A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Hyping the "X-Files" flick with Duchovny, Anderson and Sting RECENTLY IN ENTERTAINMENT Mr. Jealousy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Noah Baumbach's new urban comedy smartly satirizes self-involvement -- without being too self-involved (06/12/98) Six Days, Seven Nights Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek As cheap and predictable as a discount package tour, but still a terrific getaway (06/11/98) Back in the U.S.S.R. By Julia Barton After a brush with American fame, perestroika poster boy Boris Grebenshikov has returned to his Russian roots (06/10/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new music by Dwight Yoakam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tuatara, Nicholas Payton and the Jesus and Mary Chain (06/10/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Kitsch is bustin' out all over with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (06/09/98) BROWSE THE SARAH VOWELL ARCHIVES

[ A M E R I C A N _.S Q U I R M__B Y__S A R A H_.V O W E L L ] THE HARDEST THING TO BELIEVE ABOUT TRUMAN IS NOT THAT HE'S A MEDIA BABY, BUT THAT HE'S AN AMERICAN WHO HAS NEVER ONCE LEFT HOME. What if the most freakish thing about Truman Burbank, the protagonist of the movie "The Truman Show," isn't that he's spent every second of his life on television? What if the most freakish thing about Truman is that he is a 30-year-old American who has never moved? He lives on an island. He's never left town. I was sitting there, in the dark, appalled. I'm around 30 years old, too, and I do not know a single person -- not one -- who's never moved away from the town where he or she was born. I myself have moved from city to city 10 times. Because of all the rave reviews I'd read of the film, I knew I was supposed to be noting its commentary on the culture of surveillance and the omnipresence of TV, but I found myself paying more attention to the way the jokes depended entirely on a New World state of mind. In America, the biggest blasphemy is to curtail the freedom of movement. Because the television program of which Truman is the star depends on his presence, he is none too subtly manipulated early on to fear leaving home, i.e., the set. What could be more natural than when the adult Truman dreams the most mundane and persistent of American desires, to "get away" and to "see some of the world." Of course, he goes to the travel agency, staffed like everything else in his world by an actor, where there are antitravel posters such as the one of a plane being struck by lightning proclaiming, "IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!" The most telling -- and the funniest -- anti-American sentiment occurs during a flashback to Truman's grade school geography lesson in which the young scholar boasts that some day he's going to be an explorer like Magellan. "You're too late," his teacher responds. "There's really nothing left to explore." Treason, right? Every schoolchild in America is taught to identify with those enterprising men who, for better or often for worse, plunged their various flags into this land so many centuries ago. Aren't we all, on some level, still living in the Age of Exploration? And even though we've heard phrases like "last frontier" and "final frontier" and "last best place" for ages, we all still carry some frontier within us. That's the reason that no matter what direction I, and the people like me, are traveling in our city-hopping lives, we're always headed West. Because even if there's nowhere left to go, there's still lots left to do. It's hardly accidental that when Truman gets the nerve to make a break for it, he lights out on a boat called, honest, the Santa Maria. N E X T_P A G E _| The luxury of having a home