The Truman Show: The Allegory Of The Cave

The Truman Show is a fantastic movie that brings out an abundance of philosophical concepts and connections to philosophers. Truman, the main character, is born and raised on a worldwide TV show that films everything that he does in his life. All the rest of the people on the show are actors but Truman himself is not acting he simply believes that everything around him is not a TV show it is real life. Several strange things begin to happen causing him to suspect that everything has to deal with him for some odd reason. Some of the philosophical concepts and connections with philosophers that I see in this film are the allegory of the cave, The Evil Genius Hypothesis, the ethical theory of utilitarianism, propaganda, and lastly the views of

The allegory of the cave by Plato is connected to this film. I believe this because there is a scene in the film where Truman begins to fall in love with a woman. For some strange reason Truman notices he can never get a hold of her. Eventually he is able to get away from everyone and be with her for a few minutes. The director notices this and contacts the actor who plays the role of the dad of this woman to pick her up. When he arrives he begins to take her away and the woman begins to tell him that everyone is watching everything that he is doing and that they are all pretending. The dad tells Truman that she has schizophrenia and that she does this to every boy she talks to. After this she never sees this woman again because her dad said that they were moving to Fiji. This is similar to the allegory of the cave because in the allegory of the cave someone who is a prisoner and sees all the shadows manages to escape and knows what is in the real world, in this case the prisoner that escapes is the woman that Truman falls in love with, when

I think he would agree because anybody who would disagree with the show when filming it would be taken off, just like the woman that Truman fell in love with. She didn’t like that they were treating him like a puppet so she tried to rebel by informing him it was all a lie, but was quickly removed by the director, which in this case could be compared to the kings of Hobbes time. I believe Hobbes would have also seen that the director was a perfect example of a selfish person that was always seeking more power to control Truman’s life because Hobbes believed that it was just human nature that anybody with that much power would take advantage of it and in this case the director proves that he loves the power of being able to control Truman’s life. The TV show also goes with Hobbes view that all humans are roughly equal. In this film you can see that all the actors are pretty much equal with Truman but at the same time they are not equal because they all know that they are living in a fake made up world whereas Truman is the only one that doesn’t know. I believe that if I were put in the position of the director I would like controlling somebody’s life because of the feeling of having that power even though I see it at morally wrong. Like Hobbes says it is just in our human nature to be power mongering selfish people. If it was the other way around and I was Truman I would hate being