Why 2024 is the time for a 'The Truman Show' sequel (2024)

In 1998, when The Truman Show came out, it could be a gripping and preposterous notion. In a pre-social media world and a time when reality shows were still relatively new, the idea of watching a person’s life, day in and day out, with full access to their every move, thought, and experience, was enough to base a dystopia off. But now, the whole world is Seahaven Island as the internet has evolved into a place where there are countless Trumans, laying their life out for us as we lay in bed and watch strangers’ proposals, birth vlogs, or 12-part TikTok series about how they found out their partner was a cheater. Rewatching the movie in 2024 highlights just how much things have shifted, as when the credits roll, audiences are left no longer reeling from what’s just come but wondering what happens next, making it the perfect time for a sequel.

In the final moments of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, Jim Carrey’s titular character, Truman Burbank, leaves the film set he’s lived in forever. After realising that his life was nothing more than a television fabrication, that everyone around him was an actor and that his life had been controlled and monitored since day one solely for entertainment, he takes a final bow and walks out. The screen goes black, and the credits roll.

That ending was heroic at the time of its release. It would be read as Truman finally setting himself free as he walks out of the soundstage and into what’s assumed to be his life, now rich with agency and honesty. But in 1998, things were on the cusp of changing. The Truman Show straddled a line between more traditional ideas of fame and celebrity where a select group of people sat in a special rank in the cultural realm, only read about in magazines and remaining as a kind of untouchable ideal, and the new phase that we exist in today, that seems to get more intense with every week.

Now, we live in the embodiment of Andy Warhol’s claim that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Starting with reality shows and now with memes, TikToks and influencer culture, there are not only simply more ‘famous’ people, but the access we have to fame is tighter. Anyone can have a go at grasping it, but even those who don’t want to try can simply head onto social media and find out exactly what their favourite parasocial online celeb is eating for lunch, what they’re up to, who they’re dating, and what they’re wearing. These new celebrities are no longer a mystery only revealed through more formal, curated interviews, but they’re open and offering themselves up bit by bit, day by day. So, in essence, each day, we can watch The Truman Show.

However, the reason why 2024 feels like a prime time to revisit this character is because we are finally reaching the consequence stage, as if the world is reaching the final act, as when Truman suddenly becomes aware of what’s going on. In the years after the film, people tried to play with this concept, but it was always too knowing, like the concept of Big Brother when the reality show placing a bunch of strangers in a house and filming them was a dystopian concept in 2000. But the problem is that those contestants knew they were being filmed, and over time, reality shows have become less about reality and more about attempts at fame.

But in the age of the vlogger, we’re starting to see the consequences. Suddenly, now we’re hitting a point where kids born to influencer parents at the height of the YouTube day are growing up and speaking out about their feelings of unease from having their whole youth, and sometimes even their birth, broadcast for the world. They’ve grown up in a world where countless people have watched them grow, seen into their birthday parties or typed celebratory comments about their first steps, and now they’re older, that surely can feel quite violating. There are also more sinister cases like the story of Ruby Franke, a parenting influencer who has been jailed as it was revealed that behind the scenes of her happy family vlogs, she was abusing the children she was making perform for the cameras.

We’re living in a world where mums do TikTok dances beside their babies in hospital cots with text over the screen saying how their kid is unwell, where parents force their crying children to pose for a thumbnail for a vlog about their dog dying, where family offer their children up to the slaughtering block of the internet to cash in on embarrassing clips. And just as the world now watches as the consequence of this kind of over-access comes out, that’s what makes it so interesting in 2024 to contemplate Truman’s world outside of the experience.

Because by now, we all know that the ending isn’t a happy one. Truman was going to step out of that stage and into a world where he would never be able to live a normal life. He’ll never truly have freedom or agency simply because everyone knows him or thinks they know and understand him, a fact that would forever affect any and all connections he made.

In 2024, the conflicting thing about The Truman Show is no longer the experiment in the first place, but it is the question of what his life would look like after, the trauma he’d experienced and how, or if he could, function while being utterly incapable of escaping the fame that was thrust upon him and the ongoing reminder of how his life and privacy was violated. In a world now so different to the one the original movie came out into, 2024 feels like a perfect time to return to the dystopia now the world has transformed into it.

Related Topics