thinkingblueskyagain

Truman continues to steer his wrecked sailboat towards the infinitely receding horizon. All is calm until we see the bow of the boat suddenly strike a huge, blue wall, knocking Truman off his feet. Truman recovers and clambers across the deck to the bow of the boat. Looming above him out of the sea is a cyclorama of colossal dimensions. The sky he has been sailing towards is nothing but a painted backdrop. Truman looks upward, straining his eyes to see the top of the sky, but it curves away at a steep angle beyond his sight. Clinging to the boat with one hand, he tentatively reaches out towards the painted cyclorama. He touches the sky. He looks about him and simply laughs. (Niccol, 1998)

An extract from ‘Blue-Sky Thinking’, a chapter in Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds), Alternative Worlds (Oxford:Peter Lang, 2015)


HOME THINKING BLUE SKY SKIES WHAT IS UP THERE? WHERE HAVE ALL THE GODS GONE? HOW TO TAME THE SKY? CORY ARCANGEL LISE AUTOGENA GASTON BACHELARD JAMES BENNING CORREGGIO GILLES DELEUZE SIMON FAITHFULL CAMILLE FLAMMARION WERNER HERZOG DEREK JARMAN GERHARD RICHTER JACQUES TATI JOELLE TUERLINCKX RICHARD WILSON PETER WEIR QUADRATURA WHAT OF OUR PLANETARY SKY? ABOUT REFERENCES	PETER WEIR Touching the sky Our contemporary sky is changing. It no longer makes meaning as an indefinite expanse of blue air but rather as a thin blue boundary encircling the globe. Nowhere within contemporary culture is this change more clearly expressed than in the cinematic world of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998). Weir’s fictional character, Truman, encounters this threshold sky in the final scenes of the film in which we watch the protagonist, played by Jim Carey, attempting to escape from his island home. At the start of the film Truman’s ingrained fear of the sea has prohibited this journey. In the dénouement he overcomes his trepidation and escapes from his island home. The shooting script reads as follows: Truman continues to steer his wrecked sailboat towards the infinitely receding horizon. All is calm until we see the bow of the boat suddenly strike a huge, blue wall, knocking Truman off his feet. Truman recovers and clambers across the deck to the bow of the boat. Looming above him out of the sea is a cyclorama of colossal dimensions. The sky he has been sailing towards is nothing but a painted backdrop. Truman looks upward, straining his eyes to see the top of the sky, but it curves away at a steep angle beyond his sight. Clinging to the boat with one hand, he tentatively reaches out towards the painted cyclorama. He touches the sky. He looks about him and simply laughs. (Niccol, 1998) With a clunk, that which would have rendered Flammarion speechless in his hot-air balloon, the protagonist of the film realises that this blue backdrop, what seems like an infinite space unfolding before his eyes is, in fact, a solid limit. It is a threshold that marks the edge of his known world. Peter Weir’s film is remarkable no only for the fact that the solid blue backdrop acts as a motif by way of which we can understand today’s shifting conception of the earthly sky, but also because it speaks of blue-sky thinking within the progressive vision of late modernity. The opening scenes of The Truman Show introduce us to a paradise on earth, the town of Seahaven. The director states that he wanted the setting for the film to be ‘the ideal place, a dream haven, always to be sunny except when they wanted to make it rain’ (Weir, 2005). This perfect world, a world that speaks of 1950s adverts, is established as we watch the cherubic-faced protagonists move around the pastel-coloured, picket-fenced, golden-beached dream-town. In this town the radio presenter begins each day with the greeting, ‘another beautiful day in paradise folks’. Yet from the very first scene of the film there are slippages in the harmony, a studio light falls from the sky and actor-feeds slip into the sound-scape of Truman's world via the car-radio. This is just the beginning. Soon we realise that the constructed world of The Truman Show offers us a biting critique of the American Dream: we witness the perfect house, the perfect wife, the perfect world of Seahaven characterised as an illusion, more than that, a marketing strategy to sell a life-style. By the end of the film it becomes apparent that Peter Weir is speaking directly to us today. He is willing us to choose something other than televised spectacle, something other than a highly commodified dream of the future for this dream is as shallow and delimiting as the solid sky of Seahaven's stage-set cyclorama. An extract from ‘Blue-Sky Thinking’, a chapter in Ricarda Vidal and Ingo Cornils (eds), Alternative Worlds (Oxford:Peter Lang, 2015)	Images: stills 'The Truman Show' (1998)