The Truman Show - Movie Review Example

“The Truman Show” “The Truman Show,” the show within the movie of the same title, portrays Truman Burbank as the ultimate consumer, because he is also the ultimate source of corporate marketing information. In today’s world, large corporations use focus groups and other methods to target their consumers. They are very interested in every last detail about their consumer’s wants and needs, and why they prefer certain brands to others; it is almost like psychology, but it appears in a corporate environment.

In the show, which must keep going in order to sustain its own world, Truman Burbank is the ultimate consumer: nothing about his life is secret to the viewer. He is doing what corporations want to observe people doing: acting naturally, and making choices which seem to be those of free will. The irony of the movie is that Truman Burbank is trapped in this world, which must sustain itself by gathering more and more information about him. Going into a large corporate store, it is very easy to fill out surveys.

Cameras are everywhere. There are parallels everywhere to the ways that consumers are scrutinized, just as Truman Burbank is scrutinized in “The Truman Show.” The motivation of the show’s producers are motivated to portray Truman Burbank as an ideal consumer, so that the self-sustaining world of supply and demand can continue. The producers are the supply; Truman makes the demands. It is a symbiotic relationship, so the producers want to keep it going. They will stop at nothing to keep Truman from the truth, and this is part of what forms much of the tension in the second part of the movie.

Overall, Truman Burbank is a typical ideal consumer, because he is the object of constant scrutiny and measurement. 2 I agree with many points in this response, and I think that it has a particularly effective conclusion. To me, the conclusion is the most important part of a short essay such as this one, because it really is the last thing that the reader is going to take away from the process. The conclusion here about the cycle of Truman’s routine was something that I completely agreed with in this response, because I also think that corporations are looking for habits and cycles in their consumers, and this is something that made Truman ideal.

Of course, I think there are many valid points on this issue, but this was one I found it difficult to disagree with. I also agree that if all consumers were like Truman, corporations would make a lot of money, but I wanted to hear slightly more of the author’s opinion about the reasons for this. This was overall a good short essay response to the prompt. It covered all of the questions about the producers and how Truman represented the ideal consumer. At the conclusion of the response, the student presents a powerful section that is designed to show the reader their own personal data and conclusions about the cycle that corporations are looking for; as mentioned above, this part of the short essay is most effective in dealing with organizations and what the limitations are.

I found this section of the response particularly informative. It was interesting to me as well that the author was able to make connections between the real world and some of the issues in the theoretical world of the movie. This short essay is articulate and literate, and answers all aspects of the assignment in concise terms while paraphrasing main ideas of the assignment. It is interesting to read as a whole, with the one drawback being not enough length allotted to explain some more details.