Miami New Times
June 1998

Somebody's Watching You: The Truman Show, Webcams, and the New Voyeurism

Esquire film critic David Thomson called it the film of the decade. Siskel and Ebert thrust their Thumbs of Judgment™ joyously skyward. What is causing such paroxysms of delight among America's film critics? The reason they're all roaring is The Truman Show, Peter Weir's creepy-cheery allegory about contemporary identity and the way it is at once distended and validated by mass media. Weir's film, which tries to make an honest man out of rubber-faced comedian Jim Carrey, has a premise that's gotten more publicity than the Spice Girls shakeup. Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a clean-cut insurance agent who lives with his clean-cut registered nurse wife in an idyllic island community named Seahaven. Well, "community" is a bit of a misrepresentation. Seahaven is actually a huge set, and Truman is an unwitting participant in what amounts to the world's longest-running experimental drama. His co-workers are actors. His friends are actors. Even his mother is a hired gun, an actress who signed on to the project when Truman was a newborn. The fact that Truman's life is a lie is only the beginning. Seahaven isn't just an interminable summer-stock play. It's an immensely profitable television series. With the help of thousands of cameras hidden all over town — they're in hallways, in cars, in Truman's ring — every moment of Truman's life goes out to a worldwide audience of one billion and counting. Created by a beret-wearing, self-styled visionary named Christof (Ed Harris), The Truman Show is reality programming taken to its fiendish extreme. I saw the movie. I didn't hate it. But I didn't love it. I spent the movie trying to figure out what Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol were pushing toward, what they wanted to accomplish after they had forced audiences to accept their premise. I couldn't.

The film's symbolism (Christof as both Godard and Christ, media and religion shallowly equated) is so vague that it plays less like the dazzling fin-de-siècle satire it's being billed as, and more like an episode of the Twilight Zone. More specifically, like an episode in Steven Spielberg's far sunnier Twilight Zone movie, where the twilight was just more daylight. In addition, the psychological implications are explored with a profound superficiality — it sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but I'm using the phrase to describe the kind of juke-step that happens throughout the film, in which serious issues about the way The Truman Show might affect its participants are simply ignored. Think of the young woman (Laura Linney) who plays Truman's wife Meryl. How easy can it be for an actress, even a well-paid actress, to stay in the same role for fifteen years, especially when that role requires round-the-clock performance of intimate actions?More than Truman, his friends and relatives risk losing their humanity to gain their fame. The absence of nervous breakdowns among Seahaven's citizenry is suspicious.

I've been thinking less about Truman Burbank and quite a bit more about the other participants in The Truman Show, for a simple reason: I've spent the last six months getting hooked on Webcams. Webcams, of course, are cheap devices that record images every two minutes or so, and then load those images on the Internet. Recently, WebCam pages documenting the daily lives of ordinary people have become something of a fad. There's Jennicam, which trains its 24-hour-a-day eye on the life of Webpage designer Jennifer Ringley. There's The Zone, which posts a picture every five minutes from a Susquehanna University dorm room. And there are hundreds of other cams constantly being added to Webcam indexes like Yahoo!'s. All in all, hundreds of Americans are now under voluntary 24-hours-a-day surveillance on the Internet.

These are similar projects to Christof's Truman Show, but they are also radically different. While Truman is the victim of a voyeuristic project, the Camcult set (like the vast majority of Seahaven's residents) is proudly exhibitionistic. No one puts these people on display. They put themselves there. Pop culture phenomena like this don't come along every day, and when they do, they're worth scrutinizing. Webcams tighten the metaphors that come loose in Weir's movie; though they sound the same notes, they produce an entirely different melody. There are rumors that Peter Weir became obsessed with Jennicam, and that he sent several messages to Ringley. To each his own:

Since March, my favorite Webcam has been Anacam, which tracks the life of a 32-year-old Minneapolis performance artist and singer named Ana Voog. Voog has a number of cameras mounted around her apartment. They record everything she's doing, whether that means sleeping, eating, working at her computer, or talking on the telephone. Last November her cams even caught her having sex with an ex-boyfriend. For the last two months, I've watched Anacam religiously, and have spent hours poring over the archives of her life posted by other devoted fans. The record is one of almost sublime mundanity. Ana sleeps late, usually in a rumpled sweatshirt, and I can watch her for hours — not continuously, of course, but during work breaks — as she tosses and turns on her narrow couch-bed. Why would a perfectly healthy, reasonably happy person fritter his time away watching the life of a complete stranger? Well, there's a prurient element to this, of course, since Ana is an attractive woman who now and again lounges around the apartment naked — I have yet to see her have sex — but that's not one of my main motivations.

What are the main motivations? To humanize the medium, of course — to use the cold technology of networked computer, packet transfers, and the like to gain some purchase on a human life. To think about political issues, and whether the right to privacy includes the right to forfeit privacy. But there's also an intellectual component to my interest. Weir's film is entertaining. It has jokes, such as the wonderful scene in which an interloper who wants to liberate Truman jumps out of a Christmas present. It has romance, in the form of a woman who once guested on the show and still has feelings for Truman. It has conflict, and resolution, adventure, and plot. Anacam, and the best Webcams, have none of these things, at least not in any traditional manner. They are plotless. They are without choreographed conflict. They are boring. They are like life. So what's interesting about them? The tiny things. Anacam used to update every two minutes — now it's roughly every four minutes — and I used to love watching for the slight shifts in the picture. If she was sitting at her desk typing, an update might bring a new strand of hair tucked behind her ear or an inch drop in the level of her water glass. Anacam also does what The Truman Show (the show) did, and what The Truman Show (the movie) cannot — it explores what happens when a society's media exceeds its humanity. To begin with, there's the matter of Ana Voog's apartment. From the glimpses of her studio, it looks like a movie set hit by a hurricane. Extension cords and lighting gels litter the floor. Computer equipment hulks in the corner. She is crowded out of her own life by the very equipment she's using to record it, and this seems like a better metaphor than The Truman Show, where Christof conceals his apparatus perfectly from Truman for almost 30 years, only to be undone by a series of freak accidents (light falls from sky, radio frequencies glitch, and the car radio picks up crew transmission). In addition, Ana's domain is exclusively private, while Weir's movie rarely catches its protagonist in an entirely unguarded moment.

This is partly Carrey's fault. Even as he grows as an actor, he can't pretend to be someone unaware of audience presence. The opening scene finds Truman performing in front of the bathroom mirror, and though he's entirely alone, he's still performing. This is partly Weir's fault. Most of Seahaven's cameras are public cameras, and many of the more private scenes — Truman's heart-to-heart conversation with his best friend, for example — have fewer interruptions from the control room. This helps the flow of The Truman Show the movie, but fuzzes our understanding of The Truman Show the TV show. But it is also partly our fault. As spectators, we are entirely aware of the process by which performers change their behavior to please us, and we project that onto Truman even though he is ostensibly unaware of the audience. For the film to succeed at all, this projection has to be cumulative — we must continually ask ourselves how much Truman knows about the surveillance, and when he knows it.

This is how it works with Webcams. If you watch Ana Voog long enough, you'll find yourself wondering whether she notices the camera, whether she's exaggerating her reactions — or, most interestingly, if she's exaggerating her nonchalance. We are sophisticated enough as viewers that these things matter to us. We develop our identities by reflecting them off the identities of the characters we observe. To prove that we are a society committed to parsing the ironies of reality TV, look no further than the fate of other reality-based TV shows and films. Inevitably, reality programs implode and are reborn as spoofs and metafictions. PBS's dour An American Family was lampooned by Albert Brooks's brilliant Real Life. MTV's inane Real World series was lampooned by a surprisingly sharp Saturday Night Live skit featuring five slacker boneheads and Norm Macdonald's Bob Dole. Spoofs and metafictions are funny because they let us in on the joke. True reality is less funny, because sometimes it leaves us out. It's only a matter of time before someone creates a MetaAnacam, a Webcam that shows someone like me as I wake up, shower, and settle down to watch Anacam. There's one final lesson here. In May, Ana Voog launched a second phase of her project. Called Ana2, it uploads images more frequently, and even includes streaming video. The catch? Voog is charging a yearly fee. She's not the first to do so — Jennicam offers every-twenty-minute uploads for free, and increases the frequency of pictures tenfold for $15 per month. As The Truman Show streaks toward boffo box office, Webcam fans like me hold out hope that there's an alternative universe where Truman Burbank didn't break free of Seahaven at the movie's close, where he decided to stay put — but only after renegotiating a better contract (script approval, M&Ms in the living room, and a huge salary increase). Whether it's fantasy or reality, the only hard-and-fast rule is this one: Watching costs.