Surfing uncanny valley
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LAST WEEK I SAW the new Martin Scorsese movie, The Irishman, which is getting a limited theatrical run before Netflix makes it available for streaming later this month. Netflix reportedly sank around $160 million on The Irishman â an amount it knows the movie will never recoup. The budget was so high, in part, because it used cutting-edge effects to digitally de-age its three stars â Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino â who throughout most of the film appear decades younger than the septuagenarians they actually are.
The three leading actors all give great performances. And Scorsese found a studio in Netflix that was willing to foot the bill for his CGI-heavy vision. But it strikes me as tremendous hubris that he would spend tens of millions of dollars on computer effects rather than cast younger actors in these roles â that he wouldnât compromise his vision an inch until technology advanced to the point it could convincingly reverse the aging process.
Films of the past were forced to adapt to its constraints â the sun is setting and you only have time for one shot; the character is younger in the flashback and you need to use shadows and trick angles â but technology has removed these barriers. Now a specific, once-impossible vision â âI need De Niro, but 30!â â can be conjured up without a hitch. (Though it still comes with a price tag.)
While Scorsese and his producers are using CGI to smooth out wrinkles and fill in hairlines, others are using it to bring back the dead.
IT WAS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED that James Dean, who died in 1955, is being resurrected in CGI for a new film. "We searched high and low for the perfect character,â said producer Anton Ernest, âand after months of research, we decided on James Dean.â
This decision reminds me of when the villainous Star Wars character Grand Moff Tarkin was digitally re-created in 2016âs Rogue One, imitating the likeness of Peter Cushing, who passed away more than 20 years prior.
Alexi Sargeant articulates the wider ethical concerns bound up with digital resurrection. Here he is on Rogue Oneâs use of Cushing:
The first taboo that Rogue Oneâs use of at-will resurrection violated was an artistic one. We donât want actors who are the puppets of directors, each facial tic reflecting a directorâs decree rather than a performer inhabiting his characterâs reality. But thatâs precisely what we get when we Frankenstein together an uncannily lifelike facsimile of an actor and give technicians the puppet strings.
Sargeant again:
Peter Cushingâs spare frame, sharp cheekbones, and long limbs are part of what made him him; they are essential to his Cushing-ness. Creating a convincing facsimile of his living, breathing, moving form after his death should not be undertaken lightly, any more than exhuming his corpse should be. The grave-robbing version is surely more egregious. Yet if it would be wrong to make a puppet of a dead manâs mortal remains, then it is also wrong to make a puppet of a dead manâs imitated form. A simulacrum is fraught with the dignity of the individual it represents.
CGI can and has been used to drive more imaginative storytelling â Minority Report, Zodiac, and the first Iron Man, for example, are all better for their use of CGI. But what the cases of The Irishman, Rogue One, and the new James Dean movie show is CGIâs ability to stunt the storytellerâs imagination. In an ironic twist, CGIâs allowance of infinite possibilities has only narrowed them. With the ability to do anything, some filmmakers have grown lazy, opting to take shortcuts and resurrect once-iconic actors rather than dreaming big and truly innovating.
Elsewhere
đ§šOnline Cesspool Got You Down? You Can Clean It Up, For a Price
âOnce the internet became the primary place where our identities are forged and performed, it was inevitable that some people would want to pay their way out of the panopticon â that escape from the very services we lusted after in recent memory would become a premium good.â [New York Times]
đPinterest Has a New Plan to Address Self-Harm
âThe company launched an initiative over the summer, called âcompassionate search,â which aimed to help Pinterest users combat stress and anxiety ... Now, the company has built another series of exercises specifically geared toward the emotional turbulence of self-injury.â [Wired]
đŽIn 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants
âThe internet doesnât seem to be turning us into sophisticated cyborgs so much as crude medieval peasants entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords. What if we arenât being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past?â [Intelligencer]
đ§¨The Dark Psychology of Social Networks
âSocial media turns many of our most politically engaged citizens into Madisonâs nightmare: arsonists who compete to create the most inflammatory posts and images, which they can distribute across the country in an instant while their public sociometer displays how far their creations have traveled.â [The Atlantic]
đˇTech Has Drained the Reality Out of Our Real Lives
âWhen a photo gets âlikes,â and we feel ourselves to be the objects of joint attention, we enjoy a heightened sense of our own reality â but the self felt as real is, paradoxically, the virtual one that lives in the picture rather than the actual person that lives in the world.â [OneZero]
â Hal