We’re going back a bit for this one, but ‘The Truman Show’ was an absolutely fantastic Jim Carrey movie back in 1998 that actually proved that Carrey wasn’t just a comedian that could only play idiots like Ace Ventura and The Mask and propelled his acting career forward.
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I doubt you’re unfamiliar with the movie if you’ve clicked on this article, but just in case it revolves around the character of Truman Burbank who has been trapped unaware in a TV show since the day he was born and the subsequent gradual realisation that his whole life is a lie. I’m sure that some of us have imagined that we’re in a TV show at some point during our lives – pretty much everyone suffers from main character syndrome sometimes, right? – but I doubt anyone has fell as deep into it as this guy Jonny Benjamin.
Benjamin was convinced for years that he was living out his own version of ‘The Truman Show’ before he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and explains why this happened below:
The Truman Show with Jim Carrey had just come out, it was big.
I remember, it was big, everyone was talking about it.
And that film had such an impact on me, and my best friend. And when we came out the cinema, my best friend said to me, ‘wow, you never know, but you could be on your own version of The Truman Show.’
And then it was just like, ‘Oh, my God, like, yeah, I could be.’
I didn’t fit in, I felt like a complete loner, complete outsider. So the thought of me being on this TV show, and people watching me, people liking me, I was like, ‘OK, yeah, maybe.’
And then it’s amazing how you can convince yourself things are happening that aren’t happening.
It didn’t help that my best friend, because he knew that it was there in my head, he would do things. I’m sure he didn’t mean to do these things.
He would do things like in The Truman Show, you know, holding things up to the camera.
Every sign that I could grab to make me believe that I was in this show, I would.
Even things like, which this is quite farfetched, sometimes I’d have a song playing in my head, and then I’d get in the car and on the way to school, that song was the first song that came on to the radio.
And so I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, they’re in my head. They know that was the song and so they put that song on the radio, and everything revolves around me.’
Or you know, and this happens sometimes today, I’m thinking of someone in my head on the street, or in back in school in the playground, and that person I was thinking of, they’re there.
In The Truman Show, the cameras are obviously all around, and I’d be like looking around my room and I’d be like, ‘well, that’s the camera, my lightbulb in my ceiling light is a camera.
In The Truman Show everyone loves Jim Carrey, right? Everyone loves him. And so I wanted that.
At first it was great. But then obviously, as I got older and needed more privacy, I was like, ‘I don’t want these cameras anymore.’
I think that sort of happens to everyone really though doesn’t it? I’ve definitely experienced stuff like that before but I’ve just put it down to a coincidence because it only happens super rarely anyway. I suppose if you’re schizophrenic thought the connotations are a bit different. Glad to see that Jonny seems to have snapped out of his delusion now and is doing a lot better. Nobody wants to be trapped in ‘The Truman Show’. Not even Truman himself!
For more of the same, check out this conspiracy theory about Jim Carrey admitting he was Illuminatie on live television but nobody believing him. What do you make of that?
