The Truman Show 

A film by Peter Weir, starring Jim Carey.
Review by Alan Steinfeld  

Peter Weir has always tried to make movie that deals with upsetting the way we think reality is.  

From his première picture The Last Wave to Picnic at Hanging Rock to this current and most commercial attempt at paradigm shifting.  It's not very often that Hollywood produces a movie that is about breaking through the illusion of the fabricated Hollywood America that we live in. But The Truman show is such a movie.

The film staring Jim Carey is about a man whose whole life has been watched on television, from the time of his birth on upwards. He lives in a society that is totally fabricated for his benefit, played by a cast of actors whose only role is to perpetrate that live in an artificially created bio-physio dome of a world.  Fake world he thinks is real life.  Form his wife to his best friend everyone is acting a part for the benefit of the 24 hour a day viewing audience.  

And for Truman Burbank it’s a perfect life, perhaps a little, too perfect which gets him a bit suspicious.  And his becoming aware of the illusion is what starts him on a quest where he has to risk it all in order to break out of the Maya into something that is more real.

This is really the story of every initiate on the road to truth and the breaking down of the walls of the old paradigm no matter how comfortable in order to discover the true nature of the reality in which we live.  Somewhere in the movie a character tells Truman "reality is only what we make it to be".  But Truman intuitive urges that there is more and that there is a mystery worth pursuing is the message that New Agers and those stuck in the old paradigm come away with.  Like Groundhog's Day with Bill Murray, this is a comedy that has deep spiritual significance as we begin to wake up to the higher potentials of ourselves.  It leaves us searching for the answer of how we can perceive through the current state of reality to higher modes of consciousness?

Jim Carey is a humorous and sympathetic character that finally in this movie he doesn't quite go over the top. We can almost sympathize with his struggle to know the greater mysteries of the world he inhabits.
Rumi says (in Coleman's Barks translation of a poem he calls