Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the film, "The Truman Show," have many similarities in which both encourage its audience to question what they perceive as reality. Plato's Allegory of the Cave is used to illustrate the physical world as an illusion, the cave signifying the world, the prisoners representing the people who inhabit the world and the shadows representative of everything that the people see such as objects and their surrounding as real. In the Truman Show, Sea Haven symbolizes the cave and the protagonist, Truman Burbank, represents the prisoner. Both, Plato's allegory and the movie, reveal parallel subjects such as the yearning for completion and searching for answers, destructive characters, web of illusions and god-like figures.
Truman's reality, like the reality of the people in the cave, was constructed like the shadows in the cave that were only copies of things in the real world. In the Truman show the main protagonist lives literally in a giant bubble, controlled weather dome where every moment of his life is filmed and broadcasted in a reality show. Truman's life appears to him as free but it is actually controlled and manipulated by the producer Chrystoff. All of Truman's desires are predetermined by the producer. The Truman show resembles Plato's allegory of the cave as initially Truman is trapped into his own cave and his journey into the real world and into knowledge is similar to Plato's cave allegory. .
Truman did not know any difference than what had been taught or shown to be the real world his whole life much like the prisoners in the cave. This contains the notion of the constructive reality and involves characters breaking free of that fake reality. Both highlight large aspects of enslavement and deception. None of the characters had a choice but instead both the characters chained in the cave and Truman only saw what the puppeteers and the producer Chrystoff wanted them to see.
