For Teachers and Students (5): Discussion Questions for the Truman Show

Discussion Questions for Peter Weir’s The Truman Show

1. Discuss the significance of Seahaven as a constructed world by relating it to the quotes below:

The media do not offer a transparent window on the world. They provide channels through which representations and images of the world can be communicated indirectly. The media intervene: they provide us with selective versions of the world, rather than direct access to it. (David Buckingham in Media Education, p. 3, 2004, Polity Press)

The media are major industries, generating profit and employment; they provide us with most of our information about the political process; and they offer us ideas, images and representations (both factual and fictional) that inevitably shape our view of reality. (David Buckingham in Media Education, p. 5, 2004, Polity Press)

The media are embedded in the textures and routines of everyday life; and they provide many of the symbolic resources we use to conduct and interpret our relationships and to define our identities. (David Buckingham in Media Education, p. 5, 2004, Polity Press)

2. Discuss how the names below contribute to our understanding of the film:

Seahaven,
Truman,
Burbank (Truman’s surname),
Christof,
Santa Maria (the yacht in the film)

3. What camera techniques are used in the scenes depicting Truman? Are there any unusual camera angles you can spot? Give some examples and discuss how they contribute to the audiences’ understanding of the story and Truman.

4. What camera techniques are used in the scenes depicting Christof? Give some examples and discuss how they contribute to the audiences’ understanding of the story and Christof.

5. What does Christof’s lunar control room represent in the film?

6. Discuss the following quote by relating it to Truman:

Television, with insatiable hunger for material, has made celebrities into content.
Roger Ebert, 1998, Chicago Sun-Times.

7. What does Truman’s escape to sea signify?

8. According to Robert Castle (2005, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 49), The Truman Show demonstrates an individual’s struggle to gain his true Self. Comment on what the role of media could be in causing an individual to not know his true Self. Do you believe that audiences are so weak that they are unable to resist the power of media? Are they empty vessels easily manipulated by the media?

9. How does the film view audiences in general? Does it consider audiences a homogenous or a diverse body? Does it stereotype audiences? Discuss.

10. In the film Christof says “We accept the reality which we are presented.” To what extent do you agree with Christof?

6 comments on “For Teachers and Students (5): Discussion Questions for the Truman Show”

lol now i know where my media studies teacher gets all his essay questions from.

As a teacher could i possibly have the answers?

Audrey-As every English teacher knows, there are NO ‘right answers’. English is not Maths! There might be several valid responses. In Australia, we encourage students to have genuine responses that might differ from those of their teachers. So long as the student has not catastrophically misread the text, if s/he can argue fluently for a POV, and support argument points by citing relevant textual detail, then all will be well.

Students of course need lots of encouragement to express their original ideas as the spectre of ‘being wrong’ haunts them and is often the root cause of the plagiarism that is the scourge of the intellectual community at present.

All this is both a challenge and a joy to the committed secondary English teacher.

Dan

April 24, 2009 @ 7:42 am

Margaret,

There is an obivous difference between a right answer and a valid response. The idea that there are no right answers is absurd. Disagreement about what the right answer is in no way indicates that no right answer is available. We do not have universal agreement regarding the formation of the universe, but that certainly does not mean that there is no correct answer to the question of its formation. Even in math there are disagreements about what the right answers are. Fermet’s last theorem was debated for hundreds of years, but that did not mean there was no correct answer. Right answers might be exceedingly difficult to find or determine, but that does not justify the claim that there are no right answers.

I’m sure your intention was simply to state that students’ ideas are evaluated in terms of process and presentation rather than content. But in making that uncontroversial claim, you overstate your case to the point of making an obvious error.

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