The Truman Show Meets Interstellar

The Truman Show Meets Interstellar

Spoiler Alerts.

  

- The Truman Show Meets Interstellar

When revisiting Jim Carrey’s “The Truman Show”, one thing fell right out of the sky and struck me, and it wasn’t a lighting malfunction or Indian Air Force drone. The Truman Show portrays an apocalyptic end of a whole world that has been created and maintained over the course of Truman Burbank’s entire lifespan. This world is separate from our real world and has an entire population that are soon to be out of jobs, and not just any jobs, lifelong careers were assumed in the roles these people had accepted. As both films start out with documentary type footage, we learn that for the cast of The Truman Show, the television show is their whole life. Granted, they aren’t slowly suffocating to death or worried about basic commodities like food running out, but the movie is still a dramatic end to a world that has existed for quite some time and these peoples very way of life. Interstellar is also an apocalyptic scenario, though this one is reminiscent of the dust bowl of the early 20th century and clearly adapted to modern concerns of global warming. Both plots are based around highly advanced feats of engineering, one to create a habitable bio-dome on earth, the other to bring that bio-dome through the skies.

Truman, much like Cooper of Interstellar, wants to explore. He wants to travel, though he is confined to a small town/ film studio for his entire life. We see him as a young boy in school talk about his hopes to explore like the great Magellan, the first person to sail around the entire planet. His teacher urges him to reconsider however, claiming that there’s nothing left to explore. In Interstellar we see Cooper visit his daughter’s school. Apparently she was in trouble for bringing in an old textbook featuring details of space exploration. The teacher informs Cooper, and us as the audience, that these old textbooks are no longer in use. They now teach kids the truth about how the moon landing was faked so that the Soviet Union would put too many resources into trying to achieve something with no practical value. In this world they “don’t need any more engineers, we need farmers.” An educational system shooting down the dreams of young children is thus a feature of both films, and there’s more...

Mentioned above in this writing, both Truman and Cooper get signs from above pretty early in the film. In the Truman Show, a light comes crashing down from the sky (seemingly from nowhere), and in Interstellar it is a drone with solar panels. In both cases these machines that interact with light show us something of the modern technical aspects of the worlds of each of these movies. We also see Coopers family driving crazy to catch the drone before learning that they can’t go any further because of a large cliff that marks an end to their journey. This is like when Truman is driving crazy with his family before realizing that the roads out of town end abruptly. In each scene our protagonist asks the person in the passenger seat to take the wheel.

 - Interstellar

 - The Truman Show

(The Truman show scene is truly the epitome of Murphy’s Law.)

Both movies also feature dramatic ocean scenes with crashing waves that threaten our protagonist’s lives and yet have large stretches in the middle of these oceans that are so shallow the water comes up to our protagonist’s ankles. Coincidence? Much like Truman pieces together magazine clippings to remember the girl of his dreams, Cooper is then forced to watch his children grow up through video clips of all the time that went by while he was on this planet.

Both movies are based around a lie of some sort. For Truman his entire life is revealed to be a lie. In Interstellar, it is the life of Cooper’s daughter that is revealed to be a lie upon Michael Cain’s deathbed. A lie that she fully believed and has been working on to be reunited with her father. (Truman also hopes to be reunited with his father if you can remember this part of the movie. He also is struggling to find the truth, and this is a concession the director makes to try and ease his mind about leaving). Mann also lies about the planet he landed on and there is a whole section of the movie based around this lie.

When Truman finally leaves, he enters a black hole (doorway) where we can only assume he spends at least some time revisiting scenes from his life since the whole thing was recorded. The audience view of Truman is also kind of like Coopers view of his daughter from within the black hole, he can watch her whole life to communicate with her. There’s even a scene in the Truman show where the hidden cameras are watching Truman through a bookshelf. This is the pivotal library scene where he meets the love of his life before she is taken away to Fiji. (Did I mention the speech Mathew McConaughey makes about sailors that can’t swim and how the space ship is like a boat?)