Show Don't Tell

“In case I don’t see you again... FUCK YOU!” Isn’t that what the last line of dialogue in The Truman Show should have been?

On the way home yesterday I started thinking of other films like The Golden Compass, that have really deplorable bean-spilling openings. I don’t mean something like Star Wars, whose opening crawl was vital in acknowledging the film’s roots in the old Republic serials, rather the kind of movie where jarring upfront information, slapped onto the beginning of the film, pretty much gives away vital plot information.

It may have been because late in production the studio and/or producers looked at what they had and either lost confidence in the material or in the large proportion of gormless, popcorn-grazing, cinema-audience fucktards being able to figure out what was going on without an introduction rammed with helpful hints. Either way, it makes a jarring start to the movie.


There’s always David Lynch’s Dune to point and laugh at, especially since poor Virginia Madsen, in one of her first film roles, looks like a rabbit in the headlights who would prefer to be repeatedly violated with a potato peeler than continue spouting out

Know then, that it is the year 10,191. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam the Fourth, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space.

Good grief. I went to the press screening at the Empire in Leicester Square for that one and that opening scene just sucked the air right out of the cavernous auditorium before the film had properly begun.

That said, the film that did spring to mind, leapfrogging over everything else, was The Truman Show. If I remember rightly, it starts off with a collection of brief “interview” clips from various participants that effectively ruin any sense of suspense. Then again, since the whole advertising campaign for the movie destroyed any air of mystery, this opening was pretty much the icing on the marketing cake.


Poke around on the internet and an early draft of Andrew Niccol’s script is easily accessible. Obviously it makes for interesting reading. You can understand why, on a practical level, in later drafts the environs of the show changed from New York City to a more manageable coastal town. After all, since Truman Burbank has never seen the real world, there’s no need to recreate such a massive metropolis.

Where this earlier draft works is that, long before the eventual big reveal, it concentrates on the character’s growing unease as he tries to connect the bizarre incidents that simply don’t make sense to him. In this respect it’s a paranoiac’s wet dream and would have certainly been applauded by people who remember the great conspiracy dramas of the 1970s with great affection.

Instead, obviously once Peter Weir came on board it all went decidedly fluffy. Over the course of the revisions, the script got all turned around so the emphasis was on the television show rather than a person realising his life isn’t what he thinks it is. Maybe Weir had problems with the implications of the story as it originally stood.

By the time The Truman Show was released, the audience was already made aware of what the whole damn movie was about. The posters had an image of the sleeping Burbank being shown on a massive fuck-off television with the copy ON THE AIR. UNAWARE. Before they bought their tickets, before they took their seats, before they even started shovelling popcorn into their empty maws, the audience was made complicit.


By casting the rubber-faced maroon Jim Carey, maybe we were supposed to think that the character would get over it because, really, it was just a little bit of fun. Now I can be quite a forgiving person if the situation deserves it, but if I found out my whole life was a complete fabrication, that everyone I thought dear to me had lied to me, every day that I had known them, purely for entertainment... I would go absolutely fucking postal!

But then I guess it depends on how you look at things.

Anyway, that’s the movie where I think the studio really bottled it. If you can think of one leave a message, Meanwhile I’ll be out buying Glaser Safety Slugs, just in case.