From Shadow Citizens to Teflon Stars
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From shadow citizens to teflon stars cultural responses to the digital actor L i s a B o d e A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2004 School of Theatre, Film and Dance University of New South Wales Abstract This thesis examines an intermittent uncanniness that emerges in cultural responses to new image technologies, most recently in some impressions of the digital actor. The history of image technologies is punctuated by moments of fleeting strangeness: from Maxim Gorky’s reading of the cinematographic image in terms of “cursed grey shadows,” to recent renderings of the computer-generated cast of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as silicon-skinned mannequins. It is not merely the image’s unfamiliar and new aesthetics that render it uncanny. Rather, the image is received within a cultural framework where its perceived strangeness speaks allegorically of what it means to be human at that historical moment. In various ways Walter Benjamin, Anson Rabinbach and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed that the notion and the experience of “being human” is continuously transformed through processes related to different stages of modernity including rational thought, industrialisation, urbanisation, media and technology. In elaborating this argument, each of the four chapters is organized around the elucidation of a particular motif: “dummy,” “siren,” “doppelgänger” and “resurrection.” These motifs circulate through discourses on different categories of digital actor, from those conceived without physical referents to those that are created as digital likenesses of living or dead celebrities. These cultural responses suggest that even while writers on the digital actor are speculating about the future, they are engaging with ideas about life, death and identity that are very old and very ambivalent. Acknowledgements Over the course of researching and writing this thesis I have been exceedingly lucky to be supervised by Dr. George Kouvaros. From the early stages of research he has encouraged me to read from a wide range of sources, to traverse disciplines and to include fiction in my literary diet. George’s generousity with time and research materials, his never-failing encouragement, and his patience and trust in allowing me the time I needed to mull over ideas, have kept the doctoral process stimulating and more enjoyable than I could have hoped. His keen insights, enthusiasm and good humour have buoyed me in moments of self-doubt. The student-supervisor relationship can be fraught, I know, but ours has been a pleasure. Thank you George. I also wish to thank my co-supervisor, Dr. Ross Rudesch Harley, who provided invaluable practical assistance with publishing opportunities, work experience and mentoring. Thank you also to Dr. Jodi Brooks who made some excellent suggestions for further research after my first seminar paper, infected me with her enthusiasm, and allowed me to hope that my ideas held promise. I am indebted to Dr. Ailsa McPherson, my colleague and friend, without whose eagle eyes and brisk pencil there would a good deal more errors in this thesis than are present. To my husband Scot, thank you for giving up your evenings to proofread my work, for sacrificing income in your financial support of me these past months, and for arguing through ideas with me. Not a day passes in which I am not grateful for your love, encouragement and your keen analytical mind. Lastly, thank you to my parents, Jim Bode and Kathleen Wakefield, for teaching me to read and giving me a love of books. Contents Introduction: An intermittent strangeness 6 Chapter 1. Shadow citizens and teflon stars: reception of the transfiguring effects of new image technologies 36 Chapter 2. Enchanting objects: tales of seduction and wary resistance 80 Chapter 3. Doppelgängers: tales of actors, technology and obsolescence 124 Chapter 4. Dancing dead and melancholy ghosts: tales of resurrection, technology and the immortal image 171 Conclusion 218 Works Consulted 220 4 List of Illustrations Wireframe view of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . 35 Drawing of a cinematographic projector. 35 The face of the machine: the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis . 79 Head shot of Aki Ross from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within . 79 The aging actress: Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 123 A digital scan of Hugo Weaving’s head for The Matrix: Reloaded 123 Elsa Lanchester as The Bride of Frankenstein 170 The digitally resurrected Marlene Dietrich 170 5 Introduction: An intermittent strangeness In an article for Wired magazine in 1995 called “Silicon Stars: the New Hollywood” Paula Parisi describes her impressions of Scott Billups’s computer-generated actor, a figure based on Marilyn Monroe: She demonstrates an admirable if not entirely desirable range, with a propensity to slip at a moment’s notice from strikingly beautiful to alarmingly grotesque. Her attempts at motion are as endearing as an infant’s first feeble gestures; her awkward grace is as inspiring as it is frightening. Watching Marilyn recalls the chilly seduction of the first artificial flirt, captured so precisely in the classic climax to James Whale’s 1935 Bride of Frankenstein. 1 The computer-generated, virtual or digital actor has been the focus of research and development since the early 1980s when photo-realistic 3-D computer animation began to seem possible. This quest for photo-realism has been steered by corporate and state research and development bodies since the late 1970s. 2 For, as Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen argue, new technologies do not simply emerge – product development in the era of late capitalism is determined by market aspirations. 3 Recently virtual actors or synthespians have been developed to the point where they are widely used as extras or body and stunt doubles in the more expensive end of Hollywood narrative cinema. 4 Professionals working in this field, however, proclaim that their “Holy Grail” or ultimate goal is to create a computer-generated actor that 1 Paula Parisi, “Silicon Stars: The New Hollywood,” Wired , vol. 3, no. 12, December 1995, p. 204. 2 Michele Pierson, “Welcome to Basementwood: Computer Generated Special Effects and Wired Magazine,” Postmodern Culture , vol. 8, no. 3, May 1998, p. 11. 3 Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen (eds), Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen (London: BFI, 1993), pp. 2-3. 4 Oliver Morton, “Attack of the Stuntbots,” Wired , vol. 12, no. 1, January 2004, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/stuntbots.html (accessed 12/1/04). 6 could either seamlessly replace a human performer in a leading role or perfectly imitate the performance of a living or dead actor. 5 The commercial concerns that have shaped the developmental course of the synthetic actor have also tended to limit commentary on this figure. According to John Thornton Caldwell, this is a wider problem in discussions of digital technologies in general. He argues that the “master-paradigm of novelty” drives editorial policy on the digital. 6 This obsessive focus on the new encourages a kind of amnesia that eclipses the old or ignores it as irrelevant. This positioning of the new in opposition to the old is not an anomaly of the digital age but runs through progressivist histories of technology. It is especially intensified in the age of the technological commodity and the high-tech discourse that frames digital technologies. 7 Much commentary on the virtual actor is underpinned by a progressive myth of image technology working towards greater and greater verisimilitude. This myth feeds the pervasive expectation that the seamless digital human is just over the next horizon. Michele Pierson’s recent examination of how viewer response to computer- generated imagery and cinematic special effects is cultivated and organised presents Wired magazine as one of the main arenas for the playing out of these myths. 8 We see this elsewhere in the “Silicon Stars” article, for example, when Parisi writes: “[T]he ability to conjure a convincing human from a synthetic source has hovered tantalisingly out of reach. But that’s changing.” 9 Each new digital actor is unveiled 5 See for example Parisi, “Silicon Stars,” p. 144, and Paul Baylis, “In Quest of the ‘Holy Grail’ of the Truly Lifelike Digital Actor,” Asahi Shimbun News Service, 7 June 2003, http://www.asahi.com/english/weekend/K2003060700271.html (accessed 25/2/04). 6 John Thornton Caldwell, “Introduction: Theorizing the Digital Landrush,” in Electronic Media and Technoculture , ed. John Thornton Caldwell (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 2. 7 R.L. Rutsky, High Technē: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 1-5. 8 Pierson, “Welcome to Basementwood,” p. 1. 9 Parisi, “Silicon Stars,” p. 144. At the time of its launch in April 2000 www.ananova.com , the website for the computer- generated newsreader Ananova, featured a guest-book (no longer available). One enthusiastic entry claimed that the launch of Ananova was “more important than the moon landing.” The virtual actor is also received, then, within a broader framework of technological and scientific achievement. 7 within this framework of expectation, and each unveiling is seen to fall, progressively, a little less short of a seamless photo-real illusion. The dominant line on the digital actor flowing through newspaper reports, the technology, science and entertainment press, and even in some academic circles, is one that is anticipatory and speculative, perpetually reaching forward to a future perfect simulation. Parisi’s response to the virtual Marilyn stands out in this discursive context. She does not complain about the digital actor’s imperfections or position the figure as a failed simulation. Rather, her account evokes something mythic, beautiful and terrifying, a being that hovers unsettlingly between states: neither dead nor alive, neither subject nor object, neither human nor machine.