Transcription
In 2002, a man traveled to New York to investigate if the World Trade Center was still standing. He had become convinced that everyone in his life was manipulating him for a reality show and that the reported attacks had simply been a scripted plot twist.
The following year, another man made a trip to the Statue of Liberty, believing a mysterious woman would be waiting for him at the top, ready to finally release him from the cameras filming his every movement. Around the same time, an Olympic athlete began experiencing manic episodes in which he was certain a TV director was pulling the strings of the world around him.
The movie at the center of all these delusions is, of course, The Truman Show, the 1998 Jim Carrey film about a regular guy who discovers his life is a staged reality TV show. This movie is always [music] a treat to revisit.
In the years following its release, psychiatrists began noticing a pattern among patients [music] that they were adopting the premise of the film as their own. They believed that they were the star of a globally broadcasted reality show [music] and that everyone around them is acting, a clinical phenomenon known as the Truman Show delusion.
But why this movie? Why not other films where characters discover their reality as a lie? The Matrix, The Island, Logan's Run? What is it about this particular film that is so intoxicating to the paranoid mind? The easy answer is narcissism. that the premise of being the unwitting star of a beloved reality show flatters the fantasy of being the center of the universe. >> Feels like the whole world revolves around me somehow. >>
But you could say something similar about other films. In the game, every personal encounter, every scenario is staged for Nicholas. [music] In the Matrix, the viability of the entire system hinges on the path of a single chosen individual. In Vanilla Sky, an entire reality is rendered exclusively for a single dreaming brain. The narcissistic premise alone doesn't quite explain why this film became a psychiatric phenomenon.
So, there must be another reason, and I think it has less to do with what Truman discovers than with how he discovers it. [music] He isn't guided by a mentor who reveals the truth like in the Matrix, Dark City, or the Island. He has to figure it out all by himself. And when the cracks in the illusion begin to form, the only tool he has is his past. He goes back through his memories, finds the moments that never quite added up, and excavates the truth of what's really happening to him and who he really is.
This idea that our past holds [music] the key to our true selves is not some timeless human instinct. It's actually a quite recent invention, one that's so deeply embedded in the modern understanding of the self that it's barely even recognized. And I'd argue The Truman Show gets inside people's heads, not just because it offers a narcissistic fantasy, but because it dramatizes the exact process our culture has handed us for the task of knowing ourselves. A process that, for one philosopher, has made our minds dangerously fragile.
Well, to break that down, we'll have to take a trip down to Sea Haven, dissect the psychiatric literature on The Truman Show Delusion, and talk a little bit about might Shyamalan's bad era. Let's dive in.
But first, a quick recap. The Truman Show follows Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman living in the idyllic town of Sea Haven. He's got a nice house, nice wife, loyal friends, the works. Only thing is, they're all paid actors. His entire town is an elaborate set, and his entire life has been broadcast on TV since before he was born. All orchestrated by the all powerful showrunner in the sky named Kristoff.
But production errors start to compromise the illusion. When a studio light falls from the sky, a radio frequency accidentally broadcasts the production crew tracking his movements, and the actor who played his long deadad father wanders back on set. Truman starts to suspect something isn't quite right. So, he reconsiders his past, looking for a pattern. Through flashbacks, we learn his father drowned on a childhood sailing trip and that he was once in love with a woman named Sylvia, who mysteriously and abruptly moved to Fiji. All of Truman's attempts to leave the island are conveniently thwarted. And when his paranoia reaches its peak, his wife Meryill can't take it anymore, breaks character, and is written off the show. So Truman comes up with a plan. He slips past the cameras, steals a sailboat, and journeys to the edge of the set. Kristoff tries to stop him, insisting that life doesn't get any truer or better than within Sea Haven. Truman ignores him, takes a bow, and steps through to the real world. The end.
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In 2012, psychiatrist Joel Gold and his brother Ian published a paper about the Truman Show delusion called Psychosis in the Global Village. Their argument was that while the basic types of delusions are biological and have existed across human history, the form they take is sensitive to culture. Basically, culture and media can provide the clothing or content for delusions.
So, for example, in more religious times, people suffering from the same condition might have imagined being persecuted by gods or devils. In the 1950s, patients may have imagined the CIA or KGB had bugged their house since cold war stress was everywhere and that was the cultural vocabulary at hand. But these days in a hyperconnected media saturated society where the anxiety of being watched and having to perform is baked into everyday life, reality TV, live streams, and the internet are more likely to give form to delusions.
However, many of the elements Gold identifies about The Truman Show could also apply to other false reality movies. Plenty of them have tapped into the anxieties of their moment. Total Recall, corporations colonizing our minds, The Matrix, The Digital Revolution starting to feel capable of recreating reality, the 13th floor, existence, certain episodes of Black Mirror, all of them hand the paranoid mind culturally relevant clothing, but none of them have spawned a clinical phenomenon.
The missing piece, I'd argue, is not the premise of the film, but Truman's procedure. And to understand why, we need to take a brief detour through one of the strangest psychiatric phenomena of the 20th century. [music] >> How can they search for the deadly memories that hold the secrets of their past and the promise of their healing? >>
In the 1980s, diagnoses of multiple personality disorder exploded. Virtually unheard of before 1970, the condition was suddenly everywhere. thousands of diagnoses motivated by waves of recovered memories of childhood trauma. How does something like this happen? Well, in 1995, philosopher Ian Hacking studied this strange epidemic in his book, Rewriting the Soul, and posited that it has something to do with the relationship between culture, memory, and the self. His analysis suggested that the surge in cases wasn't due to doctors getting better at spotting overlooked conditions. It was more a feedback loop between culture and diagnosis. [music]
Suffering patients were handed a framework that organized their distress into a coherent narrative. And then once they had that framework, they did what our culture has trained us [music] all to do. They went back through their memories, reinterpreted them, and posited a hidden trauma that explained everything.
For hacking, this revealed something critical about the modern self. For centuries, identity was anchored in the concept of the soul. You had a fixed character and essence. But beginning in the late 19th century, the soul was replaced by memory or what he calls memorial politics. We started to understand ourselves merely as the sum of our remembered experiences. Therefore, to know yourself is to excavate your past. To heal yourself is to reinterpret it.
Per hacking, the delicate conjunction know thyself did not refer to memory. It required that we know our character, our limits, our needs, and our propensities for selfdeception. It required that we know our souls. Only with the advent of memorial politics did memory become the surrogate for the soul. And this culturally mandated formula for self-nowledge is exactly the process Truman goes through. He audits. He reconsiders his past to determine who he is. >> See, they got rid of her, but they couldn't erase the memory. >>
It all starts when a studio light falls from the sky. Then the actor who portrayed his deceased father sneaks back onto the set in the guise of a hobo and Truman recognizes him. With the cracks of the illusion showing, Truman begins to question things by reinterpreting his past. So he goes home and sifts through his trunk of memories. First old photos of his dad. It had to be the same man. Then momentos of Sylvia, the girl he fell in love with during college who got mysteriously carted off to Fiji. He remembers throwing eyes at her across campus only for his future wife Merryill to obnoxiously hijack the moment. Weird, right? Then the school dance. He and Sylvia were vibing across the dance floor, but all of a sudden, a mob of people pushed her away so Truman could focus on Merryill. Huh?
Later, Truman asked her out at the library, but something about her answers were decidedly unchill. >> Truman, I'm not allowed to talk to you. >> They have a romantic rendevous on the beach when the date is abruptly interrupted by her supposed father. Who are you? >> I'm her father. >> What? >> I've never even >> Who says her claim that it's all a show is just another one of her schizophrenic episodes. At the time, Truman accepted it. He got married, got an insurance job, and went on with his life. The official version of his past held until the production errors started accumulating, and those old memories began to look different in the new light.
Sensing the memory audit is underway, his wife and mother tried to intervene with a photo album, the official version of his past. It almost works. >> Here's us at Mount Rushmore. [music] That was quite a drug. You slept the whole way there. >> Because he was drugged. >> It looks so small. >> And it was a set. [music]
When they leave, Truman takes another peep and notices something strange about one of his wedding photos. Merryill's fingers are crossed. Suspecting this is one of many lies he's been told, Truman follows her to work, where he discovers the doctors are just standing around and on and on until he becomes utterly convinced of the conspiracy.
When a paranoid mind develops the Truman Show delusion, it's not just about forming a fantasy that flatters their narcissism and resonates with their environment, they're also doing what Truman does, reaching back into their past and reforming it into a narrative that makes sense of their present situation. And that process is not unique to the mentally ill. It's what culture asks all of us to do.
One of the dangers of the secularized soul for hacking is that your identity is only as stable as your memory. If our memories constitute ourselves, then whoever controls the interpreting of memory, [music] therapists, courts, cultural narratives hold enormous power over who you are. A secularized soul is dangerous because it's exploitable.
In fact, the most powerful means of control over Truman are the instillment and maintenance of interpretations of his past. It ranges from mundane things like the insistence that he hates to gamble even though he's never tried it. >> What about Atlantic City? >> Oh, no. You hate to gamble. >> That's right. I do, don't I? >> So, why would you want to go there? >> To big things like a fear of water. The trauma of witnessing his father supposedly drowned is the production's most powerful tool to keep Truman within Sea Haven. Since it's an island, every time he gets close to water, he's overcome with anxiety. They don't need a gate or a wall to keep him in. A memory is much better at instilling firm limits.
But memories are not only the chains that bind Truman, but also the means by which he liberates himself. Knowing they have to justify the return of Truman's father, Kristoff comes up with the hackiest of hack plot devices. >> Amnesia. Brilliant. Luckily, Truman knows a tedious contrivance when he sees one. Because this absurd rendevous gives him the courage to escape. He recasts the memory of the drowning, thereby enabling him to overcome his fear, get on the boat, beast through Kristoff Storm, and make it to the edge.
In a sense, memory has inherited everything religion once had. Religion gives you an identity. It can imprison. It can liberate. And whoever controls its interpretation holds a power that is in every meaningful sense theological. Much has been said of the interpretation of Kristoff as a deity. That's the big guy. Quite a paintbrush he's got. His name is very close to Christ. He's literally an all powerful string puller in the sky and speaks to Truman like he's his divine father, watching over him during all the key moments of his life. >> I watched you on your first day of school, the episode when you lost your first tooth. >>
But gods control people with belief systems, you know, commandments, promise of [music] meaning, threats of damnation, etc. You can imagine another version of the story that's more in line with a movie like might Shyamalan's The Village in which it's a manufactured mythology that keeps its inhabitants too frightened to ever want to leave. But this secular god doesn't need to do that. He doesn't need Truman to believe in anything outside himself. [music] He just needs him to keep telling himself the same story about who he is.
Hacking warns that if the soul is just a narrative, then that means it's entirely editable and the modern mind extremely fragile. Once things start going wrong in life, you start looking for new ways to rewrite yourself to fit better with your current struggles. The Truman Show for these patients becomes one such appealing framework or [music] what hacking called a semantic contagion.
The semantic contagion refers to when a newly introduced cultural concept provides a framework that compels us to reinterpret our past experiences to fit this new mold. So, for example, the satanic panic of the 80s. Since the media was going wild with exaggerated stories about demonic religious cults, vulnerable patients began spontaneously recovering memories of having been its victims. Memories that hadn't existed before these media stories arrived to organize them. The alien abduction craze worked the same way. The more a vulnerable mind was saturated with abduction narratives, the more likely it was to reinterpret health problems like sleep paralysis and disassociation as having been taken by little green men.
The Truman Show is one such potent semantic contagion. It's got the two big ingredients, the cultural resonance and the procedure. It builds off the highly cultural relevant language Allah reality television and the key to defining the secular soul reaching back and reclassifying our memories.
While the Truman Show delusion is a rare condition, the thing that makes it possible isn't rare at all. Every one of us is doing in some form what Truman does. We go back through our lives, find the moments that never really quite made sense and hold them up to whatever new light culture has provided. We call it healing or growth. Then yeah, sometimes the process really is valuable. But the problem for hacking is that this process has no stopping point. There's no limit of how many times memory can be revised and rewritten.
This is what makes the modern soul so precarious. When identity was grounded in something external, in God and fixed social roles, the self had an anchor that existed outside the story you told yourself about yourself. You could be wrong about your past and still know who you were. But without that, we hand enormous power to whatever framework steps in to organize those memories. And these frameworks are everywhere. They're generated by social media algorithms, and sold by savvy influencers. They're found in therapy offices, self-help books, political movements, and yes, even in movies like The Truman Show.
And if hacking is right and the self is fundamentally a narrative we construct from the raw material of memory, then understanding how narratives work is more than just a form of entertainment. The same conventions used to dissect a film, the way a story frames its protagonist, the way it assigns meaning to events and themes are the same tools the mind uses to construct an identity. We're all susceptible to the seductions of a good story.
Per hacking, the doctrine that memory should be thought of as narrative is an aspect of moral politics. We constitute our souls by making up our lives. That is by weaving stories about our past by what we call memories. [music]
To think critically about stories then is to become at least dimly aware of the machinery behind the construction of our secular selves. Certainly not immune to their power, but aware enough to pause before you let a new framework reorganize everything you thought you knew about your past. [music] Aware enough to notice when a framework is doing the work that used to be done by faith, providing you with a story that tells you who you are and what your suffering means.
That's what Truman ultimately earns. Not quite a clean answer about who he really is, just the awareness that he's been living inside someone else's story and he's our hero because he tosses all that aside and decides to forge his own. Hey y'all, thanks for watching. Don't forget to go to zdock.com/jaredbower to find and instantly book a toprated doctor today. Also, be sure to subscribe cuz my next video is on everything everywhere all at once. Hope you guys are having a great summer and take it easy. Peace.