Hacker Cinema
The Truman Show
1998 · Film · 103 min
Directed by Peter Weir
In a picture-perfect seaside town, an insurance salesman begins to realize that his entire existence may be staged and observed by a vast unseen audience as part of a long-running real-time reality TV show.
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72 comments on Hacker News
If it's like the commercials in the movie the Truman show I think this could be a nightmare.
I think it all boils down to how (if?) this will be transparent to the user.
If the response suggests a sponsored product/service to the user it could either be the specific product/service that ChatGPT is biased to suggest or the whole idea of using a product/service. As a user I would like to know both of these biases to understand that using any product/service for my need might not even be the best thing.
TFA:
> We’ve seen this movie before.
...which one? 1984? The Terminator? The Truman Show? The Matrix? Minority Report? The Social Network?
I imagined truman show / scenes from truman show where they show ads from your last line.
Spoiler alert if you haven't watched truman
But That is incredibly uncanny and I think this is the reason why, I think truman must have caught what's happening and also I saw this youtube video trying to explain that truman knew about the show the whole time and the scene and the time he was digging dirt in the first scenes of the movie, he was actually digging his escape route.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mCXYfv-URg
Consider this: In the movie, the Truman show: Truman is living on a giant hollwyood soundtage with thousands upon thousands of cameras following his every move allowing the TV Audience to subjectively experience his life - his life is writ large on the minds of billions of people- but it is only one life.
Now imagine instead- If the Universe is conscious, instead of that being one big conscious observer looking down; perhaps instead we (each of us humans, animals etc as life act as living observers) living our first person subjective perspectives like a multitude of cameras for the universe to experience itself on Earth
And we can imagine that happening at all scales simultaneously across all living worlds and other forms of mind throughout the cosmos, ie consciousness as first person observers might be as innumerable as the number of stars in the sky, and these living perspectives or subjective cameras are dotting the whole immensity all unify to provide the universe with an eye on itself in infinite perspective ..
Doesn't that make up for humans being puny tiny lifespans - we (our insignificant bodies) are just disposable cameras for consciousness
> I also hate just about all Jim Carrey films (except maybe the Truman Show) but many other people seem to love them. Perhaps Sora just isn't for me.
What do you think about Cable Guy? It is essentially a somewhat social realist movie about the total nightmare of having a typical Jim Carrey character in your life. You might like it.
Agent Smith is 1/3 of Trinity. C'mon, that's right in the face.
In the flanking symbolism (three figures, a central one flanked by two others), Trinity represents the flanking formation itself.
Agent Smith represents one of the flanking figures that disconnects from the main formation. He's basically Furiosa.
Similar flanking trios are seen in Star Wars (Han, Leia, Luke), Starship Troopers (Rico, Carmen, Carl).
Somehow, it also alludes to the popular trope of "protagonist, girlfriend, best friend" seen in many popular movies, and dissected in The Truman Show.
This has nothing to do with AI agents. Some of those ideas go back millenia in the past.
I think the writers were high as fuck and thought that we computer people see this as "the operating system of society" or something (because they're full of bullshit just like that).
1) God damn that movie is so good.
2) I think part of why it stands out so much is that there are incredibly few excellently-made age of sail war films. A few of the black & white and early color era ones are pretty good (The Sea Hawk and such) but those are pretty different in tone. Master and Commander is very nearly unique. You have to switch over to sci fi (Star Trek, maybe Forbidden Planet) to scratch a similar itch. If you want specifically age of sail, with that structure and tone (war, edge-of-civilization exploration with a ship), your options are very limited.
3) I have discovered only very-belatedly that Peter Weir is one of my favorite directors. I had no idea for the longest time that the same guy did The Mosquito Coast, Master and Commander, The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, Witness, and The Truman Show. Dude just knocked out one quietly-great movie after another, across multiple genres. I've gone back and picked up some others (Gallipoli, The Cars that Ate Paris) and have yet to be disappointed. The remainder of his all-too-short catalogue is high up my to-watch list. I've seen zero duds from him so far.
I watched a "reaction video" to The Truman Show recently where the hosts were wholly unfamiliar with the movie beyond Jim Carrey. They focused on the cruelty of faking the family, relationship, and community around him. The film also shows that acting wasn't enough, and the corporation/creator essentially "cheat" to keep him from leaving and being his own person. So you can see that part of the movie without thinking it's no big deal in social media world.
I also watched a channel which uploaded daily vlogs during 2020, and the person said that as a kid she wondered if The Truman Show could be real and happening to her. And now she sort of created it for herself? Something to think about.
Funny, I don't see it as being prescient or having parallels at all.
The Truman Show is the story of a man thinking he lives in the real world (he is not aware of being a star and has no desire to be one), and discovering his world is actually a TV show set. And whether he will choose to escape his entire gaslit "reality".
I don't really see what it has to do with Donald Trump or TikTok. That aspect of the modern world is about people wanting to be stars. While The Truman Show was about the exact opposite of that.
Sure they both involve reality TV, but I don't really see anything "prescient" about the movie. I do wonder if it was a little bit of inspiration for last year's Jury Duty [1] though...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_Duty_(2023_TV_series)
Kind of strange not to comment on the absurdly prescient film that provides the title of the book in review: Peter Weir’s The Truman Show.
It’s fair to say that reality TV and its tropes were not unknown when the film premiered in 1998, but they were seen as an MTV novelty. The Truman Show made what was essentially a metaphysical argument about being the star of your own life that has stood the test of time and then some.
I do wonder sometimes what a 20yo today steeped in the world of TikTok, Only Fans, and Donald Trump would think of Truman—as someone that age when it was released I can say it seemed fantastic. If we only knew!
How will it end?
- The Thin Red Line.
The narative structure is hard to get the first time you watch the movie, but once you get it, it can change the way you see (the/our) nature.
- The Secret of NIMH.
Saw it the first time at 4 or 5 and was in awe, but it tooks several more years to understand it fully.
- The Truman Show.
It's basically my life.
- Akira.
No particular reason, except it's the first Manga which gets international recognition and propulsed the industry in the grown-up domain.
I think Gattaca is also fascinating for its freshman part in Andrew Niccol's opening "trilogy" as writer (and mostly director). More people remember the sophomore work The Truman Show (in part perhaps because it was the film that Niccol didn't direct), and Simone is mostly forgettable but still worth mentioning in the way it sort of caps the "trilogy".
I think that bittersweet hopefulness and a sense of lightness (humor) in the dystopian darkness of that opening "trilogy" is partly what Niccol seems to have lost as his career has progressed from those first three efforts. It's possible to even blame Simone's critical failure for that, he leaned harder into the humor and got burnt at the box office and maybe over-corrected too hard back to even grimmer, more bland, and more action focused movies. Hard to blame someone doing what sells, but interesting to miss the weirdness and also the bittersweet hope of the opening salvo.
Variations on the this has been done many times, so I wouldn't be surprised. E.g the broader "protagonist lives in a bubble" theme includes The Truman Show, or Brian Aldiss' novel "Nonstop".
As someone else pointed out part of the problem w/how Shyamalan handles it is that too much hinges on the twist in some of his movies.
Are there any doubly (or higher order) nested movies or TV shows? E.g., a movie shown in the background of the Truman Show?
But Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-repeat, in a scenario reminiscent of the film “Groundhog Day.”
A long-distance glitch The mission team first noticed the issue November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, like it was trapped in a loop
Poor little guy voyager! must’ve hit the age of our little historical diorama. Very Truman show.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
> They made a mistake and got too greedy and make a subscription I barely paid attention to something that got too expensive...
That's the thing, in the past I I'd go months without watching anything on Netflix yet still pay them for it, so they were essentially getting a free $8 a month (or whatever) off me during that time.
Now the prices have gone up so much it doesn't make sense to keep subscribed for something I'm barely using, just so I can easily watch a single show that interests me once every three months or so.
The only streaming service that has makes some sense for me to pay for right now is Youtube's, since that's my goto for videos anyway, and it's nice not to have ads for those.
Additionally they also have a bunch of great older movies free to watch movies on Youtube, probably a better selection (of movies I care about) than Netflix right now (saw/rewatched Train to Busan, Little Shop of Horrors, Ghostbusters, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tropic Thunder, Fifth Element, Big Trouble in Little China, Dr. Strangelove, 12 Angry Men, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, The Truman Show, Air Force One, Dirty Work, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It recently).
I know someone who had a lesser but similar episode after taking shrooms for the first time. It was about a week of paranoid delusions (The Truman Show came up a few times). After he snapped out of it, he totally turned his life around; went from a very phlegmatic personality to totally type A, got his degree, and now owns several businesses. The human brain is just so complex.
Have you ever seen The Truman show ? Your comment reminds me of that movie.
I said that I want to visit. Not stay forever.
On the other hand, I’m not sure what it is but people seem to always have to point this same thing out. Actually seems like it’s a more common thing to say nowadays. It comes across as insecurity to me.
“You wouldn’t want to go back to simpler times they are just awful, run along now…”
I grew up around my great grandparents and grandparents. I never heard them say anything horrible about the past. I heard a lot of beautiful things though.
With the heavy focus on product / brand promotion and celebrities, it feels more like that movie The Truman Show.
Just like the Truman Show movie, I have always felt it's a bit underappreciated. So many great performances in that beautifully shot movie and such an emotional roller coaster. Although in many aspects a totally different type of movie, I think Uncut Gems was the first one since I watched Magnolia that touched me in similar ways. And just like with these other movies, it really changed my view of Adam Sandler.
> But Truman is not the story’s true everyman. The people who watch The Truman Show are.
I'm by no means a movie buff but I thought this was kind of obvious.
Before watching the Truman Show I actively avoided Jim Carrey movies because I really disliked his over the top acting. Just like in your case, this movie completely changed my view of Jim Carrey, even the performances in previous movies that I had disliked so much. I may even call this my favorite movie of all time.
Btw, Jim Carrey has never won an Academy Award, and neither has The Truman Show, which is quite a shame.
The ending of Truman Show is often considered one of the greatest moments in the history of cinema. It's a really great sequence that also stayed with me since then. I was never too much into Carrey acting on comedic roles, but I really like his dramatic ones.
There is this movie called 'The Truman Show', the ending is what comes to mind here.
It seems the part that is missing in the 1984 novel and Truman Show kind of films: you can build an entire reality and you know that but it is impossible to differentiate from the real thing. The two are simultaneous. It is more schizophrenic that dictatorial.
You should worry about everything you interact with, not just text on some small Internet forum. After all, you could be the star of your own reality-tv Truman Show, and everything you see is made up for the benefit of a TV show that you're the star of, but aren't privity to? How do you know your mom and dad aren't just hired actors along with all the people you interact with? Maybe I'm secretly being paid by producers of a TV show to write this comment to provoke you into discovering the truth of your existence for the season finale?
And Truman Show! Epic soundtrack. Also Jane (documentary on Goodall), which is almost a reworking of the Mishima music.. extremely similar, but I still found it to be vibrant and fresh.
Also if you listen to The Truman Show main theme, you may find that it sounds very similar to The Leftovers main theme. I’m quite certain that Richter must have borrowed elements from it.
After watching some of the congressional hearings yesterday and reading some of the news coverage, I can't wrap my head around how anyone can take this seriously anymore - it feels like I am living in a simulation, or a movie of some sort like The Truman Show.
I think what has enabled this must be something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor
The boiling frog story is generally offered as a metaphor cautioning people to be aware of even gradual change lest they suffer eventual undesirable consequences. It may be invoked in support of a slippery slope argument as a caution against creeping normality. It is also used in business to reinforce that change needs to be gradual to be accepted.[6] The term "boiling frog syndrome" is a metaphor used to describe the failure to act against a problematic situation which will increase in severity until reaching catastrophic proportions.[7] It thereby encapsulates the barely noticeable impact of slow environmental degradation that has been described by Daniel Pauly as shifting baselines.[8]
The story has been retold many times and used to illustrate widely varying viewpoints: in 1960 about warning against those who are sympathetic towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War;[9] in 1980 about the impending collapse of civilization anticipated by survivalists;[10] in the 1990s about inaction in response to climate change and staying in abusive relationships.[11][12] It has also been used by libertarians to warn about the slow erosion of civil liberties.[6]
In the 1996 novel The Story of B, environmentalist author Daniel Quinn spends a chapter on the metaphor of the boiling frog, using it to describe human history, population growth and food surplus.[13] Pierce Brosnan's character Harry Dalton mentioned it in the 1997 disaster movie Dante's Peak in reference to the accumulating warning signs of the volcano's reawakening.[14] Al Gore used a version of the story in a New York Times op-ed,[15] in his presentations and the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth to describe ignorance about global warming. In the movie version the frog is rescued before it is harmed.[16] This use of the story was referenced by writer/director Jon Cooksey in the title of his 2010 comedic documentary How to Boil a Frog.[17]
Law professor and legal commentator Eugene Volokh commented in 2003 that regardless of the behavior of real frogs, the boiling frog story is useful as a metaphor, comparing it to the metaphor of an ostrich with its head in the sand.[6] Economics Nobel laureate and New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman used the story as a metaphor in a July 2009 column, while pointing out that real frogs behave differently.[18] Journalist James Fallows has been advocating since 2006 for people to stop retelling the story, describing it as a "stupid canard" and a "myth".[19][20] After Krugman's column appeared, however, he declared "peace on the boiled frog front" and said that using the story is acceptable if the writer points out that it is not literally true.[21]
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
Every kid is different and every parent is different.
At 12, I found most horror movies silly or disgusting rather than horrifying. But ALIEN and ALIENS are both great. A few scenes from THE TERMINATOR were disturbing, but it's a good story and TERMINATOR 2 is very good. PREDATOR wasn't for me at 12, but certainly was at 14.
THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE MARTIAN, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, THE INVENTION OF LYING are all well-made, entertaining, and should be thought-provoking.
Interesting tidbit about the movie: Andrew Niccol, the director, wanted to make The Truman Show, but he couldn't get funding for it without enough of a track record. So instead, he made Gattaca which had a low budget. Its success allowed him to fund The Truman Show.
The movie features the moment of ignition, as a counter-point to Jerome incinerating himself, so we see Vincent is going into space, I guess it's conceivable that for some reason his heart fails shortly after the movie ends but you could say that about any movie. Maybe right after he leaves, Truman drops dead of a heart attack in The Truman Show?
He is the subject of the Lord of War movie by Andrew Niccol, who made Truman Show (gaslighting), Gattaca (eugenics), In Time (immortality), Good Kill (drone pilots) and Anon (privacy/hacking).
Oxygene was part of the sound track for the Peter Weir (Dead Poet's Society, The Truman Show) film Gallipoli (1981); an interesting choice for a movie set in 1915.
This made me look up what Andrew Niccol has been up to since. He had a terrific start to his career, writing and directing Gattaca and also writing The Truman Show.
But since then he seems to have fallen into a slump, directing just a handful of poorly reviewed movies in the span of 26 years. (The exception is Lord of War, which, while not a masterpiece, was quite enjoyable at the time, and has one of the most memorable opening sequences of any movie.)
This also made me think about what people like him do in the time in between. How are they earning a living? Some directors and screenwriters have gaps lasting 5-10 years between each movie they make. Much of the time must be spent trying to get projects off the ground, but who's footing the bill?
Some classify Truman Show as sci fi.
And depends on what you mean by "supernatural". There are many many movies without magic, but with possible future inventions. The category of hard scifi.
Europa report, primer, deep impact, robocop, starship troopers, blade runner, matrix, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, total recall, arrival, Jurassic Park, the man from earth, ...
But yeah, Gattaca is still my favourite movie.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
First, he said that it "felt like the people at the Gap knew about the school shooting that Matthew McConaughey was talking about before it even happened", comparing it to the movie _The Truman Show_. In response to Carlson's request for clarification he does say "I'm not saying that they did" but he clearly doesn't rule it out, either.
Second, it's not clear what statement by The Gap he's talking about, but my guess is that this is related to the delayed launch of his product line:
https://www.billboard.com/culture/lifestyle/kanye-west-gap-push-back-yeezy-gap-engineered-by-balenciaga-launch-uvalde-school-shooting-1235075178/
The "coordinated message" here appears to be "it is bad that children were killed".
The Truman Show
I’ve always been fascinated by this movie.
Arguably Truman Show fits into all those categories, plus romance and more, depending what part of the movie you are talking about.
I just got tired of them putting the same movies in every damned category:
Horror? How about The Truman Show!
Sci-Fi? How about The Truman Show!
Action? How about The Truman Show!
Adventure? How about The Truman Show!
Finally I just unsubscribed.
Well, except for ransom attacks, nobody is forced to use a public cryptocurrency.
For it to be common and being proud of one's economic transaction history would be awesome.
In the 90s, experiments in publicity like reality TV and the Truman Show movie gave way to social media in the next decade. We are constantly finding new ways to publicize our lives because there is value in publicity.
Privacy shouldn't disappear absolutely but we've got a long ways to go towards greater publicity before reaching the limit of usefulness.
The real gripe I have with the film is how they managed to totally misunderstand and butcher Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacra, while saying that it was one of their inspirations. Baudrillard wasn’t saying that the problem with current postmodern society was that the copy (the simulation) masks the real and therefore the copy should be destroyed to reveal the original (basically a Platonial ideal), the fundamental problem is that the copy masks the fact that there is no “real”. Reality has already disappeared in the way of the hyperreal, and the old Platonic distinction between “real” and “fake” became obsolete. Baudrillard speaks about the Matrix that
“Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrix’s value is chiefly as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and phantasm is given expression, “realized.” We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”
As a retaliation Lana Wakowski said,
“This is why, no one really mentions this, but everyone's like "'Simulacra' as in Baudrillard, you are referencing Baudrillard!", but the point of the reference is that the book is hollow! It is itself a Matrix! It is itself a construction, a projection, a tool for understanding the world, having a framework of meaning, that's what these things are, they are frameworks of meaning. So what we were trying to do was, can you encourage audiences to interrogate their own framework of meaning, and then through that interrogation, extend it into the experience of watching a piece of art, and then try to find meaning into that piece of art, in the same way that Neo has to go through that journey ..."
which is some bullshit nonsense that not only undermines the effectiveness of their work, but vulgarly defaces the work of Baudrillard (along with misleading the public to think that postmodernism = “anything goes”, further leading to some weird reactionary figures to blurt against it)
The metaverse is for the Roblox and Minecraft generation who are supposed to be even more doom and gloom than the one that preceded it. So the world in shambles condition may already be met for some.
Gen Z have also grown up in this reverse Truman Show dystopia where everyone has their own TV show (Youtube, Snap, Tiktok) that allows them to edit out the blemishes and embarassments of real life to produce a nicely manicured image to 'build their brand' on.
> people like people
Yes, and it's so profitable that someone will inevitably try to use AI-animated "people" to harvest market demand for organic people. Similar to cloning popular software or movies with lower-rent talent. Andrew Niccol, creator of Truman Show, Lord of War, Gattaca and Lord of War, made a film called Simone about a computer-generated fashion/celebrity avatar. Some of the dynamics in that film have already been seen on social media and will likely expand in future metaverses.
Another is Seaside Florida.
Seaside is an unincorporated master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle in Walton County, between Panama City Beach and Destin.[2] One of the first communities in America designed on the principles of New Urbanism, the town has become the topic of slide lectures in architectural schools and in housing-industry magazines, and is visited by design professionals from all over the United States. The town rose to global fame as being the main filming location of the movie The Truman Show. On April 18, 2012, the American Institute of Architects's Florida Chapter placed the community on its list of Florida Architecture: 100 Years. 100 Places as the Seaside – New Urbanism Township.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside%2C_Florida
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show
I strongly recommend reading Ubik. To me it is his strongest and most consistently good book.
I used to love The Three Stigmata too, but when I tried to read it again recently I couldn't get in to it either. I do think you have to be in the right mood to savor a Dick book, so maybe I was in the wrong mood that time.
The other first-tier PKD book for me is Martian Time-Slip.
Second-tier PKD books for me are VALIS and Galactic Pot Healer.
Third-tier are Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky, and Divine Invasion (the 2nd in the VALIS trilogy.. didn't like the 3rd in the series, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer at all).
Many of his other books, like Lies, Inc, also have great parts in them, but are kind of inconsistent.
Some of his short stories are excellent. My favorites:
- Beyond Lies the Wub
- Roog
- The Father Thing
- Faith of Our Fathers
I didn't really like A Scanner Darkly, nor Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep and would consider them of minor import had not movies been made of them. Other books in this category are Now Wait for Last Year (made in to Total Recall) and Time Out of Joint (made in to The Truman Show.. though the book is much darker). The movie Minority Report was based on another minor short story of his, as The Terminator might have been partially based on his story Second Variety.
Virtually all of the movies made from his work only bear only a very slight resemblance to the originals, which tends to be a lot darker, a lot less action-filled, and much more thought-provoking than the Hollywood adaptations.
For me it was The Truman Show, which uses several of his pieces from other works along with some specifically made for the film.
Movies with great impact on me:
1. Untouchable - must see
2. Gattaca - are we going there?
3. 1984 - must see
4. Idiocracy - initially looks like joke/stupid movie, but it's more real then we may want to agree
5. Life of others (made in Ge)
6. Amelie Poulain (made in Fr)
7. Turtles can fly (made in Ir)
8. Stalker - the russian original (3 parts) (made in Ru)
9. Metropolis
Other good movies:
Lost Horizon
The Bucket List
The Truman Show
Solaris 1972
Enemy at the Gates
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Tips for good movies in general: take countries one by one and search best ever movies from that country.
1998-99, there were at least 5 movies about simulations: Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Existenz, and The Thirteenth Floor.
Movies like "Brainstorm": "The Final Cut" "Strange Days" "Total Recall" "Altered States" "Lawnmower Man" "Ex Machina" "The Thirteenth Floor" "The Truman Show" "Inception" "Selfless" "Flatliners"
> I’m not sure this is totally a rip from Hollywood or a kind of modern Potemkin city.
There's certainly an interesting amount of cross-pollination from Hollywood. The ur-examples of districts built this way remain the idealistic Seaside, FL [1] and Celebration, FL [2], both of which have different bits both directly and indirectly of DNA/influence from Walt Disney's original super-idealist EPCOT city [3] ideas/ideals (not to be confused with the park that later inherited that name).
Seaside and Celebration are interesting too because they themselves have been used as movie sets influencing things the other direction. Most notably and effectively, Seaside, FL is the main set of the movie The Truman Show, lending a lot of the meta-weirdness to that movie "naturally" just in how Seaside, FL very much is.
(Fun anecdote: A neighborhood in my own city has some connections to the same developers/planners of Seaside, FL, some of the same meta-movie set feel, and it was a "requirement" by my parents when I went condo shopping to not even look at condos in that neighborhood because they knew I would never stop with Truman Show jokes/gags if I lived there.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)
I don't think it's "beyond you", I think it's so simple you passed right above it.
A "philosophical super-hero" in the context of Matrix, circa 1999 is something along the lines of:
Everybody's asleep like Jim Careys in the Truman Show. Reality is not what we think it is. We're all slaves, we're all miserable even if we think we're happy. It's all a lie. “They” control us. “They” know and keep us ignorant. “They” are the reason why we suffer so much and we're not even fully aware of it.
Enters Neo. Neo is a cool dude who should have been Will Smith but he declined to do Wild Wild West — crazy sci-fi in the machine seemed less blockbuster-worthy than big machines exploding in the Far West, yeah, that was a bad call. But I digress.
Neo who's not black, unlike Morpheus, is not like the rest of us. No no no: he's AWAKE(ning). He's woke, man! Like F, this should have been Will Smith, that smug look haha. Oh boy, I digress. Not that Matrix itself is boring but.
Then there's Zion. It's really the Bob Marley ideal, because why not, heaven can only be full of hippies of sorts, and the idea is that if humans "escape" the bad guys, they can all go party to Zion. Cue NOT Laureen Hill, that was a fail honestly.
So, imparted with this supreme Knowledge about “them” and heaven and Morpheus' BFF and so on, Neo can do a whole lot of cool tricks because he now "knows". And there he goes, solves the puzzle in a trilogy because that sounds nice, and the good people are now free. Probably. Or not. Who cares at that point. The whole story was never about that anyway.
So, that's the level-1 "philosophical hero". He just "gets it" and that makes him stronger. There's also a big nod to human versus machine in that the Matrix, the bad guy-s, they don't understand "love" the way we do, and Neo.. well, he's the romantic you know, he loves Trinity and that's the key to his ultimate surviving. “A truly original take on what it means to be human”, said nobody ever who wasn't born the day before.
So, yeah, I'm sure you can see all of that, and (rightfully imho) thought it wasn't much "philosophy" material.
HOWEVER! there's level-2. For the "woke" people among us, you know, those who "get it" like Neo. (I'm joking but I think it's a little bit like that, there's a smugness to Matrix fans, even those who seem to indeed "get it".)
This is my liberal interpretation of level-2. I've looked at YouTube videos analyzing the movies because frankly I didn't get it, like you. And then I had my own "awakening" in life, but it's much less glamorous than Neo, it means shitty experiences for stupidly long times and then somehow emerging the other side and being alive enough to tell about it. Long story short, I kinda "get" what they possibly mean. It's as old as the oldest mythologies conceptually, e.g. the "Maya" in Hindu (Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion”).
So the matrix is an image for "whatever you think is impossible", the opposite of what is sometimes termed "abundance" mindset — I can't do this, I'll never have that, this is impossible for me, etc. It's a veil on reality, and critically self-imposed, of our own doing in a modern interpretation, more agnostic about gods if you will.
Anybody who does something in this world must at some point on the way remove such limiting thoughts, usually much wider than the mere topic — whether business owner, moviemaker, musician, scientist, etc. In HN of all places the sample is skewed as hell, but some of us probably see that most people are self-imposedly very limited in their "possibles".
I could elaborate but you get the gist. Everything else is filling with analogies and good moviemaking, probably, or not, whatever, who cares at this point.
Level-3 exists, some people do that: they take pop content and slap philosophical references because "quotes" and "easter egg". But then they elevate the easter above the egg and we're all dying of an empty brain because Matrix is now officially better than the Odyssey and La Comédie humaine combined.
Did any of this speak to you, should you have read even just 1 paragraph? :D
Woah this is weird. I just re-listened to the Hello Internet episode where they were discussing this question.
Ask HN: Am I in The Truman Show?
That's a bit like saying the fact that turtles have very hard shells is evidence that the earth is balancing on a giant turtle.
There were a bunch of movies in the late 90's about reality being virtual (the matrix, the 13th floor, existenz), but somehow it was the one without VR that was the most prophetic (the truman show).
I actually remember this show. This was prior to reality TV shows and arguably before movie 'The Truman Show'. I did not had the honor to see this on TV, but I was been told and then checked out some Japanese websites (more like blogs, but before they were been called that) that provide text and photo updates on Nasubi's progress.
A quick search today, here are the articles that archives its history:
* https://www.projectcasting.com/news/nasubi-reality-show/
* https://www.tofugu.com/japan/nasubi-naked-eggplant-man/
I tend to agree. Movies in general seem to be escapism[0]. Even incredibly depressing/artful movies like Requiem For A Dream, Joker (since it was brought up on this thread), Irréversible, The Truman Show, Martyrs, Saw, etc. are a form of escapism.
Now, each person may have their own preferences as to what type of escapism they want, but ultimately it's really just spending a few hours at a theatre or in front of a TV.
(We could argue about the intellectual merits of each of the films I've mentioned, but that's irrelevant as to whether they're escapism or not.)
Hot take: The problem isn't "shallow movies" or similar. It's that well-enough-off people are increasingly getting bored.
[0] Hell, I'd even extend that to most art.
This is next level helicopter parenting in action. Kids these days are twice the age of millennials when they start roaming their surrounding environment without supervision. When I grew up we had a comedy movie called the Truman Show and we were actually laughing about a similar situation. This is guaranteed to set up a generation for failure if kids are never exposed to any risk taking activities.
And arguably influenced The Matrix, The Terminator, and The Truman Show as well. Virtually any modern film that questions reality has probably been directly or indirectly influenced by PKD.
Oh dear God. Reading into the indictments, it seems that a lot of the kids never had a clue that they were complicit in the schemes:
>... and it was like, the kids though, and it was funny 'cause the kids will call me and say, "Maybe I should do that again. I did pretty well and if I took it again, I'll do better even" Right? And they just have no idea that they didn't even get the score that they thought they got.
Can you even imagine what those people are going through?
One day you are a USC/Harvard/Stanford grad. The next day you are a fraud. And not only that, you are revealed to the entire world to be dumb as a box of rocks, just totally naked and shamed. And you had no clue. Your closest family members spent tens of thousands of dollars fooling you, committing very serious crimes on your behalf, and all the while, lying to you about your intelligence and work ethic.
For those people, it must feel like The Truman Show or an episode of The Twilight Zone. It's totally unreal.
I love how Hollywood gives us futuristic UIs from movies like Iron Man, the Matrix, etc. And then you have Google. They predict a future that looks like...to use another Hollywood reference, The Truman Show.
I don't disagree with King's thesis that a prolific writer can, of course, produce great works and many have done so, but I also can't shake the feeling that there is something special about authors who produce great works and then quit when they don't have anything else to say.
bad works don't diminish great works, but it feels like authors who only produce works of great quality and nothing else have a special feel for their craft, it seems like they are so confident in what they have to say that they'd be repulsed by just putting anything out that isn't remarkable, and that at least to me makes them special.
It's like comparing Daniel Day-Lewis and Jim Carrey. The former has taken on roles in remarkably few films, but pretty much every role is amazing and that's what's stuck in my mind when I see him in a film.
Carrey also has participated in films like the Truman show but then I'm also reminded of the Grinch and the Mask, which just ruins it for me a little bit.
Wow, feels straight out of a Black mirror episode. What really disturbs me is this:
> With a burgeoning staff of 800 or so actors, ranging from infants to the elderly, the organization prides itself on being able to provide a surrogate for almost any conceivable situation.
Infants!! Reminds me of a Jim Carrey movie - The Truman Show.
Went into reading this article expecting it to be a one-off, rental boyfriend type deal (that kind of trope is used very frequently in movies/tv shows/manga there), but this way way deeper than I expected. I'm pretty mind blown at how far they are taking this fake/real replacements. Pretty close to some dystopian scifi actually.
>If the client never reveals the truth, I must continue the role indefinitely. If the daughter gets married, I have to act as a father in that wedding, and then I have to be the grandfather. So, I always ask every client, “Are you prepared to sustain this lie?” It’s the most significant problem our company has.
>Morin: You’re offering a more perfect form of reality?
>Yuichi: More ideal. More clean.
This is so Truman Show esque.
The Truman Show (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/) covers a lot of this turf albeit TV rather than total simulation.
Andrew Niccol's other thought-provoking films include Truman Show (reality and free will), Lord of War (arms trading), In Time (immortality and currency) and Good Kill (drones), http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Niccol
So we are all on the Truman Show? Only it is a solar reserve instead of a movie set?
This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for $7.99.
I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper all watched it and had a great time.
Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packages) but it also offers good value too.
Hollywood leads the world in producing compelling content and it's always been smart about turning it into money -- I'm sure things are going to change in the next 20 years, but odds are good that some fraction of Hollywood is going to stay on top.
You think that you are being so extreme that it is ridiculous.
Well, lawyers already went there: http://www.plotpatents.com/
"A Plot or Storyline Patent application seeks to patent the underlying novel and nonobvious storyline of a fictional story. Such protection is to be contrasted from the copyright protection of one of millions of possible expressions of an underlying storyline. The field of possible applications is broad, and may tentatively be split into an entertainment-advertisement dichotomy. The epitome of an entertainment application is an original, thought-provoking, often shockingly unique movie plot. Several potentially patentable features may have been found in the plots of, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Being John Malkovich, Butterfly Effect, The Game, Fight Club, The Matrix, Total Recall, The Truman Show, Minority Report, The Village, Groundhog Day, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to name a few. The epitome of an advertisement application is one of the many thoughtfully hilarious Super Bowl commercials."
>> Providing content with embedded advertising
Also in-program advertising, as was classicly shown in The Truman Show and as seen nowadays with the gratuitous Coke cups used on American Idol.
As for the networks being redundant, yes and no. Yes in the distribution sense, but certainly not in the production stage. On-line distribution may be easy (for varying levels of "easy"), but someone's still gotta put up the money, organization, time, and physical plant to write and film the show, and keep it going for a while until it gets popular.
Gattaca is an underrated classic. Andre Niccol's other movie The Truman Show is even better.