Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Let me tell you a story.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a “master-planned community,” constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don’t exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
the twitter thread the artist created after this was one of the best situations i have ever seen in my whole life:
Somebody give this ignoramus a piece of actual shark skin and tell him to rub his face with it, let him find out just how “smooth” sharks really are.
Somebody did. I use it as a pillowcase because it’s so smooth.
But buddy.
Shark skin feels exactly like sandpaper. It is made up of tiny teeth-like structures called placoid scales, also known as dermal denticles. These scales point towards the tail and help to reduce friction from surrounding water when the shark swims. … In the opposite direction, it feels very rough like sandpaper.
My friend forgot to secure the latch on his magic card briefcase and all his commander decks are now mixed together. Now he’s playing 1200 card pickup and has to reorganize everything.
i want my shows one episode followed by a whole ass week of going a little insane over it with the people on my phone, writing fics theorizing and going over every single scene through amazing gifs and meta, before the next ep drops and the cicle begins anew
speak louder
It’s also contributing to the overall stagnation of writing. Binging isn’t conducive to analysis.
Binging and whole season drops also seem to be a bit hard on fandoms and fan content creation.
Looking at eg. House of the Dragon last year, which spaced out 10 episodes over 10 weeks (that is 2 ½ months) and the fandom content production and fandom discussions over multiple platforms were so high! It gave fans time to speculate, to produce and to wait for. It held the anticipation high and invigorated the fandom over a long time.
But Netflix (or other streaming services) when they drop a whole season in one go? I feel yes, many fans will watch it. But the vibe is very different. And there will be discussions and fan content, but I feel it is not necessarily good for a fandom in the long run. The built-up does not carry these fandoms as long for “casual” fans and will not bring the same influx of new fans and new content to those fandoms. And that is sad for fan spaces in my opinion.
It’s not just fandom. When I teach popular culture, I also mention how binge culture is destroying the social function of shows.
In the traditional broadcasting structure, you have an episode a week at a set time - you sit down and you watch it, maybe make a family thing out of it. The next day you go to work, and your coworkers have seen the episode too, and you talk about it - because a tv show is a safe topic (not political, not too personal), so you have something to bond over/socialize.
But when a whole season drops at the same time… You either force yourself to binge it, turning your schedule upside down, or you watch it in bits, risking to fall behind. Say a popular show drops a season on a Saturday. On Monday at work, there will be people who haven’t started it, people who are half-through, people who have finieshed it… Mix with the fear-of-spoilers culture, suddenly this point of bonding becomes restricted, even eradicated.
It’s also destroying show production. These days if a season isn’t binged in the first week — fully, completed, watched all the way through in THE FIRST WEEK — it doesn’t get renewed. There’s no opportunity for shows to grow legs and catch on. Netflix would’ve canceled The X-Files. Netflix would’ve canceled so many classic shows that were allowed to find their audience gradually.
