman’s world is entirely artificial. His everyday world is constructed within a massive geodesic dome that is populated by actors and extras playing roles in an elaborately scripted narrative.

The character of Truman is sincere, good-natured, and naive, but he is directed entirely by the cues and codes of the world around him. Unaware of the deception, he lives in the idyllic town of Seahaven, a simulacrum of 1950s American suburbia. This picturesque ‘haven’ is entirely clean, safe, and endlessly repetitive. There is no graffiti on the walls of Seahaven. The environment is engineered to eliminate risk and ensure compliance, (Truman himself works in a job selling insurance!). The world subtly disciplines Truman’s desires through advertising, fake news, and fear-mongering (notably around travel and the ocean).

Through a Deleuzian lens, Seahaven is not just a set, it is a closed system of perception and action, governed by what Deleuze called a sensory-motor schema. At the heart of this constructed reality is Christof (played by Ed Harris), the film’s godlike creator-director who watches Truman from the “moon”. This is a control room embedded in the dome’s structure, posing as the moon. Christof’s role is central to the philosophical tensions within the film. As the sole (it appears) architect of the system, he symbolises the visible hand behind the spectacle, offering the audience a defined antagonist, in contrast to a faceless swirl of chaotic influence and manipulation of a contemporary (i.e. 2025) “Auto-control structure” that can be auto-phenomenological. Christof is a face to the ubiquitous surveillance. Yet his visibility is precisely what distinguishes The Truman Show from more insidious forms of real-world control: we rarely encounter the architect in our lived realities . Christof’s presence satisfies a narrative need for an antagonist, but in doing so, it also reveals our dependence on visualising power in order to resist it. This film critiques, and indicates, that this very visibility offers a false sense of agency; and without an identifiable oppressor, resistance becomes amorphous, uncertain, and internalised. (It is largely through poor maintenance and human errors that the veil of Seahaven is pulled back enough for Truman’s suspicions to be ratified).

This inability to resist is a point that resonates strongly with Deleuze’s critique of disciplinary and control societies, when he speaks of “ultra-rapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system” (Deleuze 1992) Socially,

The Truman Show arrived at the end of the 20th century, at the emergence of reality television and just before the digital explosion of surveillance, global data systems, and social media. It reflects (the then, potential,) contemporary anxieties about authenticity, media saturation, and the commodification of the self. The film examines the ethics of spectatorship, the power of media corporations, and a thin line between entertainment and manipulation that in 2025 are accepted as one.