The Druman Show

I'm watching The Truman Show on TNT, and I think it's a very underrated movie. And, I'll be honest, with the way TV is going these days, I think The Truman Show was way ahead of its time. And if the movie hadn't come out, I bet we would've already had a similar show on television. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if we still see it.

And I think the movie pretty much paints out exactly the way a show like that would've worked out. The writers can set up a plotline for a man's life, putting great friends and a pretty girl in his way, but the man is going to look for his own path. And even though the writers have done everything they can to make his life easy (great best friend, beautiful loving wife, nice town, good job), Truman doesn't want to take the easy path.

From his teenage years, he goes after a different girl. And that's where his life alters off the writers' path - he marries the girl they want him to marry...but he spends most of his time trying to find the one that got away. The writers did everything they could to discourage leaving the town (making him afraid of bridges and water and flying), but he spends all of his free time trying to get away.

And I wonder if that's how God works too. If he sets out this nice little plan for us to have an easy life, and if we stubbornly try to make our own path. As if we have some sort of built-in system where we don't want to take the easy path because it'd be "too easy."

Because my roommate Ashley and I have a funny little story where, after we die, we get to Heaven, and the first thing God says to us is "what the Hell?" We don't know what he's talking about, and God tells us, "you could've been the greatest swimmer in the world! Why didn't you swim?"

And we'd look at him, confusion in our faces, and ask him why he didn't put any signs to tell us to swim. "I put millions of signs," God would say. "Each one more obvious than the next, and you still ignored them."


And that's the kind of stuff I wonder about - the people I meet but brush off who could've been great friends. The girls I never talked to that could've been the love of my life. I think we all like to think that, if something is supposed to happen that it will. But what if that's not the way the world works? What if, like Truman, we set off on our own path even if the one that's set for us is the one we're supposed to go down?

I'm probably reading too much into this movie, and I'm not even hitting on the primary theme (that we don't always accept the world we're given).

And there's times when I wonder about that too - whether my life is one big TV show. The scene where Truman drives around that circle, and every street is full of traffic blocking his way? I feel like that sometimes. There are times when people will act a certain way, and I wonder if they're simply playing a part or reading a script. And there are times when I feel like the world knows my deepest and darkest secrets because they all saw them revealed on an old rerun of my show.

But then I think about it, and I realize that my show would've been cancelled a long time ago. Because, in the end, I think my life would be extremely boring to watch. No one would sit and watch me "work" for eight hours - no one would want to watch me play video games or watch TV - and no one would want to watch me write this blog. So, in the end, I think my life is just too boring to be a television show.

Unless that's what the writers want me to think...