Looking for Bedford Falls ... on The Truman Show
Show Me the Way to Go Home
One third into Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of a reality TV show, is made by his fictive wife and fake mom to sit down and watch television. The program on air is “Golden Oldies,” a spoof of Turner Classic Movies. Tonight’s entertainment, the host announces, is “the enduring, much-loved classic, Show Me the Way to Go Home: a hymn of praise to small town life, where we learn that you don’t have to leave home to discover what the world’s all about, and that no one is poor who has friends.”
For anyone who has ever been within earshot of cable TV in December, this synopsis should sound familiar: Show Me the Way to Go Home is a knock-off of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). In that film, George Bailey learns that “no man is a failure who has friends” and makes peace with never having left his hometown of Bedford Falls. For Truman, who is considering finally leaving his hometown of Seahaven, the description of Show Me the Way to Go Home is an admonition from Christof, the director of his life, to stay put. For the audience, it serves as the filmmakers’ tip-off that The Truman Show is a dystopian reimagining of the holiday classic.
The similarities between the two films are highly specific. George and Truman both dream of exploring the world (including going to Fiji), but after their fathers’ deaths each feels compelled to settle down to a local career in finance, George offering home loans and Truman selling life insurance. Both nearly drowned as boys, which further tethers them to their small towns: the accident leaves George deaf in one ear (meaning even the war draft can’t unsettle him) and Truman terrified of water (and Seahaven is an island). Each character meets the love of his life at a high school dance and in each film the budding romance is interfered with twice, first at the dance and then when a car drives up to take one of the lovers away, interrupting the relationship for several years. In both films, the town would descend into disorder if the protagonist were not there. When George goes missing, everyone in Bedford Falls except evil Mr. Potter is either praying or looking for him for fear he is going to end his life. When Truman goes missing, everyone in Seahaven is looking for him for fear he is going to end his time on the show—and thus their livelihoods—while the woman who, unlike his actress wife, genuinely loves him, the true Mary Hatch to his George Bailey, prays for his escape.
In both films, help to find and save the missing man comes from above. In It’s a Wonderful Life, angels personified by blinking stars watch a highlight reel of George’s life (literally: at one point the film is paused on a freeze-frame), then send down one of their own to convince George his life is wonderful. In The Truman Show, God and His angels have been usurped by the messianic-monikered Christof, the self-proclaimed “creator” of Truman’s world, and by his technicians, who broadcast highlight reels of Truman’s life and watch over Seahaven from an imitation moon. Just as a moon can only reflect a star and has no light of its own, Christof and his minions can only imitate divine power with their weather machines and omnipresent cameras. There are no stars under the massive studio dome, only stage lights, one of which falls from the sky and onto Truman’s street, alerting him to the artificiality of his life just as the star-angel Clarence falls from the heavens and into the river to remind George of the realness of his. Giving new meaning to George and Mary’s catchphrase, “Lasso the moon,” Truman will defy the false heavens, eluding the surveillance of the moon-watchers and rejecting the director’s Clarence-like plea—but issued through a disembodied voice rather than in person—not to abandon his supposedly wonderful life in Seahaven. If, in both films, the heroes underwent baptisms of dying to childhood dreams and being raised to new lives of permanent residence in their hometowns, they each undergo a second baptism in the finale. George jumps into the river to rescue Clarence rather than drown himself, discovers what his death or nonexistence would have cost Bedford Falls, and recommits himself to the life he has. Truman again survives drowning at sea, has a moment to count the cost of exiting the show, and emerges from his city-sized version of Plato’s cave to experience reality for the first time.
All these parallels and inversions reveal that the filmmakers were consciously reconfiguring It’s a Wonderful Life into The Truman Show. But taking this analysis a step further, I suggest Christof’s choice to put Show Me the Way to Go Home on Truman’s TV screen reveals that the filmmaker-within-the-film is himself deliberately patterning Truman Burbank after George Bailey and Seahaven after Bedford Falls. It was Christof who planned the father’s death to keep Truman grounded, paved his career path toward finance, and though Truman fell for the wrong girl, planted his future wife Meryl at the same dance. (The character’s name recalls the most acclaimed actress alive, but it also sounds suspiciously like Mary.) Seahaven, like Bedford Falls, is intended to be the archetypal small town in which family lines extend for generations and neighbors know and support each other. Christof defends his directorial (read: dictatorial) decisions by saying, “I have given Truman the chance to lead a normal life,” and “Seahaven is the way the world should be.” It would seem that It’s a Wonderful Life is the basis for his standard of a good, “normal life,” lived within a good community functioning as it “should be.”
Christof fails to recreate Bedford Falls for a number of reasons, but setting aside for a moment the wrong-headedness and immorality of his methods, I think we can recognize there is something sympathetic and relatable in his even trying. While not everyone would want to live in a small town, there is something good and right about the Bedford Falls ideal that appeals to us and beckons us to cultivate it in our own places. But how can we do this when places like Bedford Falls may be so geographically, historically, and culturally remote from us that we, like Christof, know of them only from watching movies? Could something resembling Bedford Falls be found—or founded—in the middle of an urban or suburban sprawl? Can we still experience that kind of close-knit community in an age of anonymity and fragmentation?
The Truman Show does not rule out the possibility of positive answers to these questions, but its negative example demonstrates how difficult it is to realize that possibility. It is a film about bringing Bedford Falls into the twenty-first century insofar as it illustrates how not to, a film that only suggests how one might nurture community by showing how one would most certainly ruin it. I want to call attention to a few ways that Christof’s project fails, but they all have the same root cause: Christof is attracted to a surface image of community but is blind to the moral and spiritual foundations that hold it together. He tries to build community using the very tools that destroy it.
The Architecture of Community
First, genuine participation in community is a choice and cannot be coerced. All of us are born or otherwise placed into communities we did not choose, but we do choose how much to invest in them, and sometimes we have the option to leave in search of new ones. George has many opportunities to leave Bedford Falls, but what keeps him there is his conscience and his commitments to his family and neighbors. But even though Christof says that if Truman really wanted to leave Seahaven he could, he puts increasingly preposterous obstacles in his way, even contemplating killing Truman on live television. Indeed, Truman’s entire community conspires against his obvious intention to leave so they can continue to profit from his imprisonment.
Second, a community cannot be built upon falsehood. In The Truman Show, falsehood makes coercion easier: if Truman was ever content to remain in Seahaven, it was because he was deceived about its true nature. But a community built on lies and duplicity is doomed to collapse the moment the truth is exposed, because the relationships that make up a community require mutual knowledge and trust. All of Truman’s relationships, even with those closest to him—his mother, his wife, and his best friend—are phony and hollow, because no one can afford to be honest with him. (The best friend even lies to Truman that he would never lie to him.) Show Me the Way to Go Home would try to cheer Truman with the sentiment that “No man is poor who has friends,” but on these terms he is in dire poverty.
Third, related to both the problem of coercion and the lack of trust, Seahaven is a failed community because Christof relies on surveillance to contain Truman, not only by installing cameras everywhere but by employing every other resident as a spy. Granted, surveillance could serve a community by being a deterrent to crime, but surely there is a tipping point after which the amount of it terrorizes the innocent and turns neighbors against each other.
All these problems with Christof’s design seem obvious. “Of course,” we think, “you shouldn’t detain people against their will, lie to them and make them into liars, or spy on them and make them into spies.” But while these are threats to community that we might associate with far-off cults or communist countries, it’s worth asking whether our own households, churches, schools, or other associations have ever tried to manufacture belonging or enforce unity in similar ways. But if we still don’t see The Truman Show as a cautionary tale applicable to our own communities, the next three problems with Christof’s design should hit closer to home. They are less cultish, less authoritarian, and more recognizably American.
First, an underlying contradiction of Christof’s strategy for building a community is that it is premised on individualism. To be sure, a community can only ever be made up of individuals—who, again, must each decide to be there and contribute—but it can never be about the individual. A community in which people look out only for themselves and expect everyone else to always accommodate them cannot function. Granted, no actual community could take this particularly American value to its furthest possible extreme—a purely individualistic community is a logical impossibility—but Christof’s artificial one does. Whereas George is raised to be selflessly others-centered, Truman confides in his best friend that he has the paranoid feeling that “the world revolves around me”—and no wonder: nothing exists in Seahaven that doesn’t relate to him or maintain his illusions. There is no elevator in one of the buildings downtown because there are no upstairs businesses or apartments for Truman to visit. There is no trained surgeon in the hospital because Truman doesn’t need surgery. Cars round the blocks in predictable perpetual cycles because their drivers have nowhere else to go. In other words, there are no other stories being told on the show. This is another reason even Truman’s mother, wife, and best friend are so phony and hollow: they have no character development. As soon as Truman leaves the room they cease to exist. They hardly qualify as individuals since they have no individuality. Ironically, Truman feels isolated and alienated in Seahaven because Christof has ordered everything to make him feel like he is the essential member—whereas George is only an essential member—of the community. Seahaven is a dome of inward-facing mirrors showing Truman nothing but himself.
Second, in designing the community in such a way that its only purpose is to meet all of Truman’s needs and wants (except his need and want to leave), Christof assumes the highest good in life is comfort. As quoted earlier, Christof claims to “have given Truman the chance to lead a normal life.” What is meant by “normal” becomes clearer when he tells Truman, “In my world, you have nothing to fear.” This is a world where Truman should have nothing to worry about, nothing to be threatened by, nothing to cause him discomfort. Truman has no nemesis equivalent to Mr. Potter. Unlike Bedford Falls, Seahaven is not under constant threat from a greedy man who wants to buy up every property and reduce everyone to serfdom (because Christof is Mr. Potter and already owns everything and everyone). The worst thing that could happen to Truman is a workplace or relationship dramedy that has the easy resolution of a sitcom episode. But the pursuit of comfort and the avoidance of discomfort stunts character—Truman is a childish figure, because he has always been coddled—and it stunts community. What Christof doesn’t understand is that Bedford Falls is a model town because of its virtuous citizens, and that their virtues arose from adversity: the poverty of the Great Depression, the sacrifices of the Second World War, the years of resistance against Mr. Potter. Because Seahaven is devoid of real trials and thus also of real triumphs, it is inherently unable to produce the kind of neighbors who, as in the final scene of It’s a Wonderful Life, would give up their life savings to clear one man’s debts.
Third, reinforcing its individualism and single-minded pursuit of comfort, Christof’s community is defined by consumerism. The massively-expensive show is supported not by commercial breaks but by ubiquitous product placement and viewers who shop from a Truman Show catalogue. But because viewers only see and hear whatever Truman sees and hears, Truman is the first audience for every advertisement, and so from infancy he has been aggressively evangelized with the message of mammon: the good life of individualized comfort is obtained by accumulating more and more stuff. This materialism is toxic to community when it spills over into instrumental views of institutions and people: churches, clubs, and even friends and family members come to exist only to provide goods and services, which makes them interchangeable with other providers. Just as Truman is prodded to upgrade appliances and switch cocoa brands, the producers start to nudge him toward a new love interest at the office when the marriage with Meryl gets rocky. Fortunately, despite a lifetime of conditioning, Truman won’t take the bait. Against all odds, he isn’t the materialist everyone expects him to be. Deep down, he knows the absurdity and emptiness of the Seahaven way of life. He has a hunger for something more that no cup of cocoa or cubicle crush can satisfy.
Surviving Seahaven
The Truman Show, then, suggests how the American ethos of individualism, comfort, and consumerism is antithetical to true community. Unlike Truman, we aren’t compelled to stay anywhere, but in our individualism we are accustomed to going anywhere we want to actualize ourselves. As Alan Noble notes in his new book You Are Not Your Own, “Our contemporary anthropology tends to make us think of our surroundings as tools for self-development or improvement. If we are our own, then the natural world and the architecture of a city are valuable only if I can use them to get ahead.” The whole world does not bend over backward for our comfort as it does for Truman’s, but with all our conveniences and upgrades, we so easily slip into expecting that it should. While we may not live in a surveillance state like Truman does, we now have a kind of consumer surveillance that manifests itself through creepily-clairvoyant targeted ads. The corporations know us almost as well as the corporation that owns Truman knows him. And we are told essentially the same lie that Truman hears every day, that this is all there is; there is nothing better to be found anywhere else. We have internalized an impoverished, falsified account of the good life and the good community like the one given on Christof’s show, and we exist within an infrastructure that, like his Seahaven, is built to maintain the illusory plausibility of that account. While Truman can finally escape Seahaven, the challenge for us is that, thanks to the smart phone and social media, Amazon and the algorithm (among other culprits), we all live in Seahaven now and leaving is very nearly impossible. But instead of withdrawing or trying like Christof to make a utopia hermetically sealed off from the dysfunction of the rest of the world, we will have to seek better ways to live in community while remaining in a system rigged against it. To quote Noble’s book again, from a passage drawing on Jacques Ellul, “for the most part the answer to the [spirit of the] city is found in millions of tiny decisions to live faithfully even while living in the city.”
How do we do this? For one thing, we shouldn’t take any one healthy community that inspires us and turn it into the normative, prescriptive model for our own community-building efforts. For example, if like Christof your only model for community is It’s a Wonderful Life, you might think that small towns are always preferable to cities, or that it’s never right to leave your community, no matter how abusive it gets. I don’t think director Peter Weir and screenwriter Andrew Niccol are condemning the localist vision of It’s a Wonderful Life by parodying it in The Truman Show. Rather, they are providing a necessary qualification: If the people of the fabled Small Town, U.S.A. aren’t as neighborly and virtuous as they are in Bedford Falls—if they are actually just covering manipulation and materialism under a veneer of niceness as they do in Seahaven—then that town is not a heaven on earth, but a hell, and maybe you should get the heck out of there.
No community is consistently and comprehensively good enough to be emulated uncritically. No ideal vision of community is expansive or sharp enough to see all the subtle forces that either drain or sustain it; each one has its blindspots. We will need more than one model or vision, which is one reason why, in a sequel to this essay, I will consider the contributions a third film can make to our understanding of community.
But before moving on from the community model of It’s a Wonderful Life and the nightmare vision of its distortion in The Truman Show, I’ll point out one more thing: we need to recognize, as the former film does, that community is a gift from God. I’ve rattled off a number of problems with Christof’s community—its dependence on coercion, falsehood, and surveillance; its ideology of individualism, comfort, and consumerism; its reliance on only one model—but the most serious one has been hiding in plain sight ever since I noted that Christof usurps God and that he doesn’t understand the spiritual foundations that hold community together. It’s a Wonderful Life opens with a community praying to God. The Truman Show opens with Christof talking about his own accomplishment. While there are many things we are able and accountable to do to help a community survive and thrive, we cannot give it life. Indeed, Christof’s attempts to breathe life into Seahaven only choke it. If we are earnest about seeing our communities flourish, we will have to come to the end of ourselves, and of our strategies for parenting or teaching or church growth or civic engagement or whatever it may be, and concede that community was never in our control.
There is a classic comic by Sidney Harris in which two mathematicians are staring at a complex equation on a blackboard. In the middle of the equation are the words, “THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS…” Community is the same way. We can identify many of the variables that add to or subtract from it, but what makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts remains a mystery to us. As the Apostle Paul wrote, one person plants and another person waters, but God gives the growth. In It’s a Wonderful Life, God is portrayed working through ministering angels to providentially guide George and his neighbors toward their individual and common good. Unlike in The Truman Show, there are no technocrats micromanaging everything, only ordinary people doing their best to act justly and love mercy while calling on God to do what they cannot. As a friend put it so well, “Christof is trying to make It’s a Wonderful Life. George Bailey has a wonderful life.” And that, I would add, is all by the grace of God.
[For the sequel to this essay, in which I put It’s a Wonderful Life and The Truman Show in dialogue with The Terminal to further develop this meditation on community, click here.]