The illusion of freedom. The Truman Show as a heterotopic panopticon

Sylwia Zazulak

Uniwersytet Śląski
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0311-2545


Abstract

The article The illusion of freedom. “The Truman Show” as a heterotopic panopticon presents Seahaven from Peter Weir’s The Truman Show as a structure modeled on the panopticon in the mind of Jeremy Bentham and the heterotopia described by Michel Foucault. The main goal of the text is to provide evidence for such a construction of a town and to present the meaning that this evidence carries. The subject of the analysis is the world presented in The Truman Show, in which two spaces are compared: an artificially created town – the place of the show, and the space outside the studio, from which the title program is watched by viewers from around the world. The entirety is compared to the non-film reality, taking into account social fears caused by the rapid development of media and technology at the turn of the century.


Keywords:

heterotopy, panopticon, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham, The Truman Show


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Published
2021-09-15

Cited by

Zazulak, S. (2021). The illusion of freedom. The Truman Show as a heterotopic panopticon. Media - Culture - Social Communication, (17). https://doi.org/10.31648/mkks.6122

Sylwia Zazulak 
Uniwersytet Śląski
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0311-2545