Actor Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man who discovers he is living in a constructed reality televised globally around the clock.
[3] The concept predates this particular film, which was inspired by a 1989 episode of The Twilight Zone in its 1980s incarnation, titled "Special Service", which begins with the protagonist discovering a camera in his bathroom mirror.
[4] In 1941, science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein had written They, a story about a man surrounded by persons whose job is to convince him that he is insane rather than one of the few genuine people in his world.
In 1959, Philip K. Dick wrote a novel, Time Out of Joint, in which the protagonist lives in a created world in which his "family" and "friends" are all paid to maintain the illusion.
[7]For the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, its official poster pays homage to the film and its final scene with their website stating that "Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol's The Truman Show (1998) is a modern reflection of Plato's cave and the decisive scene urges viewers to not only experience the border between reality and its representation but to ponder the power of fiction, between manipulation and catharsis.
[3] Another patient had worked as an intern on a reality TV program and believed that he was secretly being tracked by cameras, even at the polls on election day in 2004.
[11][12] In the United Kingdom, psychiatrists Paolo Fusar-Poli, Oliver Howes, Lucia Valmaggia, and Philip McGuire of the Institute of Psychiatry in London described in the British Journal of Psychiatry what they referred to as the "Truman syndrome": [A] preoccupying belief that the world had changed in some way that other people were aware of, which he interpreted as indicating he was the subject of a film and living in a film set (a 'fabricated world').
[13]The authors suggest that the "Truman explanation" is a result of the patients' search for meaning in their perception that the ordinary world has changed in some significant but inexplicable way.