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2021 Lockdown — Day 8
The Truman Show
The Truman show is a 1998 film in which Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, the star of a TV reality show. Only he doesn’t know it’s a show, just everyone else on the set does. He’s happy enough in what he believes to be real but in every instance where he tries to rewrite the script or sees incongruity in events, he’s gaslit and persuaded that what he’s experiencing is reality. Of course he eventually joins up the dots and escapes.
It’s a lighthearted, funny film even though the underlying theme is monstrous. The film ends with Truman opening a door on the horizon and walking off set. The emotional trauma such a person would have to deal with, having realised he had been a human guinea pig, is not hinted at but then it’s not a serious film. Yet the concept of the film is not as ridiculous as it plays out.
@RoadsideMum trended on Twitter yesterday with the story of one company, Chartwells (part of the Compass Group), handing out £5 worth of food to families when they’d been contracted by the government to provide food packs worth £30. According to Howard Beckett (Unite),
Compass post yearly revenues of £25 billion & profits of £1.2 billion. The Chair, Paul Walsh is a Tory donor & signed the Captains of Industry letter telling us to vote Tory.
