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The Truman Show is a 1998 dramedy starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of a 24-hour reality show that began at his birth. Set in Seahaven, a city-scale television studio designed to covertly record Truman's entire life, the show attempts to divert Truman from any potential suspicion that every single person he meets is an actor or actress.
In the movie, Seahaven is a beautiful, race-diverse, middle-scale, low-density coastal city/set. A sense of its artificiality is noticeable at the outset, and non-American viewers especially might discern that Truman’s birthplace is an homage to the many movies recorded in suburban United States during the 1980's and 1990's, including E.T. (1982), Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) and Home Alone (1990). However, Seahaven's perfect life may not have been as noticeably suspicious to American viewers since suburbs were (and still are) idealized by many, seen as urban expressions that balanced the city’s opportunities with nature’s virtues through a (vaguely) traditional architectural style and a strong community life.
This latter conception of the American suburb is grounded in truth: most of the outdoor scenes set in Seahaven were recorded in Seaside, Florida, the design and construction of which inspired New Urbanism. A sentimental utopian movement of the 1980's, New Urbanism was predicated on the belief that “greater sociability could be engineered through a particular set of physical arrangements and design aesthetics,'' as described by Alex Krieger, Professor in Practice of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, in his forthcoming book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present, published by Harvard University Press.
