Baudrillard's Allegory Of Illness In Seahaven

In fact, the reality or the standard of “true” and “false” in Seahaven is completely distorted as Baudrillard (1994)’s allegory of illness. When the Louis/Marlon utters, “It’s all true”. It cannot be the “truth” we mean and understand in the same way in daily life. In the scene when Truman talks of his paranoid feelings of how people on Seahaven conspire together to deceive him, Marlon seems to be “tinged with the sincerity and the intimacy of a human friendship.” (Laist, 2015, p.142). Laist (2015) believes that although Louis/Marlon is fed with the dialogue, “I would never lied to you”, improvised by Christof, there is some sense of truthfulness in which Louis/Marlon is an actor. When an actors says something untrue, it is questionably that

We identify ourselves with them. For example, we see the man who watches the show in his bathtub, the employees and patrons who enjoy the show in “The Truman Bar”, some couch potatoes, to name but a few. It is interesting that when they are observing the life of Truman every day 24/7, they are also observed by the real audience of the movie, which is as Bishop (2000) mentions that we think we are “keen observers of the media”, but in fact, it is we who sits in the cinema watching the film or at home watching the television is being manipulated by media. We depend very much of the media to help us make sense of our lives, but we don 't trust them. However, this paradox, presented in the The Truman Show, is not very much rendered in the fictional audience, but rather, the “audience” is being depicted as duped in the artificiality of the show. For example, the waitresses in the bar, asked why Truman does not follow Silvia/ Lauren to Fiji and the other waitress answered because Truman’s mother got sick so he could not leave his mother. (00:26:43). These two women are not aware of the fact that Silvia is only an actress expelled from the show and Truman could only forced to stay in the studio to satisfy the audience and the media