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I watched The Truman Show this week. It arrives looking like a comedy. Jim Carrey, bright colours, a cheerful little town where everybody waves. And somewhere around the twenty-minute mark it stops being funny and turns into something much closer to body horror — then keeps going until it's just a straight existential question pointed at the person watching. Here's what makes Truman's situation so unsettling: on paper, nothing is wrong. He has a normal routine. A marriage. A best friend he talks to. A steady job. A pleasant town. He is living a perfectly happy life, and that is exactly the problem. Because when everything around you is arranged to be agreeable, there's no gap anywhere for anything real to get in. He can't quite be unhappy, and he can't quite say why that bothers him. The entire world has been built so that he never has a reason to ask a question — which is a far more effective prison than walls. And then the real inversion. Everythi...