Sarah Musicant

Paper Proposal

Spectacle and Surveillance

April 16, 2018

Snowden and Truman: A Love Story

Art imitates life- a sentence used all too much, although that cannot be without

reason. I’d like to point out a specific instance in which surveillance was questioned in

life and art. Ed Snowden is a computer programmer who worked as a subcontractor for

the NSA, where he learned the ins and outs of government surveillance. He started to feel

that some of this surveillance seemed unethical and began collecting top-secret

documents explaining the NSA’s practices and leaked them to the public in hopes of

changing how the NSA and USA conducted surveillance. To me, this reaction to

surveillance is echoed in the characters of the 1998 film The Truman Show. Peter Weir’s

satirical science fiction film features a man, Truman, who has been unknowingly

surveyed for thirty years for an entertaining reality show. All is going well until Truman

begins noticing some odd things occurring in his life. This is not the first time the secret

surveillance was in trouble, however, as the actor who plays his father and an extra on the

“show” both begin questioning the ethics behind The Truman Show. Quickly, the show

runner eliminates the two characters from Truman’s life. Both these characters and Ed

Snowden could be considered “whistle blowers”. I’d enjoy the opportunity to spend my

paper digging into the circumstances of both Ed Snowden and The Truman Show,

highlighting the connections and differences of the two, entertainment versus safety.
 Some of the readings I would reference include the articles on consumption,

surveillance and the subject, and an article on EBSCO about Ed Snowden and his

standing in the US.

Tarzie. "Edward Snowden, Frenemy of the State." American Journal of Economics &

Sociology, vol. 76, no. 2, Mar. 2017, pp. 348-380. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1111/ajes.12179.