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The Truman Show

There's all this talk about the season 5 ending referencing The Truman Show and how that means they must be living in an illusion now, so I was like oh cool, I'm not sure I ever watched this movie, I should go do that now. And as I was, I was just dumbfounded that everyone's comparing this to s5 and s5 only, when it's obvious

Stranger Things has always been The Truman Show.

I don't think there's a single scene in this movie that hasn't been referenced somehow in ST! Guys, what are we doing?

This is long as shit but you all need to read this

right now.

The product placement,

one of the first ones we see is an ad for a chicken restaurant or something. Chicken! The mascot of the WSQK that they kept talking about the whole time! Speaking of WSQK, every time Truman does something they don't want him doing, like he sees a studio light that falls from the sky, they make up news stories and shit on the radio and TV etc to gaslight him into thinking there's nothing weird going on. Because they all know what he's doing! Like WSQK made references to what the characters were doing!

There's a golf scene they referenced twice in ST, in s4 with Jonathan and Argyle and s5 with Ted.

This is Meryl designing a nursery, going through a wallpaper catalogue that looks like something Holly's room design came out of.

This is two audience members commenting on how they never see the sex scenes, which is just like how they did the Jancy scene in s2.

Here's Truman stopping some cars in traffic.

Where have we seen this imagery before??

The actor who played Truman's dad was written out of the show, but the he sneaks back onto set to go see him years later and Truman goes full s1 Joyce about it while everyone else tries to convince him he's mad, or how it's the grief!

All the creep shots where it looks like the characters are being watched.

Truman's friend Marlon works in a general store like Melvalds and Truman goes there to talk to him and the scene is all at once just like all the ones where Hopper goes over to talk to Joyce about shit, but also like the scene in s2 where Nancy and Jonathan are in the park waiting to get caught by the lab people and they're looking all around for the spies.

A lot of STRANGE THINGS have been happening. Oh, I'm sure.

That scene of Max in s4 where there's a poster about "running" in the counselor's office foreshadowing the Running Up That Hill scene vs. Truman going to a travel agency to book a flight but it's full of posters warning about the dangers of flying to dissuade him

The main bad guy showrunner sits in front of a globed window/screen that makes him look like Vecna when he's connected to the vines.

Little Truman wanting to be an explorer like Henry but also is dressed like s1 Mike. He has an old chest of his childhood "explorer things" just like the one Holly finds in Henry's room. It's closed with a padlock that felt like a Terry Ives reference.

The way Truman was adopted by a corporation and raised in the fake city since birth etc. is like how El was raised in the lab. The showrunner gets asked in an interview how many cameras there are in the town and he reminds everyone how they started with just one, like Brenner's program. Oh, and look, is that a NINA reference?

He also states that Truman was chosen because his birth coincided with the predetermined air date. Like how Will has the same birthday as Henry? And the November 6th of it all perhaps? There was also a throwaway line of Truman shouting out "your birthday comes but once a year!" And I'm like, they kinda gave Will two birthdays though?Is this what birthdaygate is, a mistake you're supposed to pick up on simply because it doesn't make sense and it's supposed to make you feel like something is wrong?

There's the crazy together scene. Mike's fake ass monologue to El from s4 (here, the showrunner was directly feeding the lines to the actor performing). It arguably felt like El's last speech to Mike as well.

Truman can't leave the island he lives on because they made him so afraid of water that he can't cross it, he freezes at the edge just like Henry freezes at the cave entrance! The only real exit is a BRIDGE that has the sign "You are now leaving Seahaven Island", like we keep seeing that "Leaving Hawkins" sign all the time in ST.

There's a little girl who looks like pre-s5 Holly who breaks character when she sees Truman and points him out to her mom just like Holly had all those weird moments like when she wandered off to Will's room and saw the lights and the one in s3 where she tells Karen and Ted that the trees are moving, pointing out things others don't/can't see for some reason.

There's a power plant thingy that looks like Hawkins lab. Truman gets chased in the woods by guys in hazmat suits.

See his jacket here? The collar look familiar to you? Well imagine the main body of that jacket was dark blue. Will wears this coat in blue when he's being spontaneous with Robin and they find the mandalas in the woods, or like when his head was spinning earlier, and wouldn't you know it, Truman drives his car around and round in a circle here!

This is Mike and El after Rink'O'Mania when El is all you think i'm a monster and you don't love me anymore and Mike's like th-that's not truuuee and brings her her PRODUCT PLACEMENT EGGOS.

Is this the Duffers themselves doing interviews post s5?! The dumbass answers but also—

— we accept the ending/show as real because it's what we were presented with?

There's audience members who are references, like a guy who looks like Murray who's watching in a bath, cause didn't Murray have a bath scene is s4 or something? And a family where the mom and older daughter are so invested in the show they're ignoring a toddler in a baby seat who's crying like how Holly was always being all sad and weirdly centered in the Wheeler dinner scenes??

Graduation Will in the epilogue looks just like Truman in his graduation pics. In fact, there are those bts pics of epilogue Will in the bar with different hair that it seems like they changed in post, and the edited hair makes him look more like Truman. They gave him Truman's hair in post.

Truman's neighbours, like how the Wheelers and the Sinclairs are neighbours.

When Truman makes his escape, he tricks the showrunners by pretending to clean up his basement and covering a bunch of the cameras, then he does a Turnbow trap mannequin trick, but they looks for him in the closet (like how the soldiers in the UD lab thought Hopper was hiding in the closet), and when they open the closet, he's dug a hole that he's climbed out of and the actor who's looking for him peeks out of it (like when they dig up into the bathroom in Sorcerer and then when we see Mike poke his head in)!! There's a whole point about how he managed to hide from the cameras because there's a small break in the feed when they change from regular cameras to night vision cameras which reminded me of the weird black screen in the finale when Steve almost falls off the radio tower!? Here of course, it's Truman tricking the showrunners, which made me think if this conformitygate shit is less about the characters being in a Vecna vision, and more about Vecna being in a Will vision or something? Or like the characters are tricking the audience so they can escape the show? Are we the bad guys, the hivemind, keeping them imprisoned? Well, maybe not all of us... because the ending they performed was only satisfactory to... some people.

The basement in general is like the Wheeler basement.

Look at how Truman walking on the edge of the pool that was supposed to be the ocean makes it look like he's walking on water like El does in the void!

There's a search party for him at night and it looks like the Mac-Z scenes. Truman's great escape is just like El's final moments, he finally manages to set sail, but the showrunners raise a huge ass storm to capsize his boat, just like how El gets swept away by "blowing winds". They also turn all the day lights on and the cast who's looking for Truman cover their eyes like how our guys had to cover their eyes. The showrunners and actors all just stand around and watch like all the soldiers and other characters do in El's scene.

Christoff's last conversation with Truman feels reminiscent of Mike and El's. But then there's this line:

Which feels like the reason we never get Mike's perspective on anything. ST doesn't have a camera in Mike's head!

Oh, I'm gonna be making a whole separate ass post about this scene and it's implication for ST. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

Truman's fake ass wedding photos reminding me of Mike and El's Snow Ball photo for real.

There's a library scene that manages to reference s1 Nancy and Steve, s5 Will, s4 Will and Mike, s2 and s4 Lucas and Max, s5 Holly and Mr. Whatsit, and probably more I can't remember right now, all at the same time with just three characters!!

The Snow Ball!

A pizza date!?

Truman sitting in the basement looking at pictures of his dad after he sees him "come back to life", and holding Sylvia's sweater after her disappearance is just like Mike going through his folder of Will's drawings in s1, and maybe when he's waiting to hear from El in s2.

Also Mike wears a red shirt with a white collar in s1.

Seahaven Island is a construct built under a huge dome and it is at the same time just like the UD with it's wall, but also the RU Hawkins that is under quarantine in s5. Guess how he discovers the edge? He sails into it like this.

That's the radio tower poking into the Abyss. Truman then proceeds to try and break through the wall like Jonathan and Nancy when they were stuck in the goo room. His sweater looks similar to what Lucas was wearing in the epilogue movie theatre scene. He finds a door "in the middle of nowhere" like Holly. He exits the show like Mike. Earlier when his boat capsized he was underwater like Karen and Holly in the bathtub. The outside of the dome looks like this,

like a flat surface depiction of a repeating tesseract.

Then there's this part where the same actors play themselves in college in a flashback and they look way too old and it looks funny, and I went, wait a damn minute. Isn't this exactly what people have been complaining about with ST, how everyone looks too old now and it's weird? And I was sitting there thinking, are the Duffers some kind of evil geniuses who deliberately took this long to make ST so they could reproduce that effect with the younger cast, or is this just a hell of a coincidence, like wtf is happening here?! Could they even predict people would react like that if they did? BUT THEN. I realized they could just PUT THAT SHIT OUT THERE THEMSELVES?! Because we have social media now, they could be out there controlling the narrative and feeding us the talking points?! What the hell kind of social experiment are they running here?! I feel like I'm going crazy! And this wasn't the first time I've had that thought, I made a post sometime after vol. 1, before I watched this movie, where I mentioned feeling like the weird divide into casual fans and hardcore fans, Milevens and Bylers, etc, feels in part manufactured somehow, like they're deliberately feeding into it for some reason. That is to say, something told me that could be the case before this movie provided more context, and I can't explain what.

Are they trying to show how easy it is for people to fall for a false narrative in media or something? Like making a point about misinformation and fake news and all that by using a fictional story to do it "ethically"? Idk if I'm wording this right. Does this make sense to anyone? The WSQK promotional radio station was run by the Mindflayer and Vecna to keep the people of Hawkins in check, and control them, placate them!

I think there's also a direct link to the reason Will's coming out scene was the way it was, and I want to make a more in-depth post about that as well.

And isn't this how ST seems to be, with how much they sell merch, the ST experience theme park-type stuff, everything?

What's also interesting is how the showrunners in TTS are like Vecna and/or the Mindflayer, and the hivemind, but the irl writers and creators are also, well, the showrunners. They've places themselves as characters in the story. I saw a post that said this:

"They had multiple promos reminding us to pay attention to details, to question what they're showing. Hell, Lucas literally breaks the fourth wall to inform the writers don't believe in coincidences, so neither should we.

Beyond that, their answers are straight up making them look incredibly incompetent and like they don't know their own show. They are almost absurdly bad, in a way I haven't seen them be before.

I have talked about how this resembles a lot of The Blair Witch Project marketing, where they went out of their way to deceive people."

This is like that bit earlier with Christof explaining a 22 year absence with "amnesia" and the interviewer going "brilliant" like it isn't the dumbest most cliche thing he could have said. I swear to god the Duffers are playing Christof right now. And it makes me wonder how much of the cast interviews and everything could be just completely scripted and "part of the story" too. Like a lot of people pointing out how they're silencing Noah, straight up telling him to shut up, all these stories of how dismissive they've been of him, how he seems a little sad and like he's got some beef with them, and maybe he does. I'm not trying to invalidate his possible real life struggles with people who might have been terrible to him. But, it's also a fact that Noah is the one playing Will, who parallels not one, but two different characters who were written out of "The Truman Show" because they were causing trouble for the showrunners. Truman's dad, and Sylvia (and I'm going to make a separate post about her). A coincidence? Idk, because they told us, with Lucas breaking the fourth wall to not believe in coincidences!

And I remember someone saying Finn had expressed worry for the Duffers because the ending is so brave? Because it's controversial, or because they're putting themselves out there and making themselves look bad because they're playing the role of the villain? (I don't have a source for the quote though, feel free to share in the comments if you do)

Someone even suggested that they manufactured the entire Cutgate incident. All of the above just made me think maybe the cuts are real, but not in the way we think, but in the way that they are Christof controlling Truman's story. Remember that scene in vol. 2 where Will is unconscious and Mike wanders into the room, the one from the trailer where everyone was hyped to see him talk with Joyce, but then it cuts off really conspicuously as though the scene ended in the middle and it was dubbed "pointless wandering" online? Like it was removed by the evil showrunners who don't want us to see Mike worrying about Will?

Seahaven is this perfect, but fake world like Camazotz, which is run by Henry, another avatar of TTS showrunners, who tells Will to GET OUT, because Will learned to tap into the control centre and hijack the show, and then Will does. He gets removed from the narrative, his entire arc with Mike vanishes right after this scene, and even his powers seem to be way less important than they were made out to be in Sorcerer.

I mentioned he's paralleled with Truman's dad who got kicked off the show? Well he was brought back later as damage control after he'd snuck back onto set (this was the 22 year absence explained by amnesia bit, btw) and Truman couldn't stop obsessing over him. BUT. He's brought back as a cast member. He has to go back to pretending the show is real, being an actor in it, just so he can be with Truman again. Almost like when Will wakes up and he's been tortured by Vecna, he suddenly acts like Mike was just a crush and his Tammy? We have the amnesia imagery in their costumes which reference The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (this movie has been talked about before as well, so I don't think I have to go into detail about that). And later we see the amnesia imagery again with Mike wearing the Mary Jane shirt in the epilogue, like he's forgotten vol. 1 Will who was his Peter Parker.

This is getting really long... but I suppose the question at the end is this. How does all of this fit into the actual lore and canon of Stranger Things?

I don't know. Maybe it doesn't.

What are they trying to accomplish and say?

Is there going to be a secret, true ending we're going to see, or are we simply supposed to speculate and find the truth in their controlled narrative and see how even though this is what we saw happen, it is not the truth? I guess we'll have to see. But I think we should all collectively keep analyzing the details, yes, but also, look at the bigger picture. Step outside the narrative and realize the story isn't confined within the walls set up around Hawkins, because that's where we've been looking for the answers. We are just as trapped inside the story as the characters are. Go through that door. Look behind that curtain. Be like Joyce with the lights!

TL;DR — The Duffers might be evil geniuses who have been playing some kind of long con this whole time? Who the fuck knows!

Part 2

Yeah! There's a second part! This is ridiculous!

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