THE SKY IS A ROOF!

There is a wonderful moment in the film 'The Truman Show' when Truman's 'friend' of more than thirty years, Marlon, responds to Truman's growing sense that his entire reality is somehow being fabricated as part of some great conspiracy:

"The last thing that I would do is lie to you. If everybody was in on it, I'd have to be in on it too. I'm not in on it, Truman, because there is no 'in'."

The beauty of the scene is that Marlon's passionately sincere assurances that he would not lie, that he is not in on any conspiracy, are in fact being relayed to him through a microphone by a director watching the entire scene from atop the vast dome that covers the entire mock town and doubles as the sky.

Truman, it turns out, has guessed right. He is the first child to be "legally adopted by a corporation" and has spent his entire life on a giant theatrical set modelled on small-town America, Sea Haven, observed through 5,000 pinhole cameras. His mother and father, his friends, his wife, are all actors in the ultimate docu-soap: 'The Truman Show'. Only the unwitting Truman is real. His society, of course, has programmed him to view all speculation on such a conspiracy as utter madness: he is controlled by fears, hopes, the need to belong, just like you are. Just like I am.

The Truman Show is a perfect metaphor for our time. It is exactly this level of deception to which we are subjected - the unadulterated lie presenting itself as the absolute truth. As the historian Howard Zinn notes:

"The truth is so often the reverse of what has been told us by our culture that we cannot turn our heads far enough around to see it."

You and I, nice people that we are, normally do not expect human beings to say the exact opposite of what is true. We know that people twist the truth, squash it a little, stretch it, but they generally don't reverse it. This is why it is important to remember that when we are listening to corporate and state spokespeople disseminating "the truth" of our culture, we are not listening to the independent human beings of ordinary, day-to-day experience, we are listening to human beings radically constrained by the structural requirements of their institutions. As John Steinback had a tractor driver declare in The Grapes of Wrath: "The bank isn't like a man." More to the point is the fact that, very often, the spokesperson representing the bank also "isn't like a man".

'Oh come on, people aren't that dishonest!', I hear you cry. Oh, but they +are+ - especially with themselves. Upton Sinclair explained the problem:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Women too! People have a capacity for saying and believing whatever they have to say and believe in order to keep their jobs - history suggests that there are few if any limits to this self-deception.

Alas, seeing through the illusions of society is far harder for us than for Truman. A conspiracy can always be betrayed, exposed. The deceptions in our society, however, are not the product of a conspiracy; they are the product of market forces. Nobody conspires to build a snowflake, it is in the nature of water, ice, air and cold temperatures for snowflakes - which look for all the world like they have been painstakingly designed - to be perfectly symmetrical.

Likewise, nobody conspires to prevent the media telling the truth: a profit-seeking media system operating within a capitalist society dominated by corporate and state power just comes to report in a way that reflects the values, interests and goals of that power. Editors and journalists just come to believe that what they write is the unadulterated, unexpurgated truth. People who challenge the notion that a corporate press could be a free press, are odd, Truman-like figures shouting 'The sky is a roof! The sky is a roof! There is more!'. Kalle Lasn of Adbusters describes how editors received his attempts to place his anti-consumerist TV adverts:

"They laughed me out of the building... They just giggled and laughed and said 'Hey, this isn't a commercial, we don't play this kind of thing'."

When environmental journalist George Monbiot raised the issue of resource use and global warming with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders "they burst into gales of laughter. They found these concepts funny, I think because... anyone who could compare them in importance to the growth of their industry had to be either joking or insane".

As Truman's wife pleads, "Let me get you some help, Truman, you're not well."

In Sea Haven, the local paper's headline reads: "Sea Haven: The Best Place on Earth". When Truman tells his teacher he wants "to be an explorer, like Magellan", she replies: "You're too late, there's really nothing left to explore." In the town's tourist office, a poster shows an airliner being struck by lightning: "It Could Happen To You!" it warns. Naturally enough, everything is designed to work against Truman's wanderlust.

In our corporate capitalist society, talk shows ask "Shopping or sex: which is better?" Education ministers openly declare that "The end-users of education are the employers." Our news broadcasters announce: "And the main headline this lunchtime: Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles have appeared as a couple, in public, for the first time." Naturally enough, everything is designed to work against our wonderlust.

As Norman Mailer has written, all of this comes at a certain cost for the editors and journalists:

"There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakable... the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine."

Many of the ideas in our heads - the notion that we live in a free democracy, that the West supports human rights in the Third World, there is nothing more to life than fun, status is success, life is meaningless, romantic love is 'the answer', anger is empowering - are what comes out of the end of this machine. It's not pretty.

Few of us question the version of reality with which we are presented. But, as happens to Truman, glitches in the programme are beginning to wake us from our slumber. In the film, Truman begins to wake up when an object crashes down from the 'sky'. It is clearly a light from a TV studio and is labelled 'Sirius' - being the light used to represent that star on the roof of the dome. In the same way, climate change, ozone depletion, the mass death of species, are all waking us up to the fact that 'normal' is in fact pathological - the devastation of the environment may well prove to be the best thing that ever happened to freedom of thought!

David Edwards, July 2001