The Movies and Research - Essay Example

The Movies and Research In the movie The Truman Show, the actor Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, a man who has his entire life in the lens of a camera. Even before he was born, Truman’s life was already being watched by people worldwide without him knowing anything about it. Truman’s environment of Seahaven is actually a giant movie set in an arcological dome, where everyone he meets are actually actors and that occurrences in the weather and climate are actually movie effects to make things as real as they get. Eventually, Truman begins to be suspicious and questions the world around as things begin to not sense for him.
Truman continued to question further his existence since he noticed that everything that is going on in Seahaven revolve around his life. When Truman decided to seek out the truth to the world beyond Seahaven, the producers of the show tried as much as they can to prevent him from doing so by making plot twists in his daily activities that would avert any attempts made. Eventually, Truman secretly sailed off from his house, and was almost killed by a storm the producer of the show made. Realizing the morality in killing a cast member for the sake of a show would be an outrage, the producer allowed Truman to exit the arcological movie set and to see the real world beyond Seahaven.
In this film, one of the main themes being shown is the concept of simulated reality. Simulated reality is an approach of observation, usually scientific, that makes events in reality replicated to a point that it is difficult to distinguish it from actual reality. This form of observation is the major plot basis for the movie The Truman Show and is the driving force for the main character’s actions and existential inquiries about his life. It should be remembered that in the setting of the movie, simulated reality is used as a form of mass media entertainment while setting aside any real or applied scientific usage. However, research in the movie setting is implied to have been done in a way to make the main character Truman spend most of his life believing that his world of Seahaven is the only reality. One could consider this form of research as a controlled form of observation, as every aspect of Truman’s daily life is being manipulated by external human actions. This is done so skillfully that it has been an accepted fact by Truman even right on the day of his birth until adulthood. It should also be noted that the reason for the simulated reality scheme is for audiences of the show in the movie’s setting would watch an individual who reacts and behaves as a normal person would without any use of reading a script or going into scripted emotional cues.
However, what would have distorted the scientific research principles in the movie would be the attempt of the show’s creator to completely contain Truman within that giant movie set of Seahaven and deny his curiosity for the truth. A real scientific approach would consider and accept all the possible outcomes made from observations with little to no interference to a subject’s activities or actions. In the later part of the film, the show’s creator does all he can to prevent Truman from leaving the set of Seahaven and even nearly attempts to have Truman killed off by an artificial storm. Those actions show how dramatic license distort proper scientific research principles from being done corectly. Read More