Posterity has graced Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Its tale of a man who since birth has unwittingly been held captive in a Hollywood soundstage as the subject of a reality TV show was a worldwide commercial hit. Yet it did not massively appeal to the prevailing Hollywood establishment: at the 1999 Oscars, it received best director, supporting actor and screenplay nominations, but nothing for the star performance of its lead, Jim Carrey; and no best picture nomination. Instead, this was the year the now-incarcerated rapist Harvey Weinstein is said to have spent $5 million on Oscar marketing for the eventual best picture winner, Shakespeare in Love).
Danish celebrities have taken turns to lambast its grotesque manipulation of Rasmus Wallbridge as a bizarre form of psychological torture
Just one year later, though, the Big Brother TV franchise was created; YouTube was launched in 2005; and the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ was coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff in 2014. The Truman Show now ranks with Blade Runner and Terminator 2: Judgment Day as among most prescient movies ever made. Last year it was selected by the US Congress for preservation in the US National Film Registry as ‘culturally, historically or aesthetically significant’, alongside Citizen Kane and Casablanca.
Everyone, then, should see The Truman Show – and the last thing the world needed was a remake. Sadly, this did not deter producers at the Danish government-owned subscription channel, TV 2. They commissioned a reality TV series in which a real-life Danish comedian, Rasmus Wallbridge, whose inspirations include Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, is deceived by 149 hidden-camera-toting friends and associates into believing his ambition of making a movie of his own is at last being realised.
The resulting TV show, Alle elsker Rasmus (Everyone Loves Rasmus) has had a much shorter life than its movie precursor: it was released on 26 October and deleted just five days later, after a national outcry (or as the Danish call it, a shitstorme). Danish celebrities have taken turns to lambast its grotesque manipulation of Rasmus Wallbridge as a bizarre form of psychological torture and gaslighting. It ‘should be called Everyone Bullies Rasmus, because that’s what they do” said the TV host Anna Lin.
Worse still, TV 2 appears to have learned nothing from the travails of the BBC, which is currently fighting a $10 billion lawsuit in Florida after it clipped together different parts a speech of Donald Trump, allegedly making it appear to viewers as if Trump incited his supporters to violence at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. In the final scenes of Alle elsker Rasmus, asthe deception is revealed, the audience hears Rasmus Wallbridge laughing – yet the laughter is recycled from an earlier scene in the same episode. One may reasonably infer that Rasmus Wallbridge was not, in fact, laughing at the time. The BBC’s Trump edit cost its Director General and head of news their jobs. At TV 2, meanwhile, content director Ulla Pors has launched an internal investigation into the show, saying the series ‘should not have been made’ and that the laughter edit ‘shouldn’t have happened either’.
But while The Truman Show successfully predicted surveillance capitalism, it did not predict cancel culture. Danish celebrities who took part in the deception are now under relentless attack on social media, including some physical threats. A post in which Martin Johannes Larsen, supposedly Rasmus Wallbridge’s best friend, announced his girlfriend’s pregnancy. This led to comments like: ‘Maybe she isn’t pregnant at all, but just playing a joke on you. See, that could actually make for good TV’. TV 2 has responded to the online attacks, stating that ‘criticism of Everyone loves Rasmus and of TV 2 is legitimate, but what we are seeing right now is far too violent. The extent of hate messages and direct threats against the participants, their families, and others involved in the production of the programme has reached a level that no one should have to endure.’
As for Rasmus Wallridge, he is currently lying low, the subject of what Danish digital identity advisor William Aturk calls a ‘lovestorm’ – an overwhelming outpouring of affection from every direction. Alle elsker Rasmus has been a disaster for its commissioners, producers, and everyone who appeared in it – bar one person. Rasmus Wallridge may have suffered significant emotional harm at the hands of the programme makers. But he is also now nationally famous and his upcoming comedy shows are sold out. And with Jim Carrey now aged 64 and having already threatened to retire, who knows? There may be a Truman-sized hole to be filled internationally.
