How Does The Fictional Town Of Seahaven Presented To The Audience In "The Truman show" represent the American Dream

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English                                                                                                                       Kiri Rai 10H

                  How Does The Fictional Town Of Seahaven              

                     Presented To The Audience In

                            “The Truman show”

   The fictional town of Seahaven is presented to the audience as an American dream, through the life of Truman. Wier presents the fictional theme using various ideas. In this essay I’m going to explore the ideas and see how they are presented to the audience.

   At the beginning of the film, the theme of the “American Dream” is really shown. The first shots of Seahaven show how perfect Truman’s life is. This is done by presentational devices. In the beginning the setting establishes how perfect the town of Seahaven is. In a mise en scene we see the whole town of Seahaven and it doesn’t appear to the audience as a set. We see the setting as bright and clean with no traffic or pollution making the town unattractive. We can see this properly in the first appearance of Truman in the first scene. He walks off from his tidy house and garden to his car where he passes a family that are typically perfect. They are stereotyped to the American dream with a traditional wife, husband and sweet young daughter. They are there to keep the faultless running in Truman’s happy life plus it can reflect back to the audience of how his life is just like the American dream.

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   The beginning is also a good example of how the director uses presentational devices to show us that Seahaven is also a TV set. At the opening Seahaven is immediately presented to the audience as a reality TV show. An example of this is when Truman on leaves the house. The cameras follow him and zoom up giving us a sense that he is under surveillance. A technique they use is making the camera move up and down in a jerky movement giving the audience a feel of CCTV being used. They also link all the cameras together giving ...

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