The
Truman Show
The Truth of Music
published in Real Time No.28, Sydney,
1998
Peter
Weir's THE TRUMAN SHOW is one of those films that is very
easy to praise and just as easy to damn. Any film that is
marketed by 5 star quotes from TIME and NEWSWEEK (arm-chair
tabloid bibles for concerned fathers of today) has to be
so safely full of altruisms and fey shared warmth that its
emotional machinations are sure to smart. And if you hate
Jim Carey - especially because he has become so famous and
popular for extending the Jerry Lewis tradition of rubbery
slapstick - than you can vent your rage against him by blaming
him for the movie's manipulative gyrations.
But
Jim Carey is fascinating in the film. Like all slippery
comedians, his performance mode - and its self-crystallising
and re-liquefying manifestations that flicker between warm
irony and savage humour - is hard to contain, harder to
frame. He is perfectly cast in a vehicle custom made for
such a flesh-icon of comedy. And while the film is utterly
repugnant in its media moralism (more on that in a minute),
the performance by Ed Harris is a harsh reflector board
held at odd angles to Jim Carey's gangly body at every moment.
If Carey is the cartoon made flesh, Harris embodies the
heartless core of an omnipotent god-being. Set against each
other - allowed contact only through cinematic edits and
a final voice-over dialogue at the film's closure - their
relationship is at once a corny Biblical saga (pick any
father-son line from either Testament) and an unresolved
debacle of parental over-concern.
Any
film which attempts to take the media to task is prone to
embarrassing failure. If Pop Art - particularly as generated
through Andy Warhol - taught intellectuals anything, it's
that critique is most vibrant when spoken in any voice but
its own. To love or hate Pop - you simply be Pop. You surrender
all intellectual property and submerge your critical voice.
You have to be both perverse (to embark on the seemingly
negative), experimental (to wish to gauge the effects of
your absence) and amorphous (so as to disintegrate into
the larger cultural mass that frames your critique). The
media works in entirely similar ways. You want to make fun
of it? It will make fun of itself next week even more savagely.
You want to 'work from the inside' and 'subvert things'?
No problem - just send in your resume; there's always a
vacancy. You think you're 'irreverent', 'cutting' and 'pull-no-punches'?
Go direct to the ABC.
But
still, people insist on critical distance, authorial separation,
that sly wink to the audience. This is media romanticism
at its most banal - the half-formed idea that one can be
'other than the media'. In fact, it's a para-mystical delusion
- the notion that one can levitate, freeze tape time, walk
on televisual water in the act of addressing the media while
avoiding its core grammatological grain which codes your
voice with the biting sibilance of compressed broadcast
transmission. This mystical media romanticisation has grown
unabated, cross-pollinated by everyone from Ralph Nader
to Timothy Leary, from Noam Chomsky to Nicholas Nagroponte.
All those throbbing brains and popping veins - and probably
no one could say anything vaguely stimulating at an intellectual
level about JOSIE AND PUSSYCATS, WWF Wrestling or Michael
Jackson.
THE
TRUMAN SHOW 'addresses' things many wannabe-media-critics
think need addressing - but which I personally could care
less about it. Easy targets like 'Hollywood', 'product placement',
'truthful depiction' and 'mass media effects'. I can just
hear the sweat sizzling inside the cotton trousers and skirts
of media teachers as they watch this movie, getting excited
about all the ways they could use this film as a 'topic'
for discussion in their 'media class'. (Little do they realize
that they had their chance to do that with the most dismissed
and best film of last year - STARSHIP TROOPERS.) Not surprisingly,
THE TRUMAN SHOW ends up caving in on itself to a degree.
Some people wanted more of a cathartic explosion of Jim
Carey at the end. Others wanted less of a parable-toned
ending and more of a clear assault of the media's monolithic
power. (Such befuddled braying are typical of the way most
people simply can't handle the end to any movie purely because
the film finishes: they deny the pornographic vicarious
pleasure that sustained them once the post-coital reality
of their own pleasure zone faces them.)
But
there are specific cracks in the geodesic domed world of
THE TRUMAN SHOW - and no amount of dated pseudo-postmodern
posing and smarmy East Coast winks-and-nods can hide these
cracks. For through these cracks comes yet again the surfeit
of image, the weight of space, the aura of audiovisuality:
that unstoppable diaspora from the land of image called
'music'.
THE
TRUMAN SHOW features a bit of a patchwork score: the occasional
Light Classical work threaded together by some tasteful
Contemporary AOR by Burkhold Stalwicz and some brief but
noticeable snatches of Philip Glass' distinctive 'hysterical
minimalism'. The soundtrack CD testifies to this tri-cocktail
of orchestral erogenous zones - each marked by an excess
of emotionalism, scarred by cliche, and dripping with heroic
signage. All the music I find in its own way utterly theatrical
- far from operative as 'truthful' as per the film's general
aim - and resonating more through archetype and accrued
musical grammar than a distinctive sono-acoustic character.
The Light Classical numbers have been elsewhere so over-used
they function as filler; Burkhold's music is reminiscent
of all ad jingles these days which attempt to humanize the
world and our future generations while scoring the sound
of a washing machine; and Philip Glass bellows with harmonic
bombast in a way that inverts the music into a spiralling
High Art canon of artifice.
Leaving
aside the inclusion of (usually diegetically sourced) Light
Classical, an interesting opposition is struck between Stalwicz
and Glass: the former being no doubt more palatable to most
people despite its anonymity and pedestrian harmonic/sonic
palette, the latter being irritating and obtrusive to many
due to the severity of its minimalist tenure. To some extent,
director Weir may have been searching for a balance between
artifice and artistry in the difficult task of selecting
a theme for a show based on deception which is at the centre
of a film based on exposing deception. So, a musical sleight
of hand is performed when at one point, a Stalwicz cue rises
(it has been swelling at other points prior) and Ed Harris
orders "fade up cue music". We all smile knowingly: yes,
that is manipulative music right there. But then later,
the same music rises - uncued or undirected by Harris -
and I'm certain most people would find the music 'works'
there despite it being invisibly - insidiously, even - manipulative
to an even greater degree.
Yet
I would still have to relent and say that all the music
'works' well in the film. Which gives rise to an interesting
possibility: that music cannot help but 'tell the truth'.
Or: can music 'lie'? THE TRUMAN SHOW is so contrived with
its earnest hand-wringing about the dissolution of 'truth'
in 'the media' (like, der) - but while the film is thematically
full of sanctimonious bullshit, social reductivisim and
self-contradiction, the music is never tainted by such themes,
purposes or prejudices. When Truman realizes he has some
ineffable power over forces around him and he starts controlling
the traffic, his transformative naivete is perfectly balanced
by a cloying yet effective cue by Stalwicz. When Ed Harris'
world starts to fall apart as Truman embarks on his oceanic
escape, Glass' overstated musical apocalypse purposefully
wills the world to not be rendered apart while accepting
its finality as a means of resolution.
THE
TRUMAN SHOW is the kind of film I want to trash mercilessly
because of its irresponsible myth-making about 'media untruth'
when the search for truth is such a tacky heroic grand narrative
we could do well without. Yet it is a great movie that either
intentionally or unintentionally (I don't care how) reveals
the complexity of music's 'multi-complicity' - that is,
its capacity to be all that contradicts with full effect.
It has none of the harmonic-emotional sophistication of
Michael Mann's HEAT, 1995 (his placement of Moby's "God
Moving Over The Face Of The Waters" at the film's end is
sublime). Nor does it have any of the unerring self-exposure
which typifies Ulu Grosbard's GEORGIA (1996) as the only
film I know of which portrays the idea of 'soul' in music
as nothing but a pure and beguiling effect of emotional
empathy. Yet, a deeper pondering of the role music plays
in THE TRUMAN SHOW grants the film a greater exploration
of 'truth' through actively dissolving the cine-formal distinctions
between artifice and reality - a project which the film
wills thematically but fails in realizing at that level.
(See PEE WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE - Tim Burton, 1985 - for that.)
In
the opening of ROMY AND MICHELLE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION (1997)
- one of hundreds of Hollywood movies about truth and deception
(like, does Hollywood not make movies about this theme?)
- the two girls sit watching PRETTY WOMAN (another film
about, etc.). Both are enraptured; then one bags the manipulative
emotional music '"that's meant to make us feel, y'know,
real sad and stuff'". They laugh - and then they stop laughing.
Teary-eyed, she says: "But, um, it's really sad." Images
are always safe because they can only ever lie. Only fools
think otherwise. Music is most dangerous - and most thrillingly
powerful - because it can do anything but lie. And the biggest
fool is the one who actually believes there is such a thing
as 'fake music'.
