Similarities Between The Truman Show And Plato's Cave

Truman’s Cave
Charlie Wellman What is reality? We believe that what we see and what we experience is our reality, but what if one day all the sights, sounds and memories are taken away? Imagine tomorrow someone comes to you and tells you that everything you perceive as reality is false. Do you believe them? It seems crazy or scary but an even scarier idea to think about, what if they could prove it? About two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher, Plato, had an idea about how reality is perceived based on ones surroundings. If you know one thing your whole life, you grasp what you know even when it is challenged by people who have shared the same reality. More recently this concept has been revisited in the movie “The Truman Show.” It’s incredible that an idea from two thousand years ago can still have mankind interested. Prisoners chained at the neck, unable to move their heads. They have been there their entire lives, reality consists of darkness, shadows and sounds from the fire at the end of the cave. One day a man comes in and takes a prisoner from the cave to show him the outside world, which
Truman is a prisoner and perceives the actors around him as his reality just as the prisoners think the shadows are reality. In the movie Truman falls in love with a woman named Lauren, who does what she can to hint at the idea that Truman is living in a false reality. There is also a part in the movie where someone parachutes down from the sky with a “Free Truman” sign. Both of these characters can be related to the one prisoner that came back to tell the others about the outside world. Instead of being beat to death, these characters were forcefully removed by security. The director, Christof, can be related to the liberator that freed one of the prisoners because he controls what Truman thinks as reality. Just as the liberator controlled when and what prisoner was able to experience