This scene was exquisitely filmed. Truman is alone on a boat out in the middle of beautiful nowhere, farther out than he'd ever been previously, when the bowsprit of his boat ruptures a beautiful sky that turns out to be a painting on a back panel of a movie set that literally forms the wall between reality and fiction. Truman can't believe it yet knows it to so. He touches the wall and the crack to confirm the truth that viscerally begins to move into his conscience. The crack doesn't mean he's free; the crack shifts the light. A new world opens, and the old one is cracking. The camera then pans out to a distant shot to capture the fact--that his world was just a painting, one of many to create his world.
He tries hitting the wall, angry that he volunteered for its deceit, trying to break through to know how hollow the world he's been living in is. He lets out a sigh upon that knowledge as if he'd known its emptiness, the vacuousness of it all along but never confirmed because everyone else's living in the Truman Show. As his hand goes searching for confirmation the look on his face is "I knew it all along," and he did. But that knowledge barely pierced his conscience. He just didn't have a critical mind. He was raised on innocence, reaffirmed by loving, doting parents who wanted to extend their parenting years of a child for as long as they could, so he had no reason to believe that innocence inspired by parental love wasn't the best model.
He slumps at the total losses in his investment in it and momentarily despairs. The fight for truth has just begun and it is too much. Everything that he's believed in has collapsed. It's the bitter taste of being a fool.
He gathers himself and begins walking away from the puncture along a plank at the foot of the wall. From a distance, it looks like he's walking on water, an apt Christian figure to say that he has become his own savior by shedding the deceit. Some say the best choice is to stay and fight, but visually this works.
Next, he finds a staircase and he climbs it without a rail, elevating his status to hero when he finds a door with the word "Exit" printed on it, an exit from the Milligram Experiment. Still no joy from leaving a prefabricated world. In fact, on the other side of the door, it's pitch black. He can't see anything in the new, unknown world. Could this new world be a repeat of the old world he's leaving, or could it be worse? Trading a known world where agency is controlled by others for him is worth it because a world where everybody is controlling him is a betrayal of his intelligence and light.
The show's creator, whose own existence is absent of genuine relationships and lived vicariously through Truman, tries to entice him with more psychopathic love to stay. "You were real, which made you so good to watch."
The Truman Show, 1998. There was another great movie that year, 1998, named Enemy of the State, starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith.
