In The Truman Show, Jim Carey plays Truman Burbank, an insurance salesman living a seemingly idyllic life. As an audience, we know the truth, but Truman is unaware that he’s living in a constructed 24/7 TV reality show. As props and scenery fall, supporting actors get their lines wrong, Truman becomes increasingly suspicious that something is amiss. The truth unfolds about his existence, prompting him to seek freedom from the fabricated world that he discovers has been overseen by ‘Big Brother-type’ TV producers. Not only is this 1998 film prescient of the rather Orwellian, omnipresent surveillance and the corrupt, controlling, profit-over-people systems fully in operation today, but it’s also quite easy to relate this story to the experience of the enmeshed, coercively controlled, alienated child.
As with Truman, alienated children may ‘remember’ events that never occurred, influenced by insinuating, repetitive and conditioning information provided by a parent meticulously crafting an artificial construct in a controlled reality, shaping the understanding of the world. Shared persecutory delusions between the ‘aligned’ parent and the child, false memories, along with fixed false beliefs, are not uncommon in cases of parental alienation.
Trauma bonding is similar to what Truman experiences as he fears leaving everything he’s ever known and believed to be real. As with Stockholm syndrome, something that happens between a hostage and a kidnapper, a cult leader and their followers, and an alienating parent and their child, the captive/follower/alienated child stays entrapped and gets comfortable with their predicament either because they don’t see they’re entrapped or they think there’s no other choice – even if they sense something is amiss, as Truman does. Control and a severe imbalance of power hold the whole edifice up. Breaking free is daunting. Worse still, the child/captive believes they’re not safe outside; they might believe they need that person/the captor/controller to survive. For Truman and alienated children alike, the horrible realisation of being deceived, the shattering of a long-held illusion, requires their perception of reality to undergo profound change, which can be enormously challenging.
However, just as Truman breaks free, finds love, and starts to live his authentic life, our alienated children need to recognise their entrapment, see through the false narratives, and embark on a journey toward sovereignty and freedom, independent thinking and behaving. In the climactic scene, Truman overcomes obstacles as the show’s producers try to prevent him from leaving. He reaches the edge of the set and finds a hidden exit door. He steps outside and sees the massive studio set and vast artificial sky. Even then, when the shock of the subterfuge and confinement is revealed to Truman, the show’s creator and director tries to persuade him to stay. The alienating parent doesn’t want to lose control. It makes Truman’s decision to leave a powerful moment of liberation as he chooses freedom over everything that has defined his entire life. And so it can be with our alienated children.
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