Predicting the wrong ending.

How much do we care about other people?

Fiction and theory of mind

Asked how to know if an AI has a ‘theory of mind’ (i.e. whether it can really understand that another person has consciousness, or if it merely pretends to), the psychologist Paul Bloom (whose Substack Small Potatoes I enjoy), recently said,

…here’s a good test. Read it half of a good novel and then ask what’s going on here. What’s going to happen next? Show it half of a TV episode. When we do these things, our theory of mind is just fully operational.

People are good, Bloom said, at knowing that the detective takes revenge, the scorned woman leaves, etc etc. (In response, Tyler Cowen said he might not pass such a test as he usually comes up with endings that are less likely to happen (though more interesting)).

This raises a couple of interesting literary questions. First: why do we enjoy fiction in which we can predict the ending? I call this the “expectation of astonishment.”

Just because we can figure out the sort of thing Walter is up to, doesn’t make it less shocking. If I could predict the future (in a credible way) and told you someone would fall off a building, you would still be horrified when you saw it happen.

Indeed, perhaps more so. The “surely it can’t be going to happen” factor only makes a death more dramatic. Hitchcock understood this.

This leads to the other question. How predictable is good fiction? (Or how high is entropy in good fiction?) One of the things that makes Shakespeare so compelling is that, in many of his plays, there is enough dramatic possibility for the ending not to meet our expectations. I once wrote out six possible endings for The Winter’s Tale, a play which has such a strong plot hinge in Act III, we can envisage events turning out quite differently.

To think abut this question, let’s look at some ways in which The Truman Show could have turned out differently. What’s interesting about this example is that there’s an audience in the movie, so we can think about the ways Truman might have been different, but also see what we think of the in-movie audience’s own theory of mind.

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A quick plot summary.

Truman is the star of a reality TV show. He has been on the air 24 hours day for his whole life. One day, a camera falls out of the sky. Truman starts seeing unusal things. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, he yearns for Sylvia, a former actor on the show. They fell in love, and she tried to tell him the truth, but the studio made sure she quickly disappeared. As Truman begins to catch on to what is happening, the cast manipulates him into staying. (The director, Christof, even contrived to fake the death of Truman’s father in a sailing accident when the boy was little so that Truman would be terrified of water for his whole life and thus never leave the island he lives on.) In the end, though, after trying and failing to escape, Truman sneaks out at night and sails away, reaching the “end of the world” and stepping off set. Sylvia, who has been watching, runs to meet him. The last thing that happens before he leaves is that Christof talks to him, like the voice of God from the clouds.

It seems like an inevitably ending, especially relevant to our world. So, how might this have gone differently?

Some obvious answers.

They could have kept Truman trapped and made it tragic like Awakenings. Or he could have merely escaped into the next level of fakery (too dark?). Or he could have drowned in the storm (way too dark?). Or they could have had him killed and replaced with a secret twin (too crazy?). Or as he was escaping his wife could have told him she was pregnant. Or the cast could have realised they were living off Truman’s immiseration and have walked out.

Some sensible answers.

They could have cut a deal: Truman gets LOTS of money and is allowed to go out sometimes (turn it from an Eden myth to a Persephone myth). Or his wife is the one to leave and Truman has to get her back because he realises he really does love her (variation of Orpheus myth). Or he slowly becomes so miserable in the “real world” and cannot cope (as happens to many former prisoners) that he decides he has to get his old life back (variations on Odysseus). Or he cuts a deal in which he has Christof replaced and renegotiated the show, including marrying Sylvia.

Or they could really have committed to the Edenic structure and had the studio kick Truman out, turning it into a show about one of the other characters.

Here’s a really dark one… (someone should make this movie)

The mid-point climax of the movie is when Truman tries to escape and the road is blocked because of a “leak at the plant”. He tries to run through the forest but workers dealing with the “nuclear waste” stop him. At this point, Truman could be institutionalised. On a course of drugs and psychiatric therapy he could be manipulated into believing he was mad. The doctor could gaslight him into thinking the problem was all in his marriage, or because of his father. In a dark version, Truman could end up permanently institutionalised—but on television. The final scene could be of his wife giving birth and beginning a new show.

You will see that while some of these seem much less satisfying, the mythical endings have potential to be excellent. The grim underlying logic of the movie is that if they did kill him, and then streamed his funeral, ratings would have been astonishing.

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Eden, Odyssey, Psalm

I said above that The Truman Show we have is Edenic—that is made clear in the film. But it could easily be Odyssean. Truman is trapped on Circe’s island, restless to leave. He does not get evicted from paradise, after all. He sails away. This is why there are many potential endings. The death of his father in a storm (shown to us at the start) narratively anticipates an ending where Truman dies in similar circumstances when trying to escape. Truman’s father reappears to him when the actor turns up on the street one day. And thus, like Odysseus (and Aneas), Truman visits the underworld. Maybe he could have gone out to find his father and been told the truth, but also that it’s better on the inside…

You start to see how there is as much “narrative logic” in his return to Sylvia/Penelope and away from Meryl/Circe as there is in “leaving Eden” and how that can play different ways. Christof reminds me much more of the temperamental Greek Gods, sending storms and interfering as it suits his volition, rather than the God of the Bible. Truman leaving paradise is more like Odysseus surviving Scylla and Charybdis than Adam and Eve eating the fruit.

The film has a lot to do with Psalm 139. Most of the time, the film is in productive tension with this Psalm. But as we get to the end the film diverges: Truman says, “you never had a camera in my head”; the Psalm says, “For you created my inmost being”. This is a film about escaping God, not searching for him.

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.

The movie is not built around the idea of eating from the tree of knowledge, then, but that “it is not too late to seek a newer world.” Such seeking can take many forms. As it says on Sylvia’s pin near the start, the movie is all about the question, “How Will It End?”

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The ending we do have tells us something about the audience…

The predictability of the ending we do have comes from the moral vision of the film: the individual against the system, the Matrix-style interest in living in a world of surveillance. At the end of Stranger Than Fiction they were never going to kill Harold Crick (would have been a better movie) and at the end of this they were never going to have anything bad happen to Truman.

But it also comes from the fact that the film is a satire of Hollywood and TV studios—all the ways in which studios manipulated viewers’ emotions, such as in the near unbearable scene when Truman is reunited with his “father”, and the whole thing is set up with fake fog, music rising, and carefully selected camera angles. If the film didn’t let Truman escape, the satire might reflect more strongly upon the audience than the studio system. Who wants to make that movie?

There is a little irony at the end when the viewers, having seen Truman escape, immediately switch channels. “Let’s see what else is on.” This hardly registers compared to the break for freedom. It’s a joke. But one way of exploring the same premise would be to ask not why Truman isn’t free, but why everyone keeps watching him. Why do the extras go out at night, in a scene that feels so reminiscent of the long standing American culture of regulating one’s neighbours? As their torches flash in the dark, we must surely be invited to wonder whether the ending of this show is truly in the hands of Christof and Truman, or in the choices we all make as audiences… If they were all so anxious for him to escape, why did they watch it in the first place?

It is only once Truman wants out that the audience’s theory of mind really kicks in Before that they don’t seem to care that he is trapped. As soon as there is a “predictable ending” in sight, empathy arrives. So maybe their theory of mind wasn’t so good, only their ability to root for one of two increasingly obvious outcomes.

And what does that say about us…?