Moral Deliberations in Modern Cinema | Page 4

whims
and to the brutal and vulgar aspects of his pervasive dishonesty and
sadism. The torturer loves his victims. They define him and infuse his
life with meaning. Caught in a narrative, the movie says, people act
immorally.
(IN)famous psychological experiments support this assertion. Students
were led to administer what they thought were "deadly" electric shocks
to their colleagues or to treat them bestially in simulated prisons. They
obeyed orders. So did all the hideous genocidal criminals in history.
The Director Weir asks: should God be allowed to be immoral or
should he be bound by morality and ethics? Should his decisions and
actions be constrained by an over-riding code of right and wrong?
Should we obey his commandments blindly or should we exercise
judgement?
If we do exercise judgement are we then being immoral because God

(and the Director Christoff) know more (about the world, about us, the
viewers and about Truman), know better, are omnipotent? Is the
exercise of judgement the usurpation of divine powers and attributes?
Isn't this act of rebelliousness bound to lead us down the path of
apocalypse?
It all boils down to the question of free choice and free will versus the
benevolent determinism imposed by an omniscient and omnipotent
being. What is better: to have the choice and be damned (almost
inevitably, as in the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden) - or to
succumb to the superior wisdom of a supreme being? A choice always
involves a dilemma. It is the conflict between two equivalent states,
two weighty decisions whose outcomes are equally desirable and two
identically-preferable courses of action. Where there is no such
equivalence - there is no choice, merely the pre-ordained (given full
knowledge) exercise of a preference or inclination. Bees do not choose
to make honey. A fan of football does not choose to watch a football
game. He is motivated by a clear inequity between the choices that he
faces. He can read a book or go to the game. His decision is clear and
pre-determined by his predilection and by the inevitable and invariable
implementation of the principle of pleasure. There is no choice here. It
is all rather automatic. But compare this to the choice some victims had
to make between two of their children in the face of Nazi brutality.
Which child to sentence to death - which one to sentence to life? Now,
this is a real choice. It involves conflicting emotions of equal strength.
One must not confuse decisions, opportunities and choice.
Decisions are the mere selection of courses of action. This selection can
be the result of a choice or the result of a tendency (conscious,
unconscious, or biological-genetic). Opportunities are current states of
the world, which allow for a decision to be made and to affect the
future state of the world. Choices are our conscious experience of
moral or other dilemmas.
Christoff finds it strange that Truman - having discovered the truth -
insists upon his right to make choices, i.e., upon his right to experience
dilemmas. To the Director, dilemmas are painful, unnecessary,
destructive, or at best disruptive. His utopian world - the one he
constructed for Truman - is choice-free and dilemma-free. Truman is
programmed not in the sense that his spontaneity is extinguished.

Truman is wrong when, in one of the scenes, he keeps shouting: "Be
careful, I am spontaneous". The Director and fat-cat capitalistic
producers want him to be spontaneous, they want him to make
decisions. But they do not want him to make choices. So they influence
his preferences and predilections by providing him with an absolutely
totalitarian, micro-controlled, repetitive environment. Such an
environment reduces the set of possible decisions so that there is only
one favourable or acceptable decision (outcome) at any junction.
Truman does decide whether to walk down a certain path or not. But
when he does decide to walk - only one path is available to him. His
world is constrained and limited - not his actions.
Actually, Truman's only choice in the movie leads to an arguably
immoral decision. He abandons ship. He walks out on the whole
project. He destroys an investment of billions of dollars, people's lives
and careers. He turns his back on some of the actors who seem to really
be emotionally attached to him. He ignores the good and pleasure that
the show has brought to the lives of millions of people (the viewers).
He selfishly and vengefully goes away. He knows all this. By the time
he makes his decision, he is fully informed. He knows that some people
may commit suicide, go bankrupt, endure major depressive episodes,
do drugs. But this massive landscape of resulting devastation does not
deter him. He prefers his narrow, personal, interest. He walks.
But Truman did not ask