Current Forum: Session 3: Ideology	Read 8 times 	
Date: 30-Jan-2001 00:19:42	
Author: MCKAHAN, JASON G. <jgm8530@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Subject and Ideology 	
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       The dialectical materialist approach to examining media operates on the supposition that 
the base (economic) determines the relations of the superstructure (cultural institutions). 
Therefore, media works within the confines established by the capitalists, in interests of base. For example, although American media is pluralistic, ideological and private, in the nostalgic sense, there appears a hegemony of small town family values, jingoism and consumerism. The Truman Show is a film that critiques that superstructure, not unlike Ordinary People or American Beauty, but tends to fantasize about its relation to the base. Does every character realize the menacing purpose in Seahaven, except Truman? How are we to relate to the spectators 
of The Truman Show? And how can Truman simply leave the doors of his prison? 
       The trick to the Truman Show is that we accept the premise that the prime time “family show” has become “real”: “We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We're tired of pyrotechnics and special effects.” Yet the realism is undercut by citizens, families and friends of Seahaven that are fake: “While the world [Truman] inhabits is in some respects 
counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards . . . It isn't always Shakespeare but it's genuine. It's a life”. The contradiction of social construct and realism, is acted out by the inhabitants, who render POV shots to us with their coat buttons, and by structures that hide high-angle cameras for establishing shots. However, all of these actors are also responsible for the effluency of ideas that constitute Truman’s world. When this becomes a game between privileged spectators and the clique of the citizen ideologues, Truman’s misidentification and gradual epiphany appears to be the result of a fictitious myth formed by Chrisof. We can either view the film as science fiction as a popular representation of an individual coming to terms with ideology. However, it does not allow us to consider the 
possibility that each citizen is acting as they truly believe and the these act arte carried out through ideological apparatuses. Althusser’s analysis of ideology warns against the notion of a set of menacing ideologues or priests. Rather, ideology is practiced by all subjects via material practices and ideology itself is material. Thus, we run into a common misconception in The Truman Show that the clique of Seahaven are a subjects “outside of ideology” that falsify Truman’s world in order to dominate him, when one could argue there is no subject except by 
ideology. 
       The Truman Show also slyly interpolates us spectators as a certain kinds of subjects. The diegetic spectators who watch Truman are characterized by gullibility and superficiality and we as spectators of the film have difficulties relating to these characters as anything but dullards and couch potatoes. This elitism of the filmmaker popularizes the idea that ideology is only a fake representation of the real. It is therefore, hard for us to see ideology as the imaginary relation to the relations of production, but rather we short circuit between the “real” us and the “fake” diegetic spectator. Such a thesis fails flatters us as though we were not ourselves interpolated by the media. 
       The Happy Hollywood ending is one such prison house of the mind. Rather than ask Truman to negotiate his imaginary relationship to the relations of production, the narrative must 
sell itself. Topped with the promise of heterosexual union, Truman’s escape really becomes reaffirmation of dominant ideology. Ideas are suddenly spiritual and historical, free from material processes and apparatuses.