[ExI] [The Truman Show

[Damien Broderick]

On 7/14/2010 12:32 AM, spike wrote:

>   Did you guys see The Truman Show?  If not, get it and view it.  I feel
> like Truman, when he has spotted something really weird and can't
> explain it.
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/plotsummary
>
> Truman Show is my favorite movie, and very relevant to this discussion.

If only you'd read Phil Dick's brilliant novel TIME OUT OF JOINT, as I 
did when I was 15. Now it's been stolen by TRUMAN and other ripoffs 
perhaps the ontological shock has lost its value.

In a study of sf semiotics, I mentioned

< the bleak, utterly unpretentious prose of Dick's TIME OUT OF JOINT. 
The ontologically devastating fact to keep in mind through this passage 
is that luckless Ragle Gumm's experience is not a metaphor, not a 
psychotic hallucination. This is the stuff of his being-in-the-world. It 
is a postulate possible only in an sf text, the concretisation of what 
elsewhere, even in the postmodern, would almost inevitably have to be 
read as figurative:

	Reaching around in his pockets, he found some change. A line of kids 
waited at the soft-drink stand; the kids were buying hot dogs and 
popsicles and Eskimo Pies and orange drink. He joined them.
	How quiet everything was.
	Stunning desolation washed over him. What a waste his life had been....
  	The soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, 
colourless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, 
into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky. He 
saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter 
man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for 
Coke and root beer,....
	In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold 
of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters.

	SOFT-DRINK STAND >

That was a moment to tear the top of your head off in 1960.

Damien Broderick