The Truman Show is a film starring Jim Carrey where he plays a man who has grown up his whole life in a fictionalised set of a TV show that he is not aware of, with cameras, adverts and characters all intertwined to create entertainment for viewers. Plato’s Cave Theory and the idea of the cinematic apparatus are intertwined with the film and are a precursor of the social media age, when immersed within the cinematic apparatus the viewer cannot tell the difference between the world of cinema and the real world. Cinema is ideological so forms of editing and production affect representation, Jean Louis Baudry once described it as an “ideological state apparatus” (Baudry) used to influence audiences to conform to dominant ideologies…but now with the rise of social media what is the dominant ideology and who is pushing it?

Casetti wishes to abandon the apparatus and focus on the term assemblage,(collection of technological elements) which highlights the changes of post-cinema due to technology such as YouTube, they believe it is not the “machine” that determines the cinematic experience; rather, it is the cinematic experience that finds—or even configures—the “machine.” (Casetti) The term bubble describes how we can ignore outside distractions and are still able to concentrate on “cinema”. With technological devices such as noise-cancelling headphones or VR, you can temporally set yourself away from reality, without the need to sit in a dark cinema, but it is due to the audiovisual or the new technology? Streamers and YouTubers creating content are often within an insulated bubble creating content in their rooms, protected by their communities and block buttons, which links to her second idea of “imagined public”.

She discusses the cinema being portable through sharing on the internet, which allows live-time reactions and reviews which can create the feeling that you are watching along with a “friend” or follower.  Thirdly she uses “vision” to describe how cinema is distributed and authenticated through platforms like Netflix. “Cinema is the ultimate pervert art it doesn’t give you what to desire it tells you how to desire” (Zizek). It makes sense we gravitated to filming ourselves on YouTube and making reality TV stars and streamers our modern-day cinema stars.

Watching your favourite streamer sleeping has become a reality and The Truman Show was ahead of the curve ,The illusion of control/reality from the audience is the new form of Plato’s Cave, through the use of assemblages, social media has made the idea of tactile cinema into a reality and its way better then 3D…

Miles Mitchell

Zizek, S., 2006. The pervert’s guide to cinema. P Guide Ltd.

Casetti, Francesco. The Lumière Galaxy : Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York (N.Y.), Columbia University Press, Cop, 2015.

Baudry, J.L. and Williams, A., 1974. Ideological effects of the basic cinematographic apparatus. Film Quarterly, 28(2), pp.39-47.