Windows Imply Doors

The Truman Show and a world beyond our own

This article is part of the Claritas spring 2023 issue, Love. Read the full print release here.

By: DAVID JOHNSON

Jamming My Keys

Acting quickly, I jammed my car key into the ignition and attempted to turn it. It didn’t budge. Assuming it was a fluke, I pulled the key out, rotated it 180 degrees, and tried again. Still no luck.

I was eager to return to campus, Lev Kitchen order in hand, but something was inexplicably awry. I fiddled with the key, attempting different orientations and insertion techniques to no avail. Eventually, I exited the car. Everyone knows that it’s dangerous to be distracted behind the wheel, even while stationary in the True Insurance parking lot.

Once outside the car, my issue became immediately apparent: I had entered a stranger’s vehicle—an identical Volvo Sedan of the exact same make.

Befuddlement was rapidly replaced with laughter. I took a video of the two Volvos, separated by just two other cars, and sent it to a few friends and my family’s group chat.

My sister pointed out that the other Volvo wasn’t exactly the same: it had dark brown seats whereas ours had tan seats. How on earth did I not realize this sooner?!

I felt disoriented, but ironically I was finally properly oriented—which is, I imagine, how Truman Burbank felt upon exiting his little “bubble” in The Truman Show, the popular 1998 film starring Jim Carrey.

Truman, The True Man

Truman Burbank was, unbeknownst to himself, the main character in a TV show that followed every intricate detail of his life. Everything in his life— each beer shared with a friend, each successful insurance sale, each moment spent in seeming solitude—was carefully crafted by the show’s executive director, Christof.

When Truman eventually falls in love with Sylvia (whose set name is Lauren), Christof’s command over Truman’s life is threatened for the first time. Anxious to regain control, he removes Sylvia from the TV set because, as far as Truman is told, her family is moving to Fiji. Impassioned by love, Truman attempts to track her down. In doing so, he eventually escapes the set of The Truman Show. Retrospectively, he understands the lie that he had been told, the lie that he was taught to tell himself: that there was no more to reality than his previously inhabited world.

But how on earth did he not realize this sooner? Why was it that he could only see the truth about his original world from the vantage point of the world he was about to enter?

What if Truman is a representation of everyone—of the so-called “True Man”? Might we also one day discover that the world we inhabit is not the world for which we were made?

Signals of Transcendence

Throughout Truman’s life, there are certain phenomena he cannot explain. His car radio, after mysteriously changing frequency, intercepts a broadcast relaying information about his driving route; a stage light falls from the sky; a small, personal rain cloud follows him around; people walk, bike, and drive in loops around his block; and he encounters a man he believes is his deceased father. Most importantly, Truman develops an unscripted love for Sylvia, which is something he has never truly experienced before.

Even when some justification is given for the phenomena that make him question his surroundings, he is never truly satisfied. Take, for example, the scene where Truman enters a building and realizes that the elevator is a prop—it’s simply a door to another room. Confused, he asks, “What’s happening?” before a security guard, ushering him out of the building, shortly answers, “Nothing.” He asks “what’s happening?” twice more before he is finally thrown out of the building. Truman was getting the idea that there was more to reality than at first appeared.

Austrian American sociologist- theologian Peter Berger termed such experiences, in his book A Rumor of Angels, “signals of transcendence.” He posits that certain things in our earthly lives point towards a grander reality. Through sharing the anecdotes and testimonies of (among others) C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and Malcolm Muggeridge, Berger makes the case that certain human experiences are suggestive of a reality beyond the empirical. These signals traverse the full range of human experience, from play to damnation.

On play, Berger writes, “Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is fully realized, in joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very specific quality—namely, it becomes eternity....This is the final insight of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the midnight song: ‘All joy wills eternity— wills deep, deep eternity!’” [1]

In A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken, as if completing Berger’s thought, shows how this play-induced sense of timelessness points towards the transcendent:

C S. Lewis, in his second letter to me at Oxford, asked how it was that I, as a product of a materialistic universe, was not at home there. “Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures?” Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity.... it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home. [emphasis added] [2]

Truman is consistently corralled to consider the immediate, the time-bound, at the expense of the transcendent. When, in a flashback, we see him tell his school teacher that he wants to be “like the great Magellan,” she quickly snaps that “there’s nothing left to explore.” Christof engineers ways to minimize Truman’s playfulness.

Berger suggests that damnation is also a signal of transcendence. How can the idea of eternal damnation point us to a better world? Berger asks us to consider an egregious, evil act of utter and undeniable injustice. We might imagine a terrorist attack or a school shooting.

Deeds that cry out to heaven also cry out for hell ... No human punishment is ‘enough’ in the case of deeds as monstrous as these. These are deeds that demand not only condemnation, but damnation in the full religious meaning of the word—that is, the doer not only puts himself outside the community of men; he also separates himself in a final way from a moral order that transcends the human community, and thus invokes a retribution that is more than human. [3]

Again, consider the way Christof commandeers Truman’s life, abuses him for television, and even attempts to drown him. At the end of the film, we are not content to watch this villain walk free. We yearn. #JusticeForTruman. If, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” [4] then it bends also towards the Supreme Adjudicator.

Truman asks his friend, “You ever think about that, Merlon? That your whole life has been building towards something?” This “something” to which Truman’s life builds is the grander world. And so it is with us. Signals of transcendence point us towards a better world that is yet to come.

Because He First Loved Us

Comparing Truman’s predicament to our earth-bound lives raises a serious question: If Truman is the True Man, is Christof representative of Christ?

Taking the film cynically, we are tempted to equate the two authority figures, but this could not be further from the truth. Whereas Christof attempts to limit the transcendent from entering Truman’s life, God breathes Himself into the world around us so that we might see Him in all things. In fact, Truman discovers the “grand beyond” precisely because God’s created order is more fundamental to the world—even to Truman’s world—than Christof’s attempted disruption.

While signals of transcendence are universal to the human experience, their form and presentation differ dramatically. Consider yourself: different people know you in contrasting but non-contradictory ways. Some people know me as a friend, two parents know me as a son, four sisters know me as a brother, you know me as some dorky Claritas writer ... the list goes on. No two perspectives are identical. Likewise, God discloses different parts of his being with each person. Some are drawn to beauty and aesthetics, others are inspired by human relationships and interactions, and still others— the transcendental naturalists—are moved by the trees, the stars, and the dandelions. Every encounter with the transcendent helps us build an ever- so-slightly more complete, yet still irrevocably incomplete, perception of God’s character.

C.S. Lewis, in Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, explains how our earthly experiences can help us grow to know God better: “Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” [5]

God, as an outpouring of His love, reveals himself to us through signals of transcendence, inviting us to enter into a deeper relationship with Him. Unlike Christof, who was “forced to manufacture ways to keep [Truman] on the island,” God designs ways for us to discover Him through “patches of Godlight.” The Spirit of God hovers not only over the face of the waters [6], but also on the faces of the jury carrying out justice and the faces of the clocks which make us yearn for timelessness.

Window Seeking as Inhabited Love

Experiences like this—experiences that spur metaphysical hunger pains—are windows to another world. And just like sunlight, Godlight shines through these windows and appears different from each and every angle, which means a new perspective lies a few steps away. If only we would pay close attention to the way the light falls, we might realize that windows imply doors.

Unfortunately, however, we are our own Christof. We manufacture distractions at every turn. Our overbooked schedules, both academically and socially, force us to walk inevitably towards the next commitment, never picking up our heads to take in the world around us. And if we never move our heads, as Plato writes, “How [can we] see anything but the shadows” of our cave? [7]

Beyond scheduling, we focus on the future at the expense of the present and we’re seldom without our attention- seeking electronic devices. In each example of self-distraction, we put up barriers between us and anything—and Anybody—beyond the material.

Discarding these distractions would have serious ramifications: we might miss out on college excitement, become less attractive to employers, or not receive an urgent text. But what, you ask, would we stand to gain? What if we picked up our heads and paid attention to the world around us? What if we stopped jamming our car keys into the ignition and tuned our radios to the mysterious frequency of the transcendent?

English journalist, writer, and literary critic G.K Chesterton writes, “I am the first that ever saw in the world. Prophets and sages there have been, out of whose great hearts came schools and churches. But I am the first that ever saw a dandelion as it is.” [8] What would it take to see our dandelions as they are? What would it take to finally love the world through seeking windows?

Last spring, I climbed a tree on the Arts Quad. Peering from my perch, I observed students hurrying ever forward: phone on, earbuds in, walking inevitably. I laid stomach-down on a wide branch, suspended with time above. It reminded me of my early childhood, when I used to climb on my father’s arms, back, and shoulders. I had to remind myself that reality was otherwise. And then I had to remind myself otherwise, again.

This article appeared in Claritas’ spring 2023 Love Issue

Sources

[1], [3] Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels

[2] Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, 203.

[4] Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”

[5] C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer [6] Genesis 1:2

[7] Plato, The Republic.

[8] G.K. Chesterton, A Crazy Tale