By: Mahir Pradana

Mind is human’s most valuable asset. With our minds, we can do anything. We can change the world. That is why any form of oppression cannot oppress one’s mind. Human’s mind has no limit. According to Plato, it is bigger than the world itself. That is why he suggested that there is a world outside the world that we see and live in, which can only be seen if we use our minds.

However, oppression and constraints for human’s mind always occur, even when we do not realize it. The liberal thinkers, for example, John Locke, believed that the constraint for human’s mind occurs in our daily life in the forms of, for example, political and legal constraints. Let’s begin to call them 'the prison of mind'. Anyone who gets stuck with these constraints definitely has problems, which put them as prisoners inside their own pieces of mind.

The first question that we better start from a common ground: ‘what is a ‘mind’’? The oldest definition of ‘mind’ probably comes from Hippocrates, a Greek physician and philosopher, who said, “All men should know that the brain, and the brain only, is responsible for, and is the seat of, all our joys and happiness, our pain and sadness; here is seated wisdom, understanding, and the knowledge of the difference between good and evil.”.

Hundreds of years later, a lot of philosophers put this concept into the very front order if they wanted to define the meaning of human’s mind. Jean-Paul Sartre, a prominent figure in existentialism, stated that there is nothing outside or within ourselves that we can appeal to in order to justify our values and moral rules. If there are moral rules and values, it is because we have freely chosen them, and nothing can guide us in these choices.

So, it is the question about ‘choice’ that comes after. In the early scene of The Matrix, the main character, Neo (Keanu Reeves), is asked to make a choice between the blue pill or the red pill, which are the symbols of the ‘prison world’ (a world where everything is already in order and life is designed for everyone) and the ‘free world’ (a world where anyone is free but with a shattered reality). Neo chooses to be free and escapes from the prison which we can associate with the Plato’s Cave, where human beings are enslaved by everything they want to see and forget who they really are and forget to find out who they are supposed to be.

Besides The Matrix, the concept of ‘prison world’ is also brought to the screen in The Truman Show. Both of the fake worlds in The Matrix and The Truman Show are designed to imprison the intended people inside, in order to deprive them from the real world. However, there is a difference. The world in The Matrix is made to imprison all humans where in The Truman Show, only one person is intended to be kept in and that person is Truman (Jim Carrey).

The situation where Truman is the only real man, who is trapped in a fake world where everyone else is a fake actor with a fake identity, can bring us to the matter of personal identity among the society. The moment where Truman tries to escape from this whole artificially designed society can be seen as a human’s need to break free from all the social and political values that often constrain us. All the efforts that Christof (Ed Harris) does to keep Truman in can be seen as an allegory of the maximization of political and legal constraints which have to be taken to limit individual freedom, in order to maintain social order. 

However, Christof and other creators of The Truman Show underestimate Truman’s mind as a human. They forget that a human’s mind is actually much larger than the ocean and much more powerful than anything. Truman tries so hard to escape from this fake world, just like Neo fights Agent Smith and the other enforcers in the Matrix. Truman’s fight against the crews and actors who want to keep him in the artificial city can also be seen as his rejection towards the social constraints.

At the end of the movie, trying to prevent Truman from getting out of the fake world, Christof says, “there's no more truth out there than in the world I created for you - the same lies and deceit.  But in my world you have nothing to fear.” Here, according to Christof, he created the fake world in order to ensure that Truman is secure from all dangers in the world.

However, no matter how shiny, glamorous or peaceful this artificial world is, a prison is still a prison. A life to a human is like a blank paper given to a little kid. Whatever he wants to draw on it, it is his freedom to choose. And the liberalists believe that nothing or no one must or can stop him from drawing.

We will see that in every aspect of life, we are always free to choose. But there are always limitations of our freedom, since a person does not live alone in this world. The one thing for sure is that humans’ mind should not be imprisoned, because there will be no such prison that is able to restrain it. And through those things mentioned above, we have seen that the prison is certainly not The Matrix, nor the artificial world in The Truman Show. Both of them failed.

*Mahir Pradana, has been a 'moviegoer' since early childhood, an indie film scriptwriter, in 2007 studied Philosophy and Films under the guidance of Prof. Chris Falzon at the Univ of Newcastle, and  currently volunteer for NGO Rotaract Club Bandung Metropolitan, as the community service officer in 2008-2009, and the Vice President for 2009-2010