The Three Legs of Truman

by Doug Adams

When I was a very small child, I would often lie awake at night, peer out my window, and wonder about the nature of the world of which I knew so little. One of my recurring thoughts became: What if my entire life, everything I knew about myself, everything I knew about everyone else, was actually a dream that someone else was having? What if an entire lifetime could occur within a dream's width, and what if I should awaken to a foggy recollection of everything I had ever "experienced"? Okay, I was a weird little kid. But even more than a rumination on voyeurism, this is what I found The Truman Show to be about. (Or maybe it would be more accurate for me to say, this is what I found lurking behind the already fascinating rumination on voyeurism.) Perhaps it's tapping into the same millennial angst that has spawned our new found interest in far reaching conspiracies, uncovered destinies, and the likes, but for some reason we as an audience have been increasingly more concerned with the idea of there being something else out there. We seem to need some sort of alternate explanation to--well, anything really. Why did I get four red lights in a row? Why did I get bad news on my birthday? Why do I almost unerringly look at the clock at the same time every day? And it's not so much that we seek any specific explanation, we'd just be satisfied to prove that any sort of explanation really does exist.

The Truman Show is incredibly effective because it succeeds on putting us on both sides of this equation. We experience much of the film through Truman Burbank's eyes, and his quest to find his "explanation," in part, becomes our own. And of course, we share in the his payoff when he finds the truth. But, we're also the audience in this film. Twice over, in fact. For not only are we ourselves--the same people parked in theater seats as we always are--but, we're cast as the audience for the show within the film. We're watching Truman Burbank's life the same as everyone else. In that sense, we are the "explanation" for which Truman is searching. We are why traffic stops for him, we are why the elevators don't work in some buildings, we are why the car radio seems to be talking about him. In a bizarre circular way, watching this film is like a successful search for evidence towards our own existence, though that's probably stretching the issue much too far.

The Immovable Score

Director Peter Weir obviously put quite a bit of time and thought into methods to get us on both sides of the viewing equation. That's where all the spy-cam shots come from, all the guy-in-the-tub cut-aways, and so on. But what I hope people really pick up on, is that this is where the score comes from as well. I'm sure that somewhere right now, someone is assembling a list of composers who "should have" scored The Truman Show. No doubt these composers would have written the score that would have really pushed the film into true heart-warming territory a la a Shawshank Redemption or a Dances With Wolves. (That's not meant as an insult to either of those scores, both of which work brilliantly in their respective films.)

The ingenious audacity of Truman's score is that, at times, it dares to not move us much at all. The music in this film fulfils three requirements. There is music which captures Truman's plight and reflects his sense of awe, discovery, anguish, and weary frustration. This is the music which reinforces Truman's humanity--effectively, the music of the film. Most of Burkhard Dallwitz's music seems to reside here. Next, there is the tracked in classical music. This music totally ignores Truman's thoughts by scoring the supposedly disposable nature of mass entertainment. It has no bearing on the scenes it's in, it's just soothing upper-class wallpaper which refuses to acknowledge Truman's humanity. This is the music of the TV show--beautiful in artistic terms but crassly shallow in its connection to heartless voyeurism. (It's not unlike the classical music usage in 2001 which also seeks to trivialize human efforts.) But the most important and most conceptually difficult leg of the score is supplied by Philip Glass. Glass's music is that which is about both the film and the TV show. In fact, it absolutely obscures the line between the two.

Glass's Works

Here's my hypothesis as to why Philip Glass was originally chosen as the composer on this project. Glass's music is emotionally effective, inasmuch as its based on very simple, repetitive, but carefully honed chord sequences. However, it's also incredibly obvious as being a constructed music. The paths it takes are dictated by the musical desire to work through some sort of mechanism. It other words, it strikes the perfect balance as something you experience both emotionally and analytically. When this is put in a film, the audience's perception is split down the middle. The content of the music, the message as it were, speaks directly from the film. But the method in which the message is delivered is so highly stylized, so perceptible as its own creative entity, that the music also seems to be about the film--or in this case, about the TV show we're supposedly watching. Imagine it as a film music equivalent of Ferris Bueller. At some times it's dealing with the characters and situations in the film, and at other times, it's turning to the audience and saying, "Hey, get a load of this." Unlike Ferris Bueller, though, Glass's music can do both at once. As a result, we're not sure if the music is coming from a reflection of Truman Burbank's perspective, or from the perspective of the audience watching him--i.e., us. For example, is the piano music that plays as Truman is drifting off to sleep scoring the film that we are watching or the TV show that we are watching? And to underline the question mark, Weir makes the brilliant decision to have Philip Glass sitting there on the screen playing the music. (He can be seen sitting at the piano in front of the huge "greenscreen" image of Jim Carrey's sleeping face.) There are so many dramatic/musical angles to see this scene from, one could do an entire article on it alone.

I don't know where the musical concept for The Truman Show came from. Judging by the number of composers used in the film, and the fact that the Philip Glass score was replaced in many instances, I would guess that the concept lay with the director. Whatever the case, it was a wonderful decision. Perhaps the complaint will be raised that the film lacks an overall musical profile, but I think that this is a rare instance of a film which is improved by this kind of approach. The effect is one of the first cumulative scores which invites us to be both embraced and dissected by it, and somehow we leave totally engaged and satisfied.

As always, feel free to send your thoughts: Doug@filmscoremonthly.com