At the climax of The Truman Show, Christof labels Truman the ‘star’. He means to convince Truman simultaneously of his own reality as creator, and of Truman's significance, in order to stop Truman leaving the show. But the use of the term ‘star’ displays his unconscious and reductive application of televisual codes and concepts to the show's manufactured reality. The star, by definition, is a confected identity, produced to satisfy viewers and, through their subsequent purchases, to generate studio profits. Truman Burbank's name most obviously encodes him as a ‘true man’, but in doing so it foregrounds the artificiality of the world he inhabits. The show's more obviously fictional ‘characters’ are named Meryl and Marlon. The show's audience consciously or unconsciously registers the Hollywood connotations of those names, although Truman himself, trapped in the bubble created by the show, does not. His first name might also tap into associations with Harry Truman (president during the early part of the 1950s, the decade the show presents as a lost idyll), while his surname references the so-called ‘Media Capital of the World’, the city of Burbank in Los Angeles, just north of Hollywood. By revealing the faux reality of the star system, Christof exposes the commercialised voyeurism underpinning the show's success – Truman being ‘so good to watch’ is assessed in light of the show's longevity, by its ratings, by the audience's shallow but enduring emotional investment in him. Emotional investment implies an economic component; without the commercial revenue, there would be no Truman Show, and no Truman. He only exists on the show because of the surveillance regime that transmits his unwitting incarceration to an audience that could be thought of itself as ‘captive’, if in a different sense from Truman. In order to become something other than a mediated and artificial figure, he must renounce the monitored world and flee to the real world beyond.