In the late 1990s I remember coming across an article in a film magazine, I’ve forgotten which, about the special effects in Forrest Gump. The movie, as you will recall, is noteworthy for the realistic integration of special effect shots. The landmark Oscar-winning effects were perhaps most famous for the scenes which integrated Tom Hanks’s titular character into a kind of Baby Boomer cultural scrapbook, including archival footage of presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford. Those scenes were not perfect, however, as the effects directors acknowledged, and lag behind the more clever effects of the film like erasing Lt. Dan’s legs. The tiny imperfections when the mismatching voiceovers don’t quite match the lips of JFK and LBJ draw attention to the effect itself as a gag. Back in 1994 we thought it was a flaw and gave effect a pass because this was, after all, both a gag and something novel.
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But the truth, as the article explained, was much stranger. It reported that there was a conscious decision to not make those scenes too realistic. There was something of a ethical choice on the part of the film makers. They wanted to think of the scenes as a special effect, to draw attention to the forgery itself, and not in some way as altering the historical record. Was it Jean-Luc Goddard who said it was a moral dilemma deciding where to put the camera? It’s a remarkable statement and rare to hear about such ethical considerations from a special effects department, because the object of the dilemma is the concern about tinkering with reality itself. The deep irony, of course, is that motion pictures themselves are technologies of illusion, so what was the significance of their hesitation?
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Effects like these are no longer the exclusive to Robert Zemekis and the film makers at Paramount. The ability to fake events in the televisual medium are at last democratized, at hand with laptop users. First there was photoshop, and now, videoshop. The Gump effect is now employed in, of course, as per much of internet traffic and interest – porn. It’s called “deep fake” porn, and no, it’s not like when Sally faked Harry at Katz’s Deli over pastrami and rye. 
Deep fake porn is where some horny computer nerd takes video clips of a celebrity crush’s face and superimposes it on a porn actor. It isn’t polished, and won’t look quite right, but it’s convincing enough to have some A-list stars concerned. It’s a concern that porn aficionados themselves don’t appear to share. Are they really trying to plug these as “leaked” celebrity sex tapes of the Kardashian variety, or are they welcoming the attention to the gag itself, the way something like the Youtube web series “Bad Lip Reading” does? Do they, like the Gump effects directors, worry that people will think that’s actually Scarlett Johansson or whomever? Do they expect that the imperfections will make it clear that these are not serious attempts at fakery, that these lurid cottage-crafted cinematic curios will exonerate them from libel and the ire of the presumably disgruntled real life movie star?
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Perhaps all of these concerns subordinate to the feeling of mastering the image itself, of subjecting targeted women with a fantasy collage. As Johansson put it, “Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. … The internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.” Bleak enough? To be sure. And it’s just the camel’s nose in the tent as representation fades to effects in televisual media, only to coalesce around deep insatiable wells of fantasy, however dark.
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The creep of the technology has been swift, as deep fakes are starting to be used by misogynists against political figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in attempts to use a kind of digital graffiti to humiliate and discredit the rising progressive star. It’s a trend that we’ll only see more of. The objective: to exert power over the image itself is primitive defense mechanism. And in a sense, it’s a nascent attempt to reauthor reality. And true to form for the authoritarian-minded, their reality is sadomasochistic.
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But it doesn’t stop there. What else can be done with this godlike power to edit reality? It would make some sense that the next step would be that people may dispense with their celebrity fetishes at some point and enter themselves as faux actors in the televisual media. Or, do some time travel … fabricate faux-aged footage of yourself superimposed onto away hotter and fitter body, boinking circa 1982 Tom Selleck? A trendy bachelotte party gag gift! Maybe splice yourself into your favorite old movies – ride the plains with John Wayne, take Iwo Jima, take on Darth Vader! Everyone’s a Zelig.
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Even though porn is probably conquering the world right now – because what else are humans going to do with history’s most powerful communication device – these effects do not even have to be necessarily porno-inflected. Instead of Taylor Swift singing, put your own head on Taylor Swift? Or how about transporting yourself into exotic lands, creating faux vacation videos? The cheapest way to have Bora Bora vacation memories is to fake them. Rendered phonies to show your friends of your exotic trip – all generated from your bluescreen set in your garage. Ah – how marvelous that the world of Total Recall is nigh. Corporations rule the planet, and your only escape from the social dystopian hellscape is a private utopian mindscape. I can see the ads now: “A star is born, and it is you!”
Of course it’s easy now to object to any of these possibilities without rising to warrant the attention of privacy, property and libel laws because the technology around all of this in the public is still so crude. And because it’s crude it can pass as a gag or experiment that few may take seriously. But what if the technology to fake is so good that it puts reality itself in question, prompting the Gump effect question to return? Would we even have the sense to hesitate? To ask the question – where is reality? Where is my mind? Will be imperceptibly pass over the threshold from the real to the manipulated without either nausea or disorientation?
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Last year I caught a segment on NPR in which they did an experiment in faking an audio recording. They took well known and much recorded voices – Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – and recorded them saying thousands of phrases, catching every phoneme possible. And with the help of a computer, were able to fabricate a phony and preposterous dialog between the two presidents. It was sort of an improved version than when Robert Smigel put together “Fun With Real Audio” on TV Funhouse segments airing on Saturday Night Live years ago. There there they were, presidents number 42 and 43 talking – a striking experiment that did indeed sound like them, and would be thoroughly convincing if it weren’t for tiny imperfections here and there that made them sound a little … off. But the possibility was apparent for a not too distant time when this technology could be perfected. It’s a chilling thought.
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It’s somehow a twist of deep fake irony that Donald Trump is a bit of a harbinger of fake news and faux technology. After the famous embarrassing Access Hollywood “grab ’em” tape, Trump apologized for his language, calling it “locker room talk.” But a year or so later started to openly wonder if it was even him, and suggested that it could have been faked. It wasn’t of course because he wasn’t alone. It’s a bit embarrassing that Billy Bush even has to publicly confirm that he was there to reassure that what we heard was in fact real. If he’s not a paid crisis actor, of course. Well, such is our age of Truman Showism. Perhaps the video portion might have also been fake. Even now there is a deep suspicion in large swaths of the world that seeing and hearing is far and away from believing. The growing percentage of people who believe that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing is a measuring stick for the exponential growth of the suspicious world.
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Is there any necessity to remain deferential to truth, or to the original work itself? Is there, as Walter Benjamin concludes in his Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction, a way back to origins? Does the original maintain its aura, or has the world of reproduction and fakery devoured the original? Was there, in fact, even a Gump Effect question? Or did I retroactively imagine it? Is my recall nothing but a shade in my mind? Was there ever such a reticence before the vortex of forgery?
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Imagine the capacity to combine fake video and fake audio so well that the line between reality and falsehood is indistinguishable. When seeing isn’t believing. That time is nigh for a kind of epistemic singularity of total doubt because we will all have this feeling like in Total Recall, where illusion and reality are blended. The disorientation has begun, perhaps some time ago, I’m not sure when. The president is confused about what really happened. Maybe everyone is. All that can be agreed on is there is a great unease about the whole question. As the great orange one once sagaciously said, “nobody knows for sure.”
A Fragile Dignity 