Truman cont.

Truman Show
Consumerism:
Postmodern culture is our obsession with buying and consuming.
Consumerism- superficial need to buy with the assumption that it’ll make us better in some way.

Product placement in Truman Show. Through the use of product placement, consumerism has found a voice in popular culture. Within the Truman Show, the narrative is littered with messages urging us to buy. This can also be seen in other contemporary media texts. (e.g. jessie j price tag)

Truman’s most significant and most mundane moments are consistently linked to brands.

TV was turned off at midnight years ago, the internet was rarely used. Watch anything online- pop ups appear. = the postmodern condition. Branding infiltrates our everyday lives. With the growth of new media technology, consumerism has increased. Our ability to consume is greater than ever. Our postmodern condition is almost confined by consumerism. The future of consumerism? Increase.

In today’s postmodern society, there are more platforms for consumerism. Truman’s simulacrum of friends and family express the benefits of various consumer products to the audience while simultaneously playing their roles in Truman’s life, exaggerating the importance of the products and making the audience believe that the products will make them better in someway. The film’s explicit message is a bleak one, it claims that we cannot escape from the consumer society that surrounds us. It not only shapes our identity, but controls us. The product placement show that the show was funded by advertising.

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap1002/truman.htm

Baudrillard notes that consumerism has developed through three stages:

The use value- the object’s use
The Exchange Value- trading objects for money or other objects
The Sign Value- the image and identity it presents to others

Personalised Number Plates- pointless consumer products that people want .

Fight Club comments upon the trappings of contemporary consumer culture. Baudrillard agues that modern consumerism has placed us within an intricate sign system, whereby we gain an understand of others as as our place within society by the objects we own. Therefore, we no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials. “The media spectacle has handed us the script and stage to perform our lives upon”- Baudrillard

Another prime theme within the truman show resulting from its hyperreal construct, are the fake memories which create Truman’s simulated sense of self. Artifical memories are a reoccurring texts that explore postmodern issues. (BE Right Back- Ashe’s memories are that of the online words he’s said). In the same way as Fight Club, Be Right Back explores the notion of: ‘a copy of a copy of a copy’. Presenting the notion that one’s sense of identity is merely a fabrication when excsiting within a hyperreal realm.

Existential Crisis

False nostaligia- werther’s originals as a child. The media creates fake memories that never really exsisted- e.g. having a werther’s originals as a child.