Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Let me tell you a story.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a “master-planned community,” constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don’t exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
The non-rebloggable post is a genuine competitive edge Tumblr has over a lot of other social media, but I think we’ve had it for just long enough for the practice to have its own etiquette and assumptions. The non-rebloggable post could mean a lot of things, or it could mean nothing. Here are some things it could mean:
-The poster wanted to limit the audience to people who are more likely to take it in good faith. If you follow me, you have a good sense of what I tend to believe and say. If I say something completely out of character, people more familiar with me will understand it’s probably sarcastic, or I meant it in a different way than they read it.
-Their thoughts on the subject are incomplete or undecided. You might ask, why post at that point? It’s often to solicit feedback–basically, the exact opposite of any notion that privacy is about “shielding yourself from critique.” If I’m undecided about something, I would rather “open the floor to discussion” than let who knows how many people reblog and cosign something I’m prepared to change my mind about.
-The poster just has a hunch it won’t be taken well. Once you age out of your teenage years you realize that’s not necessarily their own fault or a moral failure.
-It’s a personal post. Everyone deserves privacy, but if you have any amount of followers you know that people will decide they hate you and leverage your vulnerabilities against you, or others will let you know that your personal struggles remind them of their favorite Blorbo.
-It’s to protect someone else from being harassed. I’ve screenshot posts I take issue with, often cropping out URLs, but I know if a post spreads far enough people will start tracking down that person to get in their own piece. Stay out of it.
I don’t want to see anyone pester about the moral implications or “paranoia” behind strangers on the internet taking steps to preserve their image and their sanity. Tumblr clout is useless. If anything it’s a liability. Bloggers you don’t like are not powerful celebrities who need to be taken down a peg.
*possible incidents may include: chaos mutation, wish granting, regular mutation, shapeshifting gone wrong, combining your dead dream-self with your omniscient, faceless, green-flickering pet and then recombining upon apotheosis, surgical modification, and HRT
addition: you may get random additional features such as claws, insectile wings, feathers, tapetum lucidum, nictating membrane, scales, animalistic behavior, shells, and many other!
“but if you’re pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?” because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don’t bother me with stupid questions.
why is this site trying to become twitter. why must everything i love die
(every CEO in the last 5 years for some reason) hmmm today i will catastrophically mismanage my company to the fullest most embarrassing extent imaginable
