In the lead-up to the Sydney opening of The Truman Show (Paramount, 1998), the film was described in a newspaper interview with its Australian director, Peter Weir, as “the new millennium’s Everyman.” Just over a year after its release, Truman was in the news again when it was re-screened at the Vatican-authorized Millennium Spiritual Film Festival, a selection of films chosen on the basis of their perceived capacity to “nourish souls and edify culture.” The official word from the Vatican was that Jim Carrey’s character in the film was to be admired for his fight to retain his human dignity in the face of the “daunting odds” of “a technologically empowered media.” How literally are we to take the journalistic comment linking Truman and Everyman?
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