As Laura Mulvey states in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” females are the focus of attention in cinema; however, The Truman Show contradicts this idea. Mulvey makes the assumption that in today’s society, women are the center of cinematic gaze and are the ones favored to be the objects. She goes on to explain that the audience favors a female figure as the object of attention because of erotic identity: “The determining male gaze projects its fantasy ont

While Sylvia’s character challenges Mulvey and the other authors’ assumption that women are the objects of men, the character of Meryl extends these authors’ ideas. In The Truman Show, Meryl plays the role of Truman’s wife and is a representation of much of the ideas of the afore mentioned writers. In her essay “The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of the Cinema,” Mary Ann Doane states that women do the bulk of consuming or purchasing; she explains that in feminist theory, women are seen to be the primary consumers. In connecting this idea to a clear picture, between Truman and Meryl, Meryl does all of the purchasing. In portions of the movie, Meryl holds up a product that she has bought from the store and shows it to Truman, while at the same time, presenting it to the public as an advertisement. For example, when Truman is mowing the lawn and pulling the weeds out of the grass, Meryl comes home from shopping and shows Truman the knife that she has just bought. This clarifies Doane’s notion that women are the primary consumers. Not only does Meryl represent women as being consumers, but also as objects.

The Truman Show challenges Mulvey’s supposition that men cannot stand the idea of objectification. Mulvey quotes in her essay, “According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification”(Mulvey 63). She writes that females have always been placed as the focus of attention and that men cannot bear that burden. The Truman Show goes against this concept proclaimed by Mulvey. Truman’s life, ever since birth, has been filmed and made into a show that is aired twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. His every movement has been viewed by the public his entire life. Truman is the object and center of “The Truman Show,” a very popular show that is watched by everyone. A male character being the figure of center of attention contradicts Mulvey’s idea that the male figure cannot bear the burden of objectification. Truman being placed as the center of gaze in “The Truman Show” challenges Mulvey in that it proves that a male is able to bear the burden of being the center of focus. Besides the issue of objectification, this film also disputes another aspect of the typi

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