My messiah complex

In June 1999, I described on this page jameitos, tiny, blind, albino crabs on the sea bottom in a cave in Lanzarote, occasionally caught in a shaft of sunlight they couldn’t see. ‘Might there be searchlights moving across the surface of our world, too,’ I wrote, ‘catching [us] within their purview, and we the objects of this silent inspection, all unknowing?’

It was a long overnight flight from South America last month. Though comfortable, I couldn’t sleep, so I accessed the in-flight entertainment menu, selected ‘Comedy’ and decided to try The Truman Show, a 1998 American movie, not really a comedy, with (I later learnt) something of a cult following.

In a darkened cabin, sleeping passengers all around, in my tiny pool of light and headphone-generated surround-sound with no external stimuli to distract, I watched this film in the perfect circumstance for a strangely gripping, part-sci-fi, part-satirical, part-psycho-drama and (to me) almost religious experience.

So I might as well blurt this out: a confession you may think horribly inappropriate for (but certainly not unconnected with) Easter. I have an incipient messiah complex. I was both captivated and disturbed by a film with uncanny resonances with what has followed me all my life, hovering never close enough to overwhelm, and never so insistent as to supplant reason, but vaguely distracting me – though be assured I do know these suspicions are unfounded.

Here’s the gist of this film in a few sentences. Truman Burbank discovers that, his whole life since birth, he has been the sole subject of the already 30-year run of a wildly and internationally popular TV series, The Truman Show. ‘Seahaven Island’, where he has lived since birth, is actually a massive film set, hidden cameras everywhere, beneath a giant, invisible sky-high dome where even the weather can be controlled.