Writing 2
9 June 2010
Where is Your Tipping Point?
It amazes me that I would be asked to analyze the Truman Show at this point in my life. The parallels I can see between Truman’s plight and my own recent realizations are too similar for me to ignore, and the opportunity to reflect and analyze these realizations, using Truman’s example, is to great to pass up. Because I believe that my take on the film is entirely related to recent events, I hope to analyze this film based solely on a comparison with my life. I realize that because of my mode of analysis, this paper may only hold relevance to myself, however, I believe that I cannot be alone in my experiences, and that what I have been through, and what I have learned from it may hold relevance for anyone. I have not entirely decided whether I will analyze the Truman Show using my experiences comparatively, or vice versa; however, I believe that the two stories are tied together closely enough by parallels that what may result could still be useful regardless of which story is dominant. I would also like to preface that the majority of this paper will deal only with parts of the film occurring prior to Truman running his boat into the wall. This is mostly because I can find the most parallels between the two stories before that point. Many themes are also intentionally omitted, however I believe that the themes I do touch upon are well represented. Anyway thank you.
So without further ado, I believe it appropriate to begin with a description of my recent experiences. I will begin with the decisions that have led to the events of interest, and to do so I’m going to go back to the beginning. Since I was a child, I have wanted to travel. I’ve wanted to be the kind of man that is confident enough to rely on his own abilities, to be the man who would come and go, and known enough to be welcome where he came. I wanted glory, discovery, recognition, I wanted the authenticity of a life self-chosen, and self realized. I’ve wanted to go out into the world and make a name for myself, based on nothing more than my resolve and my character. Even now, I am confident enough in my personality and skill sets to believe that I can be that man, however, I am not him. I have instead pursued the sciences, and I have undergone the schooling expected of a young man of my age and of my successfulness. There was never a question of whether I would pursue this collegiate path or not, and thus I am here, beyond any choice of mine. I have done what is necessary of me, always; I have done what is expected of me, always.
Roughly three weeks ago, the events of which I have alluded to occurred. I had been studying harder than I ever had in my life, focusing all my energies and efforts on my chemistry and math classes, of which I have little interest. After three sleepless nights the stress had built beyond reason. This unhealthiness had been taking root all year, but it was not until that night that I realized what a problem it had become. My long distance girlfriend of a year and half finally confronted me about my degrading health, and was prepared to leave me over the state I was in. I had become steadily more and more unstable, unhappy, and unsociable since the beginning of the year, and it was true that I was allowing these problems to seep into her life as well. Everything came to an abrupt climax that night, with all of these stressors culminating in a series of severe panic attacks. I was rushed home, where I took a week and a half off to recuperate and reevaluate my life. I began to ask myself why it was that I had allowed myself to become the way I became. Why was I pursuing a path I did not fully desire? Why did I follow this path without question? Why did I not pursue the life I actually wanted? Why was I not true to myself?
These questions are difficult to answer, but they are also the basis of my analysis, for this is where Truman’s story and my own parallel each other. These questions are what make Truman our modern hero, and what makes Truman one of the most important American heroes of all time. His quest for the answers too these questions is the modern quest for self within society, the quest for an authentic, free life, the life I have always wanted to lead, and the life I’m sure we have all desired, the quest for the unordinary in the normality of modernity. His is the quest for the life we dream of, but do not even know that we can have, the quest for the freedom of will required to choose the lives we want. In short, Truman is searching for free will.
I must establish however, why free will does not exist for the majority of modern America. I believe that free will occurs when we are aware of the options presented to us. You may say that I have chosen to come to school, that Truman chose to become a husband, that he chose to become an insurance salesman, that he chose to own a house. But let me ask this; does Truman choose not to swear every five seconds? Does he choose not to kill people? Does he choose to be polite? Does he choose any of these things? Of course he has the physical ability to do any of them, but does he choose not to do them? I believe that he doesn’t. Why? Because it does not occur to him that he has the option to. He doesn’t consider it. He has no conscious understanding of the alternatives, and therefore has no choice in the matter. In the same way, he does not realize that he can actually live the lifestyle he desires. He has the ability to “bum around Europe,” to become an “explorer,” to be anything he wishes to be, and yet he’s an insurance salesman, in middle class suburbia, living an entirely average American life. My situation is exactly the same. I could be touring with my band, pursuing my dream, my ideal, and instead, I am here, studying subjects I don’t care about (i.e. chemistry, physics, mathematics), with no end in sight, and only more stress to come. Why then did we take these less than satisfactory paths? We were aware of what we wanted, why then were we, for all intents and purposes, unaware that we could actually take the paths we desired? Why are our paths not freely chosen? The answer is because those paths are not normal.
I will explain how normality accomplishes this, however, to do so we must first ask a question; what exactly is normality? To answer, let’s start with a simple definition. Normality is a set of expectations, a code by which the majority of people conduct their lives. When we do what we are expected to do, we are acting normally. It is the path accepted by the majority, chosen by the majority, and continued by the majority. For example, the American dream is normal in middle class America. It is normal to have two kids, it is normal to have a dog, it is normal to live in a suburb, it is normal to have a job, to work for retirement, to have a credit card, to save for your children’s college tuition, to have a wife or husband of the opposite sex, it is normal to have all these things, and the majority try to have them, try to have that kind of life, whether it’s what they really want or not. Truman is a perfect example of this conformity to normality. He pursues the American dream because he is expected to want all the things that constitute it, because it is normal to want those things. The reason he doesn’t pursue his goals is because of normality.
Why are Truman and I unaware of our choices then? Why can we not exercise free will? To answer these, we must first find the answer to another question; what dictates normality, and how does it do so? The answer is that normality is entirely dictated by society, and it does so by having a collective goal or ideal to strive toward, and the resulting efforts culminate in a standard of living, or a sense of normalcy. Let me give an example. If a society idealizes human life above all else, then you can bet that normally people would not kill one another, however, if society valued cannibalism, you might find a very different norm. This also means that what is normal depends entirely upon the society in which you exist, thus we have the American dream, and could theoretically have a British dream. What is expected of you is therefore, entirely dependent on the environment you are born into. Truman was born into the American norm, and thus is expected to act accordingly to it.
Some might say that it is not society in the Truman show, but Christof that dictates the norms in Truman’s world, but it makes no difference. The situation is the same for Truman; he is expected to live in normality, to love his normality. Christof says that he has “given Truman a chance at a normal life,” however it is a chance and not a choice. The only difference in his situation is that instead of a unified, collective decision as to what the norm is, there is one man, acting as the voice of society. This does not change Truman’s plight, and does not estrange it from ours. The discrepancy only exists as a plot device, so that Truman can directly confront societal expectation. For all intents and purposes, our situations are the same.
But for why does society create norms in the first place? The answer is simply safety. Like it or not, we rely on the knowledge that our neighbors will act normally and not try and murder us. It is the mode by which our society maintains some semblance of order, because if we could not expect what is going to happen next, life would be truly terrifying. The abnormal scares us, just as Meryl is terrified of Truman when he is “being spontaneous.” If something does not fit our sense of normality, society, and ourselves, deem it abnormal and therefore unsafe. If we cannot expect what is going to happen, we grow scared.
Let’s take a step back now and ask, why do we adhere to society’s normality? It is that very need for safety that is responsible for why we as people are trapped to normality, for if we cannot be anticipated we are rejected. I mean would you sail on a boat if you can’t expect it to float? Would you lend a friend your car if you can’t expect him to give it back? No, we’d do neither, however, society does not have the option of doing neither. Society has already accommodated us, and if we cannot do the expected thing, we’ll be rejected. Normality exists because society has a common interest, if we cease to be normal, there’s a great chance that we will not work toward that common interest, so of course society will kick us out! We do the normal thing, lest we be rejected by society, and as long as we value society’s company, we will adhere to that normality.
However this is only one side of the coin. One might say that Truman chooses to be normal, despite what he wants, because he values his relationship with society, and that would be true if he were aware that he had the option to do anything else. As I stated earlier, Truman does not swear like a sailor because he doesn’t register that he has the option to, because it is abnormal to do so. This is because Truman has internalized society’s expectation, and just as he has internalized the Christian dogma of “Thou shalt not kill,” and does not see killing as a viable option, he does not really see any alternative lifestyle as viable. We are aware, through first and second hand experience that deviation from the norm means rejection (and thus hardship), and as it is a part of the only value system we have lived in, we internalize, beyond a conscious level, what can and cannot be done. Thus we accept our societal expectations, and are unable to see all options open to us. Take Truman for instance. In a scene on the beach, we see a young, eager Truman, climbing rocks to see what’s happening beyond, when his “father,” frightened, tells him that he has to “know his limitations”. From that point on, the negative experience of having his worried “father” scold him in front of a whole lot of people, causes him to internalize the lesson taught. He, from that point on, does not need to stop himself from climbing the rocks, the thought doesn’t even cross his mind, because he has “learned his limitations,” he has learned what is expected of him, and will no longer consciously make the choice to climb the rocks. It is just as Christof says when asked about the reason why Truman has never wondered about the nature of his world; “we accept the reality of the world with which we are presented,” Truman does not consciously realize that the world could be different.
(I realize that people still do abnormal things, and I would like to explain that briefly. Though we are all members of society, society is made of increasingly smaller and smaller sub sects, the smallest, arguably being a single individual. Though there is an over arching normality, there are also more and more variations the smaller the unit gets. Let me paint you a picture quickly; Humans are expected to be carbon based (unique amongst all the known universe), Americans are expected to follow the American dream and abide by federal law (unique amongst all countries), Californians are expected to abide by state law (unique amongst all states), Davisites are expected to abide by city ordinance (unique amongst all cities), my immediate family is expected to abide by house rules (unique amongst all families), and I am expected to operate underneath all of these expectations and also by my own innate limitations. The difficulty is, that there are incongruences. For example, it is normal in my family to drink, however it is arguably not normal in any societal ring larger than that sub sect, and I am thus rejected, or deemed unsafe. To remain normal and accepted, I go to CASE, whether I want to or not, I don’t even question it. I streamline myself, “correcting” my variations, both consciously and unconsciously to be accepted. That’s why there are still murderers, and non-conformists, because on some level, incongruence occurs.)
This is why there is no free will within our modern society. This is why we do not have a choice in what we do. We have internalized the lessons taught by society, and no longer realize that we have options besides those depicted in normality. It’s why both Truman and I follow paths we can only tolerate, rather than the ones we wish for.
(As an aside I would like to address a small issue with the ideas I have presented thus far. As with any question of free will, there are sure to be strong opinions and discrepancies about its presence. This topic is largely philosophical, and is the subject of many heated debates, and when discussing this topic with my friends, such a neat little discrepancy presented itself. The discrepancy is simple; didn’t Truman choose to become an insurance salesman? We may all chase the American dream without our total knowledge of having done so, and thus have had no choice in that matter, but isn’t the path we take to pursue it a choice? Isn’t that free will? This was a difficult question and truly depends on your definitions and your own viewpoint, however I would say most definitely yes, that within those options there is free will, however that exertion is overall unimportant. The question comes down to a simple analogy; you are presented with two doors, each of which lead to the same room, and your ultimate goal is that one room, does it matter which door you take? Have you exercised free will in having chosen a door? I say that you have only exercised any free will if you consciously choose to leave the room you are in, in order to reach the next one. Without an understanding that there is that third option of staying in your current room, you have no choice but to advance, having chosen a door is indeed a choice, but not one that you have an option in choosing. The fact that you had no choice in choosing a door means that free will was not truly exercised. It’s as if you’re in the desert, about to die of hunger, when you encounter a man with a roasted chicken and a charbroiled steak. He asks you “chicken or steak?” you can choose either, but the end result is still survival. The choice is unimportant without the larger recognition that you could have also said neither and allowed yourself to die. In this way, we may be dentists and lawyers, teachers and doctors, but we will always be normal, and thus not have exercised our free will to its full extent. This is truly based on my definition of free will as having made a larger conscious effort, and exists only as an aside. Anyway, I will continue with my main point.)
Let’s recap quickly. We have established that society dictates, through a set of collective values, what constitutes normality, and rejects anything beyond it for its own safety. We adhere to this normality because failing to would mean that we are rejected by society. We are also unconscious of our adherence because we have internalized the dangers of failing to, and no longer question that normality, that is, until the day it becomes unacceptable.