The Truman Show and Koyaanisqatsi

The Collingswood Movie Club showed Koyaanisqatsi (1982) on Tuesday night. In a special feature on the DVD, Koyan’s director, Godfrey Reggio, indicated that his film was not about the effects of technology; rather, everything in our world exists within the technology.  People are no longer conscience of technology’s presence.

At the end of the film, several writers are acknowledged as having influenced the film, one of whom was Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society.  Ellul’s major thesis is that the old world of separate and manageable technologies have developed into an all-encompassing Technology, guided by the principle of efficiency, which is antipathetic to anyone or any people or anything that does not support this Technology.

There are several meanings for the Hopi Indian word “koyaanisqatsi”: life out of balance; crazy life; and (my favorite) a state of life that calls for another way of living. The last conforms to Reggio’s abovestated theme.  His film means to awaken its viewers to a revelation.

Thinking about this particular theme caused me to reflect on the Movie Club’s January film, The Truman Show (1998). 

If you take the world of Seahaven as representing our world (and, for the moment, not the televised world within our world), the actors become real people who live and work around Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey).  Truman knows only these people and a little of the outside world that the television producers allow him to know.

Essentially, it is the exact world depicted, analyzed, and critiqued in Koyaanisqatsi.  Seahaven is the television equivalent of a technologically monolithic society. All values in this world are dictated by Television.  Not incidentally, German philosopher Martin Heidegger had called television "the essence of technology._

Another writer, Leopold Kohr, also mentioned at the end of Koyaanisqatsi, focused on the crisis of bigness.  This referred to the more and more centralized (and subsequently bigger) governments of modern nations, as well as the growing number of very big corporations.   He believed organizations and economies have optimal size and subsequently become stultifying and limiting the greater they grow.

Thus, Christof (Ed Harris), in The Truman Show, refers to his television creation being larger than many of the economies of nations.  And to support this large economic entity, the show must use product placement.  At almost every turn of Truman’s day, there is some product being sold by word of mouth or by strategic placement of actors in a shot.

This television world doesn’t differ much from the world “outside” it.

In Seahaven, thousands of cameras record Truman’s every move, and the template of surveillance in our own society is approaching Seahaven’s.  Everywhere we turn, a hat, shirt, headband, highway, and stadium promote some product or business.  Selling is an unrelenting, 24/7 activity in our world.  It’s inescapable, such that we take it for granted and stop noticing it.  Likewise, as Reggio mentions, we are no longer conscious of Technology’s presence.

Nor do we reflect upon the saturation of advertising in our society unless we fetishize it when rate the Super Bowl’s commercials.

Similarly, the world of national politics is subsumed by television.  Presidential campaigns are perpetually perpetuated by news hungry organizations.  The news in political campaigns is often about campaign advertising, the funding (PACs) for such advertising, and how the news media cover the campaigns.  And campaigns are watched specifically for errors in the way candidates misspeak on the news. 

Returning to Seahaven.  Truman’s world, for Christof, represents an ideal, a utopia, which has filtered out the problems of the real world.  One of these, by virtue of its absence in "The Truman Show", is politics.  Another is religion.  Obvious points for antagonism, arguments, and intolerance.

Seahaven trades these sources of conflict for phoniness and inauthenticity. 

Christof and his actors would counter-argue that everything that happens in the show is real.  It’s the common if not compelling attraction for audiences: their desire to experience something “real”.  But the film seems to be saying that the world depicted in Seahaven IS the world we live in and everything in it is canned and pre-planned and lacking any spontaneity (or suppresses attempts to be spontaneous). 

Taking this a step farther.  The television audience in our world seeks the “real” partly to satisfy a desire for something that seems to be lacking generally in our world.  Seahaven-as-our-world scenario suggests that this desire itself falsifies the world even more.