Nightmare Fuel / The Truman Show

• While the scene is intended to be darkly humorous, Truman getting angry at his wife as she spouts Product Placement, temporarily going mad, taking his fictional "wife" hostage and threatening the first person that comes into the house with a knife, leaving her a sobbing wreck, is pretty hard to watch. In-universe, it's the first and only thing that shocks Meryl enough to break the show's fourth wall.
• The scene where Truman disappears and a set-wide search begins to find him. The atmosphere is tense. The moon is used like a prison search light, a siren is blaring in the background, and everyone is marching down the streets in formation searching for Truman. The previously friendly dalmatian is being used as a growling search dog. The way the search is conducted feels robotic, fitting in with the already artificial nature of Seahaven, as if everyone on the set were drones to scan the streets with. Then after failing to find him, everyone is ordered to assume first position, and they just... freeze in their respective places as if time stopped. It's a chilling shot.
• When Truman nearly drowns while trying to escape.
• Christof is nightmare fuel unto himself, simply for how much power he wields over an entire human life. What really makes him chilling is that, despite the fact that he's mindful of the ratings, he's not Only in It for the Money at all — he's really an absurdly overprotective father figure, who is obsessed with keeping Truman "pure" and is willing to go to sociopathic and even homicidal lengths to preserve this.
• Apart from bathroom breaks, showering, or even masturbation, think about any private moment you've had where you were alone that still would've been pretty humiliating if you were discovered (i.e. acting out daydreams). Now imagine doing that unknowingly having almost the entire world as an audience. Since Truman's life was broadcast 24/7 without commercial interruption (even while he's sleeping), there are only a handful of moments throughout his day where he has genuine privacy. Evil as he is, Christof is at least courteous enough to not film Truman in truly inappropriate situations, but it's still creepy to think about.
• The entire premise of the film is pretty nightmarish. The idea that a man could be "adopted" as an infant by a corporation and unknowingly imprisoned within a fake life for the entertainment of millions is horrifying. Think about it for a moment, how every single part of Truman's life was a lie; his childhood (including his father's death), his academic career, his job, even his marriage — all of it was planned out and given to him in order to serve Christof's constructed narrative. And Truman remained blissfully unaware of this fact for thirty years. And if Truman had never figured out the truth and escaped when he did, it's made clear that Christof would've kept Truman trapped inside Seahaven as his slave until he eventually died.
• The fact that Christof was willing to have the actress playing Truman's wife become impregnated on international television and forced to carry the baby to term as part of the world's first on-air conception. While it isn't impossible that she would be okay with it for a larger paycheck (it's worth noting that real actors and actresses have had on-screen sex before for the sake of art), Christof's insistence on it happening one way or the other implies otherwise. If that is indeed the case, then the revelation that Hannah (the woman playing "Meryl") never loved Truman or even cared about him makes forcing her to have sex with Truman and conceive his child for the sake of ratings not seem too far off sexual exploitation.
  • Truman is a very nice, honest guy, so if he ever discovered he was unknowingly being made to sleep with a woman who isn't actually interested in him, one could imagine he would probably be horrified by this, and would likely feel as though he had repeatedly raped her. And considering he does learn the truth at the end, will he eventually feel like this when the realisation fully sinks in?
  • As for Truman's hypothetical baby, Christof makes it clear in deleted material that he intends to use the child in the same way he's used Truman; forcing the kid to live a false life on a TV show where everything is planned out for them in advance. From this, it becomes pretty clear just how obsessed with creativity to the point of insanity that Christof is. He has no intention of ever letting Truman or his planned child go free, despite his claim to the contrary.
• As noted under Fridge, the amount of human rights laws that must not exist in the universe of the film for The Truman Show to even be possible is deeply concerning to say the least. Not only is it legal for a human to be bought by a corporation as a baby and used as a tool for entertainment, but there are also seemingly no laws against keeping that person in a fake controlled life for decades and then killing him when it looks like he might escape. And the only people who have any problem with a man being enslaved for the entertainment of the entire world are a small group of activists whom everyone else considers merely a nuisance.
• Louis/Marlon's entire situation is almost as bad as Truman's. In a documentary video, Louis reveals he was basically tricked by his parents into becoming Truman's best friend at seven years old, therefore giving Truman a friend for life as the narrative demanded. This essentially means Louis has been stuck on the show for almost as long as Truman has with no easy way to leave. The only difference is that unlike Truman, he's fully aware that their world is fake, but this isn't presented as being any better however, as the decades of gaslighting a man he has grown up with has long since taken it's toll on Louis, who eventually developed drug and alcohol addictions in the real world and has been to rehab multiple times over it.
  • It's also implied that because of his alcoholism, substance abuse and a lifelong commitment to the show meaning it's impossible for him to do anything else with his life, his role as Marlon is basically all that he has left to keep him going. And with the show's use of product placement requiring him to repeatedly consume alcohol, he'll probably never be able to kick his drinking problem. It's a vicious cycle of crippling guilt and depression, and it makes Louis seem every bit the prisoner Truman is, forever trapped in the Marlon role and forced to lie to a man who considers him a close friend.
  • There's also the fact that Christof continues to make Louis consume and promote alcohol (instead of, say, concocting an excuse for Marlon to quit drinking and having another character promote alcoholic beverages), in spite of the man's struggles with substance abuse. What a bastard.
  • The same deleted scene where Christof confirms the plans for a second show about Truman's child sees Marlon finally expressing his concern over how carelessly people treat life, bitterly pointing out during a cast and director meeting that Truman's eventual death is being treated as just the difference between one TV show or two. No one even bothers responding to this. Additionally, Marlon has to be silently aware of the fact that they're dooming future children to a fate just like his, as the friend(s) of Truman's child.

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