Saturday, June 27, 1998

'The Truman Show' asks basic question: Are you the center of your universe?

(EDITORS: All Scriptural quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.)

By Lauren R. Stanley

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- I went to see a movie the other night, expecting only to be entertained, and came out awestruck.

Now, I don't go to movies that often; I have other things I'd rather be doing. So I'm somewhat selective about which movies I'll see. I expect a good story line, abhor gratuitous violence, and generally want to be entertained.

And usually, I am entertained. But rarely am I awestruck. Rarely do I sit there at the end, my mind reeling with the possibilities presented by the message of the movie itself.

"The Truman Show" is one of those rare movies that left me awestruck.

Not because the acting was so all-fire wonderful. It wasn't. And not because the story line was so all-fire wonderful, either. It wasn't.

But the message -- now that was something wonderful indeed.

In the movie, a character named Truman lives his whole life on an island. He has a perfect wife, perfect neighbors and a perfect job in a seemingly perfect world. What he doesn't know is that his whole life is a television show, that his wife is an actress and that everything -- absolutely everything -- about his life is make-believe. And what he doesn't know is that hundreds of millions of people around the world watch his every move, day and night, and have allowed their lives to be consumed by a television show.

Until one day, when a kleig light falls to the earth, and he slowly begins to realize that all is not as it seems.

The crux of the movie comes when Truman and a lifelong "friend" -- yet another actor playing his role for the show -- are sitting on a dock late one night, and Truman asks, "Did you ever get the feeling that the world revolved around you?"

That's the key question in the whole movie. And when Truman asks it -- when he realizes how important it is simply to ask that question -- his whole life changes. Because from then on, he is able to cast a critical eye about him, to observe all that he had taken for granted for so long, and to assess how his life is being lived.

That is when Truman realizes that life is nothing but a series of questions related to the main question: Does everything in life revolve around us? Should everything in life revolve around us?

As I understand it, the movie is intended to be a social commentary on how we allow our lives to get wrapped up in the make-believe, how we are willing to focus all our attention on things like movies and TV and "stars" and "heroes." It's intended to be critical of the way we allow ourselves to be consumed by things as unimportant as a television show.

"The Truman Show" certainly does all that. But it also does a whole lot more.

Because what the movies really does is force us to ask ourselves -- just as Truman does -- "Do you ever get the feeling that the world revolves around us?"

The world, you see, isn't supposed to revolve around us. It's supposed to revolve around God. After all, it is God who created us, God who redeemed us, and God who sustains us. It is God -- not us -- who stands at the center.

In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples, basically, that indeed, the world cannot revolve around them. In each Gospel, people walk up to Jesus and say, "I will follow you wherever you go." And Jesus replies, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." Then, one man whom he has called to follow him says, "First let me go and bury my father," to which Jesus replies, "Let the dead bury their own dead."

Those harsh messages have, at their center, one refrain: The world does not revolve around us. It revolves around God.

That's the message I kept hearing as I watched "The Truman Show": The world doesn't revolve around us. Even when we think it does, it doesn't. Because when we think it does -- when we are fulfilling our own needs -- we ultimately find ourselves, like Truman, unfulfilled.

Anyone who ever has had children or has been around children in their early years knows what it is like to see someone consumed by the idea that life revolves around him or her. A 3-year-old has no perspective on life and things only about him or herself. That child's demands upon everyone -- parents, teachers, baby-sitters, even strangers in stores -- are extraordinary, and frequently exasperating. We know that the universe doesn't revolve around the child, but the child doesn't, and until the child learns, life is ... well, life can be frustrating.

We are created to live in community, with other people, concerned about other people. We are created to focus not on ourselves, but on God and neighbor. And when everything is focused on us, something is missing from our lives.

That's what Truman discovers after a klieg light falls at his feet, and he begins to question the perfection of his life. Something indeed is missing.

We can't all have klieg lights fall at our feet to wake us up. But we can ask the same question. And if we find the answer is yes, we can, like Truman, decide to make a few changes.

That's when the possibilities seems endless.

And that's why one little movie left my mind reeling the other night.

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(The Rev. Lauren R. Stanley, a former assistant news editor for the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, is the associate rector at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Burke, Va. Readers may write to Stanley care of Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, 790 National Press Building, Washington, D.C., 20045.)

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(c) 1998, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.